George's Blog

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Rise of the Machines

Yes, this is a post about AI, but not just about AI. This is a post about how much things have changed in the world. For brands. For consumers. For anyone who buys and/or sells anything. Which is all of us. COVID-19 changed everything, sure. We all know that by now. There are some people and businesses who are still using that as an excuse to underdeliver or deliver late. "Oh, you know, COVID" has been the apathetic battle cry for anyone not getting it done for years. It's the El Niño of a new generation. COVID forced people to get more things done online. Online shopping had been increasing gradually through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 for years. Amazon changed the world long ago (2005) when it launched free 2-day shipping. But COVID sped that along. It forced late adopters to go online for more and more of their wants and needs. Not just random Amazon purchases anymore. Whole industries like grocery shopping and restaurant dining moved online virtually overnight. A lot of busin

Why Innovate?

I got invited to a CPG food marketers group Zoom call recently and was excited to attend. The subject was innovation and the lady presenting talked about product innovation and creating a culture of innovation at companies. We talked about timelines and budgets and how to ask the right questions and how to iterate. Then we got to the end of her presentation and she asked for questions. There were a few hands that went up and people asked some good questions about how to foster a culture of innovation at their companies. I couldn't help myself. I put my hand up and asked a question that I ask myself all the time: " Why should we innovate?" She had a pretty good answer, so it's not like this was her first time getting the question. She talked about how innovation didn't have to be a product, it could be a new way of doing things at a company that was better than the old way of doing things. I like that answer and it resonates with me. But when we all in CPG are t

Founders Aren't Forever

When founders take on outside capital, we are ceding control. How much control and under what circumstances is negotiated by lawyers and written down in long documents full of legalese that will, after much hand-wringing, get signed and stuffed in a vault only to be dragged out in extreme scenarios. Good or bad, it’s an extreme scenario that sends you running to the docs. Break glass in case of emergency. But we ARE ceding control. We are exchanging it for opportunity. Most founders aren’t getting rich off the fundraising process. Yes, there are exceptions but, mostly, we are trying to take a great idea and make it bigger and more meaningful. We are trying to get a product or service that we think the world needs and will love actually distributed to the world or, at least, to a broader community. Every founder who has taken outside capital has had that conversation with themselves of “Well I’d rather own 60% (or whatever) of something big than 100% of something small.” So that’s wh

Resistance Training

You have to lean in when the work gets hard. The first time I thought about this concept was in high school track. I ran cross country in high school and, while I wasn't winning any races in 6A, I was decent and I worked hard at it. I clocked a handful of sub-5-minute miles and sub-17-minute 5k's. Little brag on younger me. High school boys 6A cross-country in Alabama in the late 90's was more competitive than you might think and we were cranking out pretty difficult workouts on a regular basis. One of everyone's least favorite workouts was 400-meter repeats. On our team, we would do a couple of miles easy to warm up, 12 400s at a sub-:60 pace, and then a couple of miles to cool down. Just to put this in perspective, a 57-second 400 is 3:48 mile pace. And we would do 12 of those. Feels crazy when I think about it now. The easy thing (well, "easy" for a fit 17-year-old) was to go out and run 2 or 3 fast 400's. After 4 you're pretty smoked. After 5, you&

Wave-Particle Duality And A Cat In A Box

Thomas Young was a notable British polymath who lived around the turn of the 19th century. His famous contribution was his double-slit experiment. While I myself am no physicist, the gist of this original 1804 experiment was that he fired a light at a board with two slits in it and noted how the light hit a solid board behind the first board. If light were just made of particles (which it is: photons) then you would expect to just see two solid strips of light on the second board where photons passed through the slits and hit the board behind. What he found, instead, was an interference pattern implying that light was actually a wave. But it is also a particle. This was the beginning of the idea of wave-particle duality or the concept that every particle can be described either as a particle or a wave. As our technology has gotten better and the scientific questions we ask have gotten tougher, hundreds of versions of the original double-slit experiment have been performed and, in many

Expectations Are A Funny Thing

Expectations are a funny thing. They exist everywhere whether it's said aloud or not. We are so attached to the written word that we think things don't exist until we write them down. That couldn't be further from the truth. Some things just exist regardless of our intentions. Expectations are one of those things. We have expectations of our jobs, our relationships, our children. And those things all have expectations of us, some explicit and some not. Explicit expectations are obviously the easiest to understand and manage. Your boss expects you to be physically at work at 8 am and tells you as much. Your significant other expects you to be faithful and tells you as much. Your kids expect to be fed a few times a day, etc. But all of these relationships contain non-explicit expectations as well, expectations that no one writes down or says out loud. In the world of remote work, an attendance expectation can be incredibly hard to craft or communicate. What does it mean t