Nathanael Yellis

Happy New Year!

Each year, I purchase a Moleskine day planner. While sometimes I use it for, you know, planning, mostly I write about things that have already happened. This catalog of events and their immediate impressions on me can make for interesting reading at the end of the year. Just what made that mid-March ski run from the summit "ludicrously good"? Nathanael of 9 months ago didn't say. The better reading is about the books, articles, and even the early thoughts for some of these essays: when I put a little effort into it, the journal is rewarding.

It’s almost Christmas; time for some stories.

In an demonstration video of HubSpot's in-CRM AI, called, like most AI things in software, copilot, the voiceover reminded us to always verify what the AI produced. Whether you are asking it to summarize a CRM record, write an introductory email, or answer a 'how does this work' question, the trainer wanted to make sure the viewers verified what their copilot produces. The message seemed to be the old Reagan line, "trust, but verify," although it didn't leave me feeling too trusting.

About a month ago, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching cable news. This isn't my normal mode: usually, I'm in bed by 10, and I never watch the television pundits. But that night, I couldn't look away. Heading into it, almost all of the people on the tv thought something else was going to happen. Then, as each new bit of data came in, you could see their faces initially register surprise, you could almost hear their internal dialogs figuring out how to smartly adjust, and then you got to see, in real time, how they managed to make their comment as if they'd known or understood all along what would happen. Some did this very well: you might call them the born liars; others struggled, much to my entertainment, they appeared more like real people. Cable news is usually boring because no one moves away from their practiced commentary. Election nights are one of the few times where they have to improvise to absorb unfolding reality and react to it in real time. I couldn't look away.

On Saturday, we drove the thousand miles from our house to where my in-laws live in Tennessee. On Sunday, I read Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas, by Nick Hornby. It's a collection of his Believer columns. They appear under the heading "Stuff I've Been Reading." Which, come to think of it, if I weren't into silly puns, would be a good title for this email.

My friend Tom wore his "for the love of marketing" sweatshirt on Tuesday. That was an early HubSpot tagline; I had it on my office key when I first started. It's been a while since I've talked about marketing. And rather than clutter your inbox with another half-baked post-election essay, I thought I'd let my election thoughts cook a little longer and talk marketing.

In business school, we talked a lot about entrepreneurship and we adapted the idiom "ham and egging" to mean the way entrepreneurs need to ask for a whole lot from their early employees, vendors, and customers. Say you had your first signed customer, the "ham and egging" entrepreneur would take that contract immediately to the bank to ask for money, investors to ask for capital, or vendors to ask for credit. I can't find any real-world usage that mirrors this b-school usage. Ham and egging means, variously, someone with minimal talent, legs, baseball's double play, plugging away at a task, or begging. Maybe it was the begging usage we were adapting—the entrepreneur does a lot of asking. Whether our usage was right or not, the newly started company needs to bridge a big gap between what it wants to be and what it is. There are a lot of opportunities to fake it until you make it. That's where they get into trouble.

Over the summer, my book club read a book set in occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War. It was mostly an unremarkable book: the heroes were actively part of the resistance; the villains were Nazis; the plot was exactly what you'd expect. In it, no Nazi sympathizer went unpunished nor did any of the heroes pay the price of resisting the occupying regime. As a result, this historical fiction was entirely ahistorical: the vast majority of actual people went along with the Nazi regime and almost no one actively resisted it. While there are some great stories of heroes resisting the Nazis and hiding Jews, historical reality is far more grim: 75% of Dutch Jews died in the holocaust.