Chers amis, fans de bonnes lectures,

Bienvenue aux 31 personnes qui nous ont rejoints depuis mardi dernier ! Si vous lisez ceci et n’êtes pas encore inscrit, rejoignez vite les 2835 personnes qui ont déjà eu la bonne idée de le faire. C’est juste ici !

Dans les JCNews cette semaine, mes dernières lectures les plus intéressantes, dont un zoom sur un must-read à ne pas manquer !

Ecrivez-moi pour en parler, sur Linkedin ou sur Twitter. Bonne lecture à tous !

💡Must-read de la semaine

Chaque semaine, je publie un must-read.

👉Construire sa startup dans un environnement réglementé - leçons tirées de Cash App et Carbon Health (First Round)

“It’s important to not be afraid to go to whatever depth necessary to get an answer that you really understand.”

Always look for those opportunities where it’s easy to stop, where it gets tedious. That typically is a signal that somebody or a bunch of people just haven’t gotten deeper before.

“When you’re working within domains that are regulatorily complex, generally, once you establish a beachhead, there are higher barriers to entry. That complexity is a reason that people don’t tend to try it”.

La sagesse conventionnelle et le consensus mou sont des matelas confortables dont peu de gens veulent s’extraire. Ceux qui le font dérangent souvent. Nous poussons chaque Alaner à ne pas avoir peur d’aller plus loin, de creuser un sujet autant qu’il le faut.

“It’s easier to take the thing that you’re told as fact. But there are enough cases where the thing that you were told is just a series of interpretations. The person telling you just got it from the person who told them, but it’s been a long time since someone’s really interrogated those assumptions”.

When you’re looking at a problem with a heavy regulatory component, you have to be willing to question everything.

Omojola suggests you build up your own know-how on the topic — especially if you’re a novice — before looping in a few key allies. “You have to be willing to read everything on the topic from a regulatory perspective and build a perspective.

Cela s’applique très bien à Alan. Nous ne voulons pas nous fier uniquement aux “experts”, et soutenir nos décisions par de la technologie et de la donnée, en allant beaucoup plus loin que la norme. C’est essentiel pour redéfinir notre catégorie, et même en créer une nouvelle.

You ask, ‘Hey, can we do something else here?’ and people tell you no, but they can’t tell you why. Or why they give you is so ambiguous.

Dire non sans pouvoir expliquer pourquoi est un bon indicateur qu’il y a quelque chose à creuser. Nous n’acceptons pas l’excuse de la complexité, nous décomposons les questions et les problèmes, pour les ramener à des composantes simples et intelligibles, et mettre en place un plan d’action en conséquence.

A lot of leaders fall into the trap of assuming that people are coming to the table with the same context as you.

Most of the time people just have very different contexts than what you have and their perspective on the objective is not necessarily aligned with yours

Sharing as much context as possible with the person you trust to get something done is like a superpower. It’s almost like downloading your brain into their brain.

“I find that it’s better to describe problems to them. Basically say, ‘Here’s what’s happening that we would like to change. Here’s some constraints that we want to put around it”

Le contexte est tellement important. On considère que le travail de tous, à tous les niveaux, est de définir un contexte clair afin que les autres disposent des informations nécessaires pour prendre de bonnes décisions.

Ainsi, au lieu de contrôler les décisions des autres, nous les aidons en définissant le contexte approprié qui leur permettra d’obtenir d’excellents résultats.

I think founders that have not necessarily had these massive exits are really undervalued by the job market.

On adore l’esprit entrepreneurial, et on recrute : jobs@alan.com.

🏯Construire une entreprise

En plus d’articles triés sur le volet, je partage un principe de leadership d’Alan par semaine. Le même que je partage en interne et à nos investisseurs tous les mercredis.

