Gears Within Gears

When a company hits a ceiling on its core business, it often tries to grow demand. The Michelin Guide wasn’t about restaurants; it was about miles driven. Facebook’s internet.org wasn’t about altruism; it unlocked expansion by growing the size of the entire internet. The ceiling on the business was the medium, so they expanded it. AI companies face the same structural problem: their constraint on inference revenue is the volume of tasks that flow through models. From where they sit, every piece of software that still runs without model calls is unrealized market.

## The quest to kill meetings A few years ago I was leading the consumer product engineering division at a startup, and one of the teams I was leading was repeatedly flagging the same issue: too many meetings. Clawing back time to focus on day-to-day work is a recurring pain point for engineers, because for many of us it’s difficult to regain our focus and concentration after an interruption. I started looking for opportunities to cut back on team rituals, and my gaze fell on estimation.