O'Leary on signal vs noise, Jobs and Musk
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I found this an interesting observation from someone who knew both these guys.
I recall reading somwhere shortly after Jobs died, what O’Leary says about him in the clip. Maybe O’Leary even wrote it. Can’t recall.
That he operated from the premise that people did not know what they wanted and it was his sole mission to design and manufacture products that they would immediately understand they could not live without. Essentially a variation on marketing versus sales. Marketing determines whether there’s demand for a product whereas sales convinces people there is a demand and that they need the product.
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It depends on what signal Musk is trying to drive right now. When he was focused on business - 100% agree. He’s been able to drive an insane amount of output and innovation across multiple companies.
With twitter, there seemed to be a shift. Now’s he’s all about fighting some sort of fight on the culture front.
I dunno if he has the charisma or same skill set for that.
He doesn’t seem to care about his companies as much. Tesla seems to be teetering.
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Regarding Jobs' antipathy for market research, I can understand his perspective from my experience. Our marketing department is obsessed with "voice of customer" stuff, and it so rarely pans out into anything meaningful. We recently even attempted to develop a metric for data quality that was based on subjective customer reports of how pretty certain things looked. I looked at the actual calculation and saw how unprincipled and over-fit it was to our "customer opinion" dataset and knew it would be useless as a generalizable number, and that's what it turned out to be. I ported it into a bunch of tools our R&D people use, ostensibly to "give them access to this exciting new metric", when my real intention was to throw it against the wall and watch it not stick. It didn't stick. It sold well, as an internal marketing exercise. The "inventors" of it could not have been more proud, while it existed as a theoretically perfect thing. This metric which gave us a number for exactly what customers want to see. It was gratifying to predict its uselessness, play a role in making it available to establish that uselessness, and then watch it fail. The fact that its "inventors" presented it as an evolution on our existing metrics (many of which I had a lot to do with) and how could we not have thought of this before, maybe played a role in my satisfaction in how it played out.
The main reason why marketing loves voice of customer stuff, is that they take no personal responsibility for any failures. Results from customer surveys are spoken of in hushed, reverential tones by our marketing department.
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For me, a potential problem is that those type of people start to believe that because they "know so much more than anybody else", the become a bit blind to certain things, and do not want anybody around them except those who agree with them.
