The marketing material for this newsletter advertises insights about “marketing, management, writing, and whatever else.”

Henceforth, when those topics appear, they shall be so labeled.¹

Writing

A San Francisco moment, lightly fictionalized

The dream of San Francisco is alive in Noe Valley.

It’s Friday. Sunny Spanish drifts across the park.

“Que tengas un buen finde!”²

“Si, bai, nos vemos!”

The play areas for children and for dogs are both busy, respectively. One whimpers, and a blond bystander walks up the street to investigate. Another one doesn’t fetch. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because it’s an idiot, or it’s smart. Its parent persists. Throw, wait, entreat, walk to where the ball has come to rest, pick it up, repeat. An exercise in futility, except the dog isn’t getting any exercise.

I am scribbling in a notepad. I can only do this, the scribbling, when I know I don’t have much time.

Feedback

Yes, want it; yes, still hurts.

Two feedback excerpts from classmates for a short story:

The story is… not good. Given the vast room to improve, I really do want feedback that’s true and furthers my quixotic quest to become better. But oh, how badly I wanted to (figuratively) run away from Person A and towards Person B!

Such is the struggle.

Marketing

The default

A consulting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business told me he knew it was time to retire when his students came into class expecting to be entertained.

Hard to blame them. By the time they were old enough to take graduate-level classes, his students would have grown accustomed to near-constant entreaties for their attention. Ten minutes passing without the experience of at least mild arousal (in the physiological / psychological sense, as opposed to the sexual) would have been a rarity. Now they were seated in a no-tech classroom for an hour with a professor who didn’t want to do the song and dance.

Thesis: Entertainment is table stakes…
….for playing any game in which you need to deliver messages
…to people who do not know you.

I don’t think this is fully appreciated. You cannot play if you cannot hold attention and interest. There are other games, but doing “marketing” and why not, let’s generalize to just being effective in a non-technical role in a corporate environment, requires entertainment-savvy. More today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today. Someone who is a good communicator is often just someone who is entertaining.

The professor wasn’t willing to do the necessary song and dance. He had better things to do. But I don’t.

For me, learning to “dance” is a worthwhile pursuit.

Whatever else: AI and brand

When one writes a newsletter and works in “technology” and lives in the Bay Area, it is hard to avoid writing about AI. I will now succumb.

Thesis: AI will make brand-building more important.

The more vulnerable your product to commoditization, the more you have to care about brand. A commodity is a product that is completely fungible or interchangable with other units of the same type: think gas for your car or bubble wrap for rolling around on — …I mean, packing.

Companies that sell products vulnerable to commoditization (soda, shoes, cars, beer) spend huge amounts of time and money defining and defending their brand. Why? Because if you regard Coke as just like any other sugar water, you wouldn’t pay $2.50 for a bottle, and you certainly wouldn’t insist on it over, say, Pepsi.

Generative AI, in particular its ability to rapidly and cheaply replicate what existed prior, will commoditize digital products (like software) and assets (like content) faster than ever.

Even some popular consumer AI platforms have begun to spend big on brand advertising, because they know that their products are not obviously differentiated from their competitors’.

As product differentiation becomes less durable, brand-building (as defense against commoditization) will become more dear.

Things of the Month

Book of the Month

True Grit by Charles Portis

I think a lot of people read this book when they were kids. I just read it for the first time. It is hilarious. At 225 pages in kid-friendly font size, you’ll fly through it.

A quote from an article written about Portis shortly after his death:

Imagining of the Month

AI is frothy and overhyped and the billboards on 101 North heading into San Francisco make no sense, and I grow weary of all the breathless takes posted on LinkedIn (the superior social media platform) but it is a fact that two years ago, I could not imagine creating images like the ones in this newsletter.

Is it a good thing that I can do that now (plus videos, plus small pieces of software, plus bad poems)? I don’t know. But it’s definitely a thing.

Song(s) of the Month

What I listened to while writing this newsletter

Happy new year. If someone told you that you could have everything you wanted, but you’d have to keep wanting it for 25 years, would you accept? Y2K doesn’t seem so long ago…

But 2050 seems so far away. Though, thanks to the proportional time perception, it will come faster than these last 25…

Thank you for reading The Cortado.

Yours in the struggle,
Ethan

1  Until next time, when I come up with a better idea or get feedback about it.

2  Colloquial, casual abbreviation of fin de semana, meaning weekend!

3  The available space and opportunities a publisher or platform has to display advertisements