Everything's in flux!

How will this impact you and what you do?

We're all facing this question right now. Creation is easy right? So lots of people are focusing on "taste" (e.g. deciding "what" to do). But is that really the biggest question for you?

Recently I've applied my own unique taste. I've always been good at picking strategic directions and being ahead of developments. Over the last few months I've had a lot of fun building flo.monster. Yet every time I'd run ahead, soon after the frontier labs would release things that directly impacted it.

That's great for my ego and re-inforcing faith in my "taste" - but that's also no way to make real progress.

So I stepped back and spent some time working out the best market segment, something that flo.monster could uniquely deliver for them, and in a way that was strategically defensible against the frontier labs. They're giant bulldozers - but they do have strategic drivers you can map out. Ones that they would be at least "unlikely" to change.

Then I built it - and it works great! It has an amazing onboarding process, really useful features, it's absolutely scalable, minimal running costs, robust security and agentically scalable too.

This is probably the best platform I've ever built - certainly in terms of "how you find out what it does" and "get from zero to useful".

Then before I released it, and rolled it out to a new batch of beta users to really started testing properly, I stepped back and asked myself

"Is this really what I WANT to do?"

The clear and honest answer was "no".

I think THIS is the biggest question right now! The strategic question - beyond creation - beyond taste. In this moment, what is it that YOU really WANT to do in this moment of change? In the midst of creation and destruction. There's so many interesting things you could do right now - and any real platform move means you "have" to stay focused on that - largely to the exclusion of anything else. Not a decision to be taken lightly.

If you think AI will create a wealth of new jobs, or if you don't - either way you need a plan.

Plus the arms race that the Mythos Red Team just highlighted is about to hit us all - so the ground is shifting under our feet yet again.

It's clearly an important moment, and honest decisions plus giving yourself freedom to really explore is critical.

How are you dealing with this question? How is this impacting you personally and what do you WANT to do?

That's why I've changed my substack to "Flux" and I have some interest ideas on this topic that I hope you'll like. But I'm not just going to post ideas, I have some new ways for you to explore them and see how they apply to you directly too...

PS: This is a chance to re-visit my TrustIndex work and ideas - but in a way that’s more specific to each of us.