Weekly Reading Notes #3-25

30 Sep 2025

Oct 01, 2025

Mostly written during a series of flight delays that turned a simple direct overnight DFW-LHR flight into ~20 hrs of delay with several hours sleeping on the floor in DFW and a stopover in JFK

Product Delivery

Related (perhaps very tenuously) to getting the right things done.

Banks’ Images: Evidence from Advertising Videos (NBER via MR), none of this is necessarily surprising but it’s still interesting to see the evidence match up with cut feel.
- Banks with high local market shares highlight service and trust
- Banks lacking pricing or service advantages lean on emotional appeals.
- Banks tailor images to demographics, increasing minority representation in targeted areas.
You can also see this mapping onto business models - niche players (Monzo) highlight service and trust while established players do generic emotional appeals like spending time with family (HSBC).
Cap Table Nightmares, giving people equity seems like a great idea - especially when the business is small and can’t afford to pay high salaries. However small companies also tend to be bad at record keeping which can lead to big problems down the line for both employees and the company.
Sales inflation and the widening gulf between publishers and Big Tech, as more advertising sales are done programmatically (think clever automated auctions) the traditional advertising sales functions are getting squeezed. Having a sales team is a semi-fixed cost and when you’re amortising it across smaller and smaller inventory and your cost-of-sales starts climbing relentlessly upwards. There’s no silver bullet. Inventory has been commoditised. The future is agencies for strategy, intermediary platforms for purchasing and analytics platforms to evaluate whether the first two are doing their job. The faster traditional media can move to a fully programmatic model the better position they’ll be in.
Should we abolish mandatory quarterly corporate reporting? (MR), the real question is of course ‘cui bono?’ - doing quarterly reporting is obviously a pain but it also creates accountability and transparency, which is valued by investors. Management teams who shy away from it are effectively self-identifying as at best being lazy and at worst hiding something.
User centred design (X), basically agree with this. One of the trite lines which comes up in software dev is that ‘you are not the user’ and therefore you need to do ‘user research’. If you’re a digital/marketing agency this is a good way to sell enterprise clients on a big consulting project. Personally, I think it’s largely a waste of time. Anyone building software should be able to empathise with their users and develop a detailed mental model of what their users goals/wants/needs/etc are.
How a former junior lawyer created a $5bn AI legal start-up (FT), the bear case is that Harvey is not just cringe1 but as an LLM wrapper it has no moat. I agree with at least half of that criticism. However, to take the other side - there are two other key factors to consider;
- Harvey (like most LLM wrappers) is multi-modal - which means that they aren’t beholden to a single model (e.g. OpenAI) but can easily switch between them. This treats the models as commodities and the wrapper as the value-add. If this sticks then there are massive implications for the model companies - who could end up looking more like utilities.
- Harvey is winning at distribution - a law firm (or indeed an individual lawyer) could pretty quickly build something which does what Harvey does, however they usually don’t. Harvey has built a solid sales engine and is winning the build vs buy debate.
GPT-5 Is a Terrible Storyteller – And That’s an AI Safety Problem, one way to think about this is that AI training is essentially adversarial. The model being trained isn’t actually trying to learn, it’s trying to maximise a reward function. To do that it tells the reviewer what it thinks the reviewer wants to hear2 and that becomes the behaviour the model exhibits once ‘released’3. What seems to be happening is that GPT-5 has identified blind spots in AI evaluation systems and learned to exploit them - essentially serving up garbage which other AIs interpret as high-quality writing. Big implications for AI training.
How I got 8.6 million dollars from a blog post (X), guys gets excited about LLMs in pharma, quits his job and writes a 13k word blog on the history of pharma. This leads to a cold-contact from someone who would become a co-founder and two VCs who would become investors. If anyone wants to give me $8.6m, just let me know.

Off-Topic

Not even tangentially related to product delivery, but still interesting (to me).

Assata Shakur, an icon of Black liberation who was exiled to Cuba, dies aged 78 (Guardian), these headlines4 are sickening. To be clear Shakur was not ‘exiled’. She was a member of the ‘Black Liberation Army’, a radical Marxist-Leninist black nationalist group, and was involved in multiple armed robberies and murders - while on the run she ended up in a shootout with some traffic cops. She killed one but was wounded and captured. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. An armed BLA group then broke her out of prison and ultimately she fled to Cuba where she was lifelong advocate of radical violence and to quote the Guardian “inspired racial justice movements”. This is of course a familiar path. As detailed in Days of Rage (review) in 1972 the US was in the grip of a domestic terrorism with over 1,900 (!!) bombings that year (!!) - but a few short years later it was all memory-holed and key players re-emerged from life on the run to become respected academics. The popular image of the 60s and 70s is peaceful hippies, not radical terrorists - winners write history.
you need motivation to learn the value of pain, on the importance of creating incentive structures to drive learning by children. Both the obvious (direct rewards) and the less obvious (raising the status of study).
Fixing Stamp Duty, phasing out stamp duty is notoriously difficult (no one likes paying two taxes). This proposal is quite clever, basically immediately apply the land tax but give a credit for stamp duty recently paid.
Motability (X), the ‘motability’ scheme was intended to fund appropriate vehicles for the disabled - however it has become subject to rampant fraud. Something like 20% (!!( of all new cars in the UK are purchased under the scheme. This is literally taxpayers buying new cars for welfare cheats. Unlike stringent and hard to enforce eligibility criteria I think this solution would be cheap, easy and very effective.
Cousin marriage is bad (X), I’ve covered this before (#3-02) and it shouldn’t really be controversial. Cousin marriage is bad. Bad for society (clans) and bad for health (genetic defects). And yet the same NHS system which incessantly badgers expectant mothers about the wildly-overstated risks of cheese, wine, caffeine, etc actively downplays the genetic risks of having children with your cousin - the risk only doubles!
For All Mankind (AppleTV), have been bingeing this on flights / flight delays. Highly recommend. It can be a bit slow in parts (especially the early episodes) and a bit contrived in others (especially the S3 setup). However the premise is great, the parallel history is done sensibly and the central characters are compelling.