EMHApai - Elon Musk Hates Acronyms (probably also Initialisms)
On my run yesterday I was listening to the wonderful podcast No Stupid Questions with Angela Duckworth (her of Grit fam) and Stephen Dubner (him of Freakonomics fame). And they brought up this email from Elon Musk which he sent to all staff in 2010.
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.
That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.
For example, there should be not "HTS" [horizontal test stand] or "VTS" [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A "stand" at our test site is obviously a test stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with "Tripod", which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!
The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, e.g. MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
What got me from this email was the line ‘No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.’ Having been someone who’s sat in meetings, heard an acronym bandies around, had no idea what it meant and just nodded emphatically in agreement to avoid looking silly. Im also someone who, on reflection uses acronyms and initialisms a lot and work in a company/industry where their use is widespread, changes regularly and is quite often pretty confusing. For example we use CPC to mean the internal Cost Per Click but CPC could also mean Cost Per Call when running click to call campaigns - yeah not confusing at all. I think too often these acronyms come about as a way of providing status and creating a sense of a void between those who know and those who don’t. In a world where we’re working remotely, writing messages through Slack, Teams, Google Meets and Zoom then using acronyms to speed up communication seems sensible but we should critically evaluate our use of these shorthands - we don’t have word limits in our days so maybe starting next week I’ll try and user fewer acronyms, be a little more inclusive and try to communicate a little more clearly and think about Elon’s question: “The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication”
What’s in your wallet?
I was looking through this slide deck shared by Ark invest, as part of their Big Ideas for 2021. In it they discuss Digital Wallets and how the adoption of these applications has become so widespread so quickly - slide 31 is one of the most wild slides!
Bricks and mortar banks put in years of time and effort and millions of advertising to acquire a critical volume of customers and Venmo and Cashapp get there in a few short years. Initially I thought - Great, that’s a perfect vertical to run some acquisition campaigns at MVF. Well $20 CACs are going to be hard to beat! Even though these are likely to increase over time as some of the viral and referral loops they’ve built reduce in effectiveness, it’s still a far cry from the acquisition targets of the bricks and mortar competitors. So they’re able to acquire users and those users stick around and continue to interact with the app, so the product is useful - so what next? Well Ark outline the potential opportunity size presented to these digital wallets if they can add to the value they drive from each user. One of the challenges for me around each of these products is the disposable nature they’re treated with vs the reverence with which people still treat their bricks and mortar banks. I can have a Venmo, Paypal, Revolut and HSBC app all in one phone and use each one every now and then. The challengers have unbundled the services of a traditional bank and that’s provided a great tactic of building a product that does one thing very well and acquiring users but ultimately the value surely lies in a re-bundling of these services to start to maximise the value per user?
A look into another future
I was supposed to right a post last week and failed in week 2 but as part of the prep I read the Wunderman & Thompson 2021 Future 100 deck. It’s a beautiful whitepaper and has a huge amount of interesting ideas to jump into, some of which I might well come back to. But for now I was going to focus on a couple I thought were interesting…
Anti Amazon - Amazon as the marketplace has genuine competition in Shopify…
Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj
Shopify did ~$120B of GMV in 2020, growing at 96% y/y.
It's now up to almost a quarter of the size of Amazon which did ~$500B of GMV in 2020, growing at 45% y/y.
7:56 PM ∙ Feb 17, 2021
379Likes48RetweetsThere is also the amount of money pumping in to FBA rollups which seems crazy - Thrasio are reportedly buying $1.5m of revenue per day, either they have a rock solid DD and investment thesis or there is some serious risk kicking around somewhere. And what’s the end game - to become some new version of Procter&Gamble? I don’t know the exact brands they’re acquiring but if you look at the products with high GMV on Amazon then these would seem to have a helluva journey before that ambition is realised. And might these sellers simply move over to Shopify?
Personally I also despair for the increase in the amount of stuff we buy online, which is returned because it’s too small or we don’t like it. At best this is sold at a discount but more likely it’s land filled or incinerated. This is without even thinking about the environmental impact of this increase in ecommerce - sure Amazon have increased the amount of electric vehicles they’re using in their logistics network but fundamentally the stuff we’re buying has more miles.
Branded learning - You can see that top tier employers in large tech like Facebook and Google are now running their own courses which aim to land you a job in their orgs or in adjacent networks. It makes a lot of sense for these businesses, because they have huge brand recognition, work forces an the quality of the educational content they’re producing is likely to be higher than anything you would see in a traditional university. Personally I think university degrees are totally over rated but they represent a way to gain employment and employers use it as a gating criteria for application acceptance. Breaking this way of seeing the world, will lead to a revolution in the job market - We need to undermine the status of Universities. How might that happen? Well if organisations can say that this qualification might have been taken for £500 but we recognise that actually it is the same value and it makes you just as qualified as this £50k degree then maybe people would think a little differently. I’m watching this space eagerly.