❤️ How to make employees care, avoid delaying tough decisions, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 38th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Lenny’s Podcast, Acquired, and 20VC.
What you need to know
✍️ Is ChatGPT the future of SEO?
🕚 Avoid delaying tough decisions
❤️ How to make employees care
✍️ Is ChatGPT the future of SEO?
🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 1 hour 30 mins listening)
ChatGPT is the first real threat to Google. It offers users a cleaner results page that completely undermines Google’s advertising model. Sure, there are accuracy issues. But ChatGPT will only improve over time.
Google is the default place to start any buying journey. But that could all change. Read on for a whistle-stop tour of how SEO will evolve in an AI world.
What they say
Ethan’s views on AI
Most AI generated content is just sentences similar to other sentences that have been written before.
I mostly don't like AI for SEO and don't recommend it but there are exceptions.
Where AI is really useful is all the other stuff that I talked about - the workflow of creating content.
You start with what should I be writing about? What are the subtopics? What are the 300 different keywords I want to include? What's the outline?
All of these things can be done really well with AI. It can help me decide which topic to write about by going through thousands of keywords and finding these subtopic themes.
Ethan Smith
What I say
Why it matters: We’re all impatient. Historically, startups have massively underinvested in SEO compared to paid marketing. Why? Because in many cases it takes 6-12 months to start seeing an ROI. It has also been expensive and time-consuming to write 100+ blog posts per month. However, when done well, it is can become a cash generating machine. Just look at Monday.com:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, AI has changed the game. Now is the time to double down on SEO. AI significantly reduces the cost of producing content at scale. With a Human-AI-Human sandwich, you can set the strategy, AI can do the leg work, then you can edit and publish.
Between the lines: I disagree with Ethan about using AI to write content. He’s biased in favor of human writers because he runs an SEO agency. I’m a big believer that AI is good enough to augment your writing and even write initial drafts. We just need to have our wits about us and fact check and edit the end result. When used correctly, AI can pass itself off as human but still be ten times more efficient.
I’ll leave you with this to mull over… AI generated content is about to proliferate the internet. I see this as the California gold rush for building websites. If you pump out great content at scale you’ll be able to gain a lasting foothold in whatever form search ends up taking.
🕚 Avoid delaying tough decisions
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 3 hours 32 mins listening)
We've all been following the collapse of FTX. It's hard not to when $32 billion evaporates in a matter of weeks. However, the drama we're witnessing is child's play compared to the Enron scandal. At its peak, Enron was the 7th biggest company in America and its leadership was friendly with multiple US Presidents.
David and Ben tell the rise and fall of Enron in one of my favorite Acquired episodes to date. Before we dive in, here's a bit of context:
Arthur Andersen was one of the Big 5 accounting firms of its day and provided auditing services to Enron.
Arthur Andersen facilitated Enron’s dubious accounting practices to retain Enron as a consulting client and was convicted for obstruction of justice in 2002.
What they say
The Arthur Andersen backstory
Enron became Andersen's biggest client in the world. They were making $50 million a year from Enron. Half was audit and tax fees and half was consulting fees.
At this point in time, all the accounting firms had attached consulting arms under the same roof.
Andersen had Andersen Consulting which would go on to become Accenture after the demise of Andersen.
All the senior partners at the firm - it's one and the same - they're all making money from these engagements. The conflict here is immense.
At any point in time Enron could switch their consultants at the drop of a hat. There were huge incentives for Andersen to let Enron get away with what they wanted to keep them happy.
David Rosenthal
What I say
Why it matters: If you want to hear all of the ins and outs of how Andersen facilitated Enron’s fraud and conspiracy, you can listen to the full episode.
The point here is that Andersen chose client retention and short term revenue over accepted accounting practices and long term brand integrity. Andersen avoided every opportunity to say no to Enron and instead caused its own demise.
This makes me think of Marvin Liao’s great quote: ‘Startups die of suicide, not murder’. As he puts it, it's often bad decisions, actions, or inaction that causes a startup to die, not from something a competitor did.
Between the lines: Over the course of 2023, you'll be faced with tough decisions:
Should I lay off staff?
Should I kill off projects?
Should I wind down businesses?
The key takeaway is to learn from Arthur Andersen. Make tough decisions swiftly and communicate clearly and effectively. Despite the short term pain, your business will be better off for it.
❤️ How to make employees care
🥇 First place (4 min read vs 1 hour 4 mins listening)
Layoffs will kill quiet quitting (people doing the bare minimum to keep their job). At least for now. Fear sets in when job security is damaged and people have nowhere else to turn. Just look at the recent tech layoffs. They’ve already exceeded the dot com crash and we’ve only just begun.
However, this isn’t a doom and gloom post. I’m saying this because fear isn’t a long term motivator. Quiet quitting will re-emerge over time. To combat this sustainably, you need to make people feel fulfilled. They need to care. Miki Kuusi explains the 3 types of ownership needed to make people care.
What they say
Financial ownership
How do you create a culture where people actually care? The easiest way to make someone act like an owner is to make them an owner.
I’m a big believer in having equity programs. In Wolt, up until the very late stages, every single employee was a stock option holder.
My feeling is that I’d rather be a little bit more generous than a little bit more stingey with compensation. That’s my guiding principle.
It’s the same thing about culture. I always err on the side of transparency. If there’s something I can share with the company, I always ask ‘Is there a reason I can’t share it? If there’s not, I’m going to share it.’
Miki Kuusi
Information ownership
As an inexperienced leader you try to protect the team from the things that keep you up at night.
You're like ‘If they knew all the shit I know, would they be able to work or would they even stay at the company?’
I realized that's very heavy. You burn out very easily if you're making yourself the single point of failure. Your team is not going to be able to work with the full information to succeed.
I decided from the early days of Wolt that everything I'm concerned about, every one of my co-founders knows, everyone in our management knows, and the board knows
I've always acted on full transparency. There's been nothing going on with the company that I wouldn't have shared with these groups of people.
You know what? It's not as lonely or heavy on your shoulders. The team comes up with a lot smarter solutions to these things than you would ever come up with on your own.
Miki Kuusi
Domain ownership
You get people to care about the small things by giving them ownership over the big things.
People talk about delegating like ‘I don’t want to do something so I’m going to delegate it to you.’
Delegating should be ‘I’m going to make you the owner of this area. If there’s small things related to that area, that’s your responsibility because you own the area. You’re going to make or break it for us in this thing.’
Ownership makes people care about the details. If they feel like owners, they’re also going to care about the small things.
Miki Kuusi
What I say
Why it matters: Like any Venn diagram, the magic only happens when all three circles overlap. The same can be said here. You can give people stock options, but without domain or information ownership, people will feel disempowered.
What if you gave two of the three ownership types? Yes, people will care more. But from personal experience, when all three are present at the same time, it unlocks a level of motivation and buy-in that didn’t exist before.
Between the lines: Most companies get information ownership wrong. Leaders avoid sharing bad news with their teams and don’t explain why big strategic decisions are made. Instead, they should employ clear, concise, and transparent communication. It goes a long way to installing trust, respect and resiliency among teams. When you’re facing the gauntlet, this trust and resiliency can be the difference between life and death for your startup.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
Most of you will have played around with ChatGPT already. If you haven’t, get ready to have your mind blown. I’ll let ChatGPT sell itself for you:
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.