Draft Four: Build with humans

I draft these letters in Microsoft Word. It’s a habit, and it still tracks changes better than Google Docs which, once full of suggestions, becomes unreadable. This morning, I noticed a new icon in the bottom right of the screen: an AI assistant offering to summarize the document, find key insights, and prep me to discuss it.

Nobody is surprised, right? The chatbots, the browsers, the custom GPTs, the agents roaming around the web – we are surrounded by AIs offering to do stuff. It’s only been three years since the release of ChatGPT, and we’re not slowing down. (Which is worrisome for many reasons, but that’s another story. Do read Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, though).

Yesterday I started listening to the new season of Shell Game, Evan Ratliff’s excellent podcast on things that are not what they seem. In the first season Evan cloned his voice using AI technology and set a bunch of agents loose on the world (and his colleagues, family, and friends). It was eerie, funny, but also prescient.

This time, he is taking AI agents on an even wilder ride: partnering up with them to build a software company where he is – more of less – the only human. That means he has a family, wants time away from work, and tries his best at this business called living. The AI colleagues on the other hand are always ready to hop on calls, brainstorm product specs, and grind away.

Evan is a recovering entrepreneur and part of the allure of starting a company with AI agents (aside from telling a story about it) is working on something without the added responsibility you feel for the livelihoods of those you brought on board. As someone who at one point struggled with the weight of paying 25 people’s salaries, I get it.

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There is a passage from a comical novel by Max Barry, Company, which I read before I ever became a manager. It’s still funny 20 years later:

The problem with employees, you see, is everything. You have to pay to hire them and pay to fire them, and, in between, you have to pay them. They need business cards. They need computers. They need ID tags and security clearances and phones and air-conditioning and somewhere to sit. You have to ferry them to off-site team meetings. You have to ferry them home again. They get pregnant. They injure themselves. They steal. They join religions with firm views on when it’s permissible to work. (…) They arrive with no useful skills, and once you’ve trained them, they leave. And don’t expect gratitude! If they’re not taking sick days, they’re requesting compassionate leave. If they’re not gossiping with co-workers, they’re complaining about them. They consider it their inalienable right to wear body ornamentation that scares customers. They talk about (dear God) unionizing. They want raises. They want management to notice when they do a good job.

You can see why AI agents are attractive alternatives. They don’t need or do the above. Plus, they are always ready to go. (In all honesty, it was ChatGPT that helped me locate the passage above, as I don’t have the physical copy of the book on me.)

Of course AI doesn’t always deliver what you want, nor how you want it. From the very first episode Evan finds out that, although his new partners are hustle-enthusiasts, they’re far from ideal: they don’t do what they promise, they forget essential stuff (like the company name), they have terrible ideas, they flat out lie.

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There is another way to read Barry’s paragraph – less as an indictment, and more of a celebration of humanity and imperfection. For me, one of the most rewarding parts of building an organization was somehow directly tied to the things that made it maddening.

People were not always on, and sometimes they weren’t on exactly when they should have been. Same for me. We were there for each other most of the time, and sometimes we were not. We were kind, and occasionally we had lapses in judgement, and said things we latter regretted. We tried to build things, while building or rebuilding our lives, all within the seemingly forever-open construction site of a Romania bent on testing the limits of how much noise we can put up with.

It was beautiful. And it was painful. But that’s (human) life, right?

I am not getting nostalgic – there are so many ways working with others can go wrong, so much room for abuse, and so many ways in which relationships can fracture and explode. I write this at the tail end of a week when the co-founders of one of the most important NGOs in Romania over the past decade became engaged in a public spat that is as cringe-worthy as it is dispiriting.

You’d think adults would know better.

But we don’t, not really.

Recently, I was talking to a former entrepreneur who entered journalism after running an events company crushed him. He’d seen it all and was calm about it. You never crack the code of hiring “perfect people” because they don’t exist, he mused.

Or even if they seem perfect at the beginning, things will change. You will change and want something else, and suddenly it’s THEIR fault. They will change, and YOU or THE JOB will become the thing they can’t wait to get away from. Maybe the environment will change, and it just doesn’t make sense to carry on together.

It’s almost as if we persevere going into work relationships knowing the odds are against us.

And it has been harder in the past few years.

The pandemic supercharged remote work and highlighted who are the essential people to keeping life going. It brough more freedom and it brought more control. It brought demands for better working conditions, and it has increased exploitation (especially in digital services – as I said, just read Empire of AI). In my bubble of creatives, journalists and civil society laborers it has swelled the ranks of the freelance class, which I’ve been a part of for the past three years. When it all goes well, you pick the work you want, for the right amount, and do it on your schedule. (From my experience, this is a terribly rare combo.) Often it becomes a tug of war of competing priorities, with individuals fighting each other for time and space, common interest or goal or others’ needs be damned.

