Sep 30, 2025
Erik’s Newsletter: A Faster Horse Can Still Win
Issue #83
🗓 Today at a Glance
Quote: The measure of intelligence is the ability to change
Reading: Automated local newsletter makes $500k/yr
Podcast: How Elon Works
Tweet: Sell products to women
Idea: Jobs to be done in AI are writing, tutoring, and answering questions
💬 Quote I’m Pondering
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” — Albert Einstein
Intelligence is less about what you know and more about how fast you adapt. If you can’t adjust when reality shifts, knowledge doesn’t matter.
🧠 What I’m Thinking About
Humanoid robots in residential.
What are the near-term tasks?
Near-term tasks might be safety checks, pet and plant care, and elderly support.
Medium-term tasks could be dishwasher loading, folding laundry, tidying, and meal prep.
Replace wasted time.
- Wasted time is car time and scroll time. Replace it with train, bike, or walk time. Pre-pack micro-tasks. Dictate drafts with voice. Swap feeds for audiobooks, swap phone for Kindle.
How do you get to the truth if numbers lie?
Data misleads when definitions are sloppy, when selection is skewed, or when measures become the target.
Some fixes: interrogate definitions, red-team the opposite case, look at the source data.
PMs must be storytellers.
Use AND–BUT–THEREFORE:
AND: the world as it is
BUT: the tension
THEREFORE: the decision and the vivid proof you can ship this week
How much of yourself have you fired?
- How many AI employees have you hired? Track hires: research assistant, meeting scribe, data analyst, PRD drafter, QA copilot.
📚 What I’m Reading
- Automated local newsletter makes $500k/yr. This is a city-specific newsletter that is AI-generated and it is monetized with classifieds and jobs. Crazy.
🎧 Podcasts Worth Your Time
How Elon Works
//founders
Ruthless throughput, insane context switching, zero tolerance for “status green, product red.”
Btw, the Founders podcast ads are AMAZING. They are directly integrated into the podcast rather than a scene cut.
**Alpha School
**//investlikethebestPodcast on the future of education, which I would totally send my daughter to, but the nuggets in this are within the wisdom:
Anything is possible. You have to prove this to yourself.
On values: if someone cannot say or argue the opposite, it’s a wasted statement, e.g. “we have integrity”
🐦 Tweets That Made Me Stop and Think
- Aaron Levie on speed of execution. Companies stall when they confuse consensus with progress.
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- Sell products to women. Women control most consumer spending. Many products ignore them. Design with women in mind if you want scale.
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I should have invented this. Simple, useful, obvious once you see it. The kind of product you kick yourself for missing.
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Agents will use software for you. Don’t try to design UIs for people, agents are just going to use them anyways. Right now, we’re trying to be backwards compatible, but if you want to get ahead, just design the UI for agents.
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- Sometimes a faster horse is the answer. Progress doesn’t always mean reinvention. Sometimes it’s a 10x upgrade of what already works.
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- We need PMMs. PMMs crystallize positioning, say one thing clearly, and arm sales with a story.
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💡 Idea I Can’t Get Out of My Head
What people use ChatGPT for (sample of 1.1M conversations, May 2024–June 2025):
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Two business opportunities:
Build specialized vertical products in the two biggest buckets (writing and practical guidance), e.g. AI-first tutoring platforms or writing co-pilots with deeper workflow integration.
Create “multi-modal learning” tools that fuse writing, guidance, and multimedia: capturing overlap between the top three use cases while differentiating from generic chat.