👉Les Alaners se concentrent sur un “A+ problem”. (Healthy Business)

• Parfois, il est difficile de savoir ce qu'est un problème A+ et un problème B.
• Les A+ problems sont des problèmes à fort impact pour l'entreprise. Le problème sur lequel nous travaillons doit avoir un impact élevé pour l'entreprise. Mais il existe de nombreuses façons d'avoir un impact élevé, et cela concerne tous les niveaux de l'entreprise. Lors d'une visite au centre spatial de la NASA en 1962, le président John F. Kennedy a remarqué un concierge portant un balai. Il a interrompu sa visite, s'est approché de l'homme et lui a dit : "Bonjour, je suis Mr. Kennedy. Qu'est-ce que vous faites ?” “Eh bien, M. le Président," le concierge répondit, "J'aide à envoyer un homme sur la lune." Ce concierge travaillait vraiment sur le problème A+ car un espace de travail sale aurait pu perturber l’opération.
• La deuxième caractéristique est très corrélée à la première : les problèmes à fort impact ont tendance à être difficiles à résoudre (sinon, ils seraient déjà résolus). C'est pourquoi nous devons faire des investissements supplémentaires pour être innovants, prendre des risques, échouer, apprendre de nouvelles choses pour les résoudre, aller vers des territoires inexplorés. Pour trouver un A+ problem, nous devons regarder là où d'autres auraient abandonné, parce qu’il était trop complexe, trop fastidieux, ou parce qu'il y a un nouveau paradigme. Comme ils sont souvent difficiles, nous avons recommandé aux Alaners de n'avoir qu'un seul A+ problem à la fois (qu’ils communiquent chaque semaine), de le clore le plus tôt possible avant de passer au suivant.

👉Savoir quand s’arrêter (Basecamp)

Designers and programmers always want to do their best work. It doesn’t matter if the button is on the center of the landing page or two pages down a settings screen, the designer will give it their best attention. And the best programmers want the code base to feel like a cohesive whole, completely logically consistent with every edge case covered.

Instead of comparing up against the ideal, compare down to baseline—the current reality for customers. How do customers solve this problem today, without this feature?

Plutôt que de se comparer à un idéal de design ou de programmation, il faut toujours se demander, quelle est l’expérience actuelle de l’utilisateur final ? Et, en fonction, comment fait-on pour delighter, qu’est-ce qu’on développe pour résoudre un problème existant ?

Seeing that our work so far is better than the current alternatives makes us feel better about the progress we’ve made. This motivates us to make calls on the things that are slowing us down. It’s less about us and more about value for the customer.

Every project is full of scope we don’t need. Every part of a product doesn’t need to be equally prominent, equally fast, and equally polished. Every use case isn’t equally common, equally critical, or equally aligned with the market we’re trying to sell to.

Tous les cas d’usages de votre produit ne se valent pas, et chaque projet doit prioriser ceux qui affectent la plus grande majorité de vos utilisateurs, et qui auront donc la plus forte valeur ajoutée une fois implémentés ou améliorés. Chez Alan, on dit souvent que certains “feux” peuvent brûler plus longtemps que d'autres.

Cutting scope isn’t lowering quality: Making choices makes the product better. It makes the product better at some things instead of others ... The trick is asking ourselves which things actually matter, which things move the needle, and which things make a difference for the core use cases we’re trying to solve.

As we come up with things to fix, add, improve, or redesign during a project, we ask ourselves:

Is this a “must-have” for the new feature? Could we ship without this? What happens if we don’t do this? Is this a new problem or a pre-existing one that customers already live with? How likely is this case or condition to occur? When this case occurs, which customers see it? Is it core—used by everyone—or more of an edge case? What’s the actual impact of this case or condition in the event it does happen? When something doesn’t work well for a particular use case, how aligned is that use case with our intended audience? The fixed deadline motivates us to ask these questions.

Faire des choix, et donc renoncer à certaines choses, permet de gagner en qualité et en impact. Ça nous force à aller à l’essentiel, en nous posant les bonnes questions en fonction de ce que l’on souhaite réparer, ajouter, améliorer. La liste ci-dessus en est un bon exemple.

For years we didn’t have a QA role. Then after our user base grew to a certain size, we saw that small edge cases began to impact hundreds or thousands of users in absolute numbers. (...) Therefore we think of QA as a level-up, not a gate or a check-point that all work must go through.

A partir d’une certaine taille critique, avoir un rôle de quality assurance au sein de son entreprise permet d’éviter des effets de bord qui pourraient avoir un impact sur une base d’utilisateurs plus large.

👉Êtes vous un phoque ? ou quels business où une forte probabilité de se faire avoir par les GAFA (Ben Evans)

• If Google can turn your business into a trivial part of Google, it will try. If it would have to recreate your entire company inside Google, it probably won’t.
• The canonical example of this is Google buying dMarc in 2006 for $1.2bn to get into the radio advertising business. It thought that this could be scalable, self-service, automated software - that it could be turned into ‘Google’. When Google discovered that it would have to send thousands of actual human salespeople all over the country - that it would need to grow another limb - it shut it down.