I’ve noticed something else, too – a great numbers of very capable and talented people feeling restless, craving belonging and a sense of purpose. And a great number of organizations unable to find people to commit to a mission and the discomfort of building something hard (rather than just matching a job description). Mix in brains with scarce bandwidths due to inflation ballooning precarity, plus a likely recession, and no wonder you want to turn to AI agents for the quick fix.

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Thanks for making it this far.

I didn’t expect I’d need over a thousand words of prelude to get to what’s actually been on my mind: a craving to find partners to build alongside with. Not freelancers. Not consultants. Not part-time gig workers that you plug in and unplug. Not people who think a project sounds nice as long as the work doesn’t create discomfort. But imperfect yet dedicated humans, with similar values, who want to build things alongside others, at least for as long as the spark is there.

Part of this need comes from me sucking at the consulting or freelance life (and not enjoying it). But part of it also comes from a desire to create at a time when so much around us seems to fall apart.

As LinkedIn would ask: am I hiring?

I don’t know. Yes? Maybe? Kinda?

The honest answer is: I’m looking. Looking to meet people outside my immediate bubble, even if only to compare the kinds of futures we are imagining, and to see if there is one we might work on together. (Not AI-powered content creation, for sure).

The future I have in mind revolves a lot around The Power of Storytelling at the moment. We revived the yearly event, and there is more we want to do: keep being a source of inspiration but also be a provider of storytelling insights and tools, a place that can help people and organizations create personal and social change. Keep the yearly Bucharest gathering going and also travel to other cities in Romania. Be more helpful to the community. Create products around it. And so on.

This is all still in a dreaming phase, which means reality is vulnerable and chaotic: ambitions are high, opportunities abound, but resources do not. It’s a gamble, like many wonderful things. As I told our very small team at Media DoR, the NGO through which we run the conference and other projects (listened to our recent podcast yet?): The future depends on joining up with people who are better than us at many of the things we want to build – at project management of any kind, at communications and marketing for PoS, at financial management, and more. If we don’t find and empower partners who excel at these and other types of work, we’ll remain stuck in a loop: big ambitions reached mostly through stubbornness and personal sacrifice. But that’s not a path to joy; it’s a recipe for burnout.

We’ve been there before.

Which is why I feel the risk we need to take is to open ourselves to looking for experienced partners to grow alongside with. The risk I have to take is accept a leadership role in this exploratory phase, at a level I’m still struggling to reach.

All of this to say I’m terrified. But the desire to get there is bigger than the fear, thus this letter. I want to spend the next phase of my working life building with humans, for humans. Even if – maybe especially if – that won’t be the most attractive or efficient unique selling proposition. 

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So if you read this and go: “Oh, I feel the same!”, here’s a more concrete breakdown of needs. I’ll start with a less concrete dream, but then there is a more specific role we’re looking to fill. No hard deadlines on either, precisely because of everything I said above.

• In the medium term, our storytelling organization needs a strong operations leader with project and financial management skills. Maybe it actually needs someone that can set up strong and lean frameworks to run our projects, plus someone who can organize our financial future to back them up. But we’re not there yet, so any would do. I’ve done and continue to do both, but it’s not what I do best, and it’s not what I enjoy. I’m an ideas and strategy person, less good at keeping systems in order, or trains running on time.
  Since this means finding someone to trust and work alongside with, I’m not expecting us to run a search and nail it. I fully expect extended dating periods are required, but that’s how partners find one another, right?
• The Power of Storytelling needs a strong communications manager. This is a given and it’s a role we’re actually looking to hire for. Here’s what we know about the ideal person: it should be a senior person with experience in comms and/or marketing, a person with strategic thinking, a grasp of communication tools (including strong writing/editing skills), experience coordinating teams, and the maturity to operate in an environment that delivers magic, often with limited resources. We need someone autonomous, able to generate their own workload, and who also likes the doing, not just the planning. They would coordinate communications across all our channels and manage partnerships, as well work with 2–3 people that do newsletters and social media, so the ability to steer and harmonize a team is essential.

For any of the above, drop me a line at cristi@dor.ro, tell me your story, and what if anything of the above resonates or matches your future wishes. Yes, you should be in Bucharest for these. I likely won’t reply before November 25, because I’m away and wrapping up a hectic two months, but I will read everything and get back to you. (You can also forward this to friends that might match these descriptions). 

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I did turn to Word’s new assistant as the first draft of this was done and pressed “summarize this document”. Nothing happed. I pressed again, and again, and again. Nothing again. I thought the AI was supposed to be always ready.

SIDE DISHES:

A leaner list than last time, and more of a reminder – we announced half of our conference line-up this week and the theme. You can grab a spot starting at 2pm Monday, on Eventbook.ro – just look for The Power of Storytelling. We also launched the second episode of Prea Sărac, which we were very excited about. A third one will drop by the end of the month. And speaking of things made intentionally by humans and for humans, is there anyone not enjoying Rosalia’s new album?