We spend too much energy translating our ideas into google docs
Hi friends,
This week, some things that are bad but might be better soon:
Documents
The process of finding a therapist
Email
Industrial control system security
Founder Shishir Mehrotra has been thinking about documents for 20 years. Now, he’s rebuilding them from scratch.
Creativity has always been about the funky and strange translation that occurs when we fit ideas into format. Shakespeare carved thoughts into iambic pentameter. A designer transforms elegance into a dress (or a Megan Rapinoe suit). Broad City squishes plot into 22 minute episode blocks with 3 commercial breaks. And the rest of us? We write essays and run companies and manage projects within the capabilities of modern document creation tools (Microsoft Office, Google Drive). Except, except!! Format is supposed to elevate the final product: the idea is that Shakespeare’s poem was better for having been a sonnet. We, on the other hand, spend too much energy translating our ideas into documents. Think about it: information is always stored in an up and down format, and it doesn’t vary based on who looks at it. It won’t auto-update, unless you’re willing to build a complicated API. You can only run calculations in a table, and in that table you have to refer to columns like “a game of battleship:” A1, C3, etc. Coda supposedly makes your documents as powerful as an app. They can send texts and emails. Formulas work everywhere and are equipped to pull in information like the weather or directions from Google Maps. It’s been used for everything from planning a wedding to starting a company. The result is a platform that elevates our ideas and business interactions. Like a 14 line sonnet.
Coda is hiring engineers and customer champions. It is also completely free to use their system (for now).
Anyone who’s ever seen a mental health practitioner before will say: it is so stupidly hard to find a good doctor. What if we could change that by changing their office spaces?
Alma is betting that communal workspaces packed with full-stack technology, socializing quarters, and peer networks will lead to better mental health outcomes: they are pitching their service as WeWork for mental health practitioners. Here’s why it’s not a bad idea. If you’re a gynecologist or a general surgeon, you typically work in a hospital with hundreds of other professionals or in a private practice with a team of peers. If you’re a mental health practitioner, your work is siloed. Most of our psychologists and psychiatrists are sole practitioners operating their own businesses (more than 90% in NYC). Therapists don’t get to productively socialize with their colleagues at lunch, ruminating over treatment strategies, approaches, outcomes; psychiatrists aren’t checked by hospital-level performance standards; psychologists figure everything out on their own, from scheduling systems and billing software to office management. This solo-work predicament has negative downstream effects on patient treatment (much like we’ve seen in dentistry) because outcomes are better with the subtle checks and incentives (or strict rules) of communities.
Alma is hiring a product manager, a community growth manager, and a real estate professional.
Email has been very subtly irksome for a very long time. When asked why we don’t have a better experience, CEO Rahul Vora said “I just think that no one ever tried.”
Two years ago, Superhuman started from scratch and tried to understand the subtle frictions overtaking our current email experience. It’s the fact that we can’t undo-send a typo-ridden email. It’s all the mental effort of translating our reverse-chronological inbox into the real order of our priorities. It’s every person who has 90 flags and 90 folders. It’s all the times that we tried to hit send when we didn’t have any service. It’s the fact that the UI/UX has no joy. Think of all the moments that people all over the world have spent frustrated by these tiny problems and you can imagine a big pit filled with a lot of frustration. Wouldn’t it be fun to poof it away? Superhuman is trying. They’ve built an email client around keyboard shortcuts to gamefy the experience (think: Tetris). It can undo, template send, no-service send. It minimizes latency (the time it takes clicks to load). And it is apparently very pretty.
They are hiring a product manager, an onboarding specialist, and more.
Dragos does complex threat mapping and monitoring so that we can all have water, electricity, and heat.
In 2003, I was 6 years old, about to jump in the pool at summer camp when all the sudden there was a blackout and I had to leave: I remember it vividly. This was just a few years after 9-11, so when it first happened, everyone was worried that it was a terrorist attack. It ended up being a random computer bug, but the perception of a major threat to industrial control systems stuck with me. Cleanliness and order in society relies on a swath of public utilities, many of which are accessible from a central operating center and thus vulnerable to attack: gas, water, electricity, sewage. Someone (or some country) who wants to create disorder in society can, yes, go to Walmart and buy a gun, but they can also hack into our power grid: a system that is non-robust to targeted attack because the drive for efficiency prevents protective redundancy. So what Dragos does is map out these complicated systems (think of a big software model of all of the power lines, transformers, and control centers in an electrical grid) and then overlays that information with the expected, normal behavior in each part of the system. It triggers an alarm upon deviation and provides recommendations for action.
For those who want to prevent the industrial apocalypse, Dragos is hiring in product management, threat operations, engineering, and HR.
Reply with thoughts, ideas, questions, exciting job-search news, or your favorite canned soup (for this week’s grocery run).
See you next week.
Love,
Lea