🗞Dans l’actu

📱Monde des technologies

👉 7 emails de rejet d’investisseurs qu’Airbnb a reçu en 2008 (Medium) ou pourquoi il faut continuer à persévérer, et se faire rejeter fait partie du chemin.

👉 Le CEO de Twitch, Emmett Shear parle du phénomène d’unbundling du contenu, de persistance et de l’importance du focus (Founder’s Field Guide)

The Bundling and Unbundling of Content

• You've got a! whole stack of subscription services like Twitch, but where you're not subscribing to some corporation service, but rather you're subscribing to an individual creators' feed of content or even just that content's often free, but just to support that creator.

The importance of persistence:

• And that persistence to keep making stuff, even though the stuff I was making wasn't very good and wasn't very successful, was really, really valuable and important. And I wish someone had told me, it is normal and okay for the first three things you build to kind of suck. The important question is, are you getting better at it? Are the new things better than the things you built before? Do they work better? Do customers like them more? Do you think they're better?

Importance to focus on the basic things:

• And I really see it as this endless improvement of that core value proposition. And we'll do a hundred little things to try to improve that.
• At the end of the day, every 5% better we get it that, it's 5% harder it is for someone else to come be better than us at it.
• I think we're still too easily distracted by, "Well, this will improve it. We'll do this. And then it'll let us do this thing, which lets us improve it." And that's true sometimes when you take these sort of roundabout ways to improving something. But a lot of the time, you'd have been better off just making the damn thing better in the first place.
• It's almost like a rite of passage for founders that they have to make this uncomfortable decision to narrow their focus and pick something that feels too small.

👉 En 2021, le passage à la nouvelle année s’est faite sur les réseaux sociaux (Facebook)

• New Year’s Eve is a historically busy night for Facebook services, but this year set new records.
• More than 1.4 billion voice and video calls were made on WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve, the app’s highest usage ever. That’s up more than 50 percent over last year.
• New Year’s Eve 2020 was the biggest day ever for Messenger group video calls (3+ people) in the US, with nearly 2X more group video calls on NYE compared to the average day.
• There were more than 55 million live broadcasts across Facebook and Instagram globally on New Year’s Eve.

🏥 Santé

👉 Amazon, Berkshire et JP Morgan mettent fin à Haven, leur projet commun dans la santé (CNBC)

• Haven is a joint venture formed by three of America’s most powerful companies to lower costs and improve outcomes in health care. One of the key issues it was facing is that the three founding companies executed projects on their own.
• This closing move may be a sign of how difficult it is to radically improve American health care. The three companies will likely collaborate informally on other health-care projects and develop their own health-related projects.

👉 Le futur de la santé: des hôpitaux sans murs (The Guardian)

• In the wake of Covid, doctors and designers are radically adapting their thinking about what a hospital can be and what it should deliver.
• The pandemic has accelerated some trends, such as the one to a “hospital without walls” – the hospital conceived as a digitally connected community rather than a circumscribed physical space.
• The twin pillars of digital health are electronic health records (EHRs), which allow patient information to be shared across health systems, and telehealth, which allows patients and physicians to communicate at distance.
• The results of a survey of nearly 10,000 patients in London suggest that in general they want more, not less, digital healthcare. Though it certainly doesn’t suit everyone, in future people will have more choice in how they access healthcare – being able to mix and match channels.
• With the move to digital, we’ll see medicine becoming more preventive, as well as more personalised and precise. Patients with asthma and diabetes are already used to monitoring their peak flow and blood sugar (respectively) through dedicated apps, for example.
• The hospital of the future is a specialist hub, digitally embedded in the community: this is the hospital without walls – the hospital that is everywhere, embedded in our lives.

📕📺 Livres et docus

👉 Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) (IMBD): documentaire intéressant sur Steve Jobs, les hauts et les bas, et son histoire. La fin est un peu longue.

👉 My 2020 Reading List : je vous partage cette semaine ma reading list de l’année 2020, avec en particulier le super Volume 2 de The Great Mental Models, dont voici une petite fiche de lecture! Shane Parrish y approche des concepts fondamentaux de la physique, de la chimie et de la biologie (par exemple la relativité) comme des modèles mentaux. Un must-read !

C’est déjà fini. Bonne semaine et à vous de jouer maintenant ! Invitez vos amis à s’inscrire, ici.