Yesterday I was in a session of Launch Accelerator Demo Day 31 where there were 8 companies showcasing their products. The demo’s were intriguing and the entire session was well run.

As one would expect, a lot of the products are a build up on the AI fad. Everything has to include AI now a days. I am certain (or hope to be certain) that soon we would be coming back to the days where the products need to make business sense. They need to have a strong value hypothesis which shows that they are helping the business and a strong growth hypothesis that shows a hockey stick.

A common theme in the products was that they would help you go faster and possibly better (which is debatable). Faster for sure. But what race are we trying to win by going faster? There were products like Saga and Recall that I liked but later in retrospective, I started thinking that what are we trying to win at?

Saga would help me create the plot for my latest blockbuster, built on models from OpenAI and Recall would summarise any knowledge content and put it in my knowledge base for future reference. recall has a terrific UI and the first few summations that I attempted with it were not bad.

Today, we have a plethora of content to work with. We end up bookmarking, adding to Notion, putting in Keep etc etc (put any tool of your choice). But if you are like me, we seldom go back to those content pieces. Many a times bookmarking them is all that we do. We feel that we have done our work once the bookmark is done.

Cal Newport in his book Deep Work talks about this behaviour of ours that is actually detrimental. We try to gather a lot and accomplish little.

The products that I saw sure help me gather, summarise, assist in speeding up. But the question is that are they helping us win the shallow race? Would there be a deeper impact? Would there be tangible deep benefits? Are we running the right race?