What’s Old is New Again

We just sat down with Bill Gurley, a billionaire and one of the leading venture investors on earth. Bill is an early backer of Uber and many other things people use every day.

Bill spent the last decade studying one question: why do some people end up loving their work while most spend their careers staring at the ceiling at 2am wondering where it all went wrong?

The answers, he learned, are a set of timeless truths.

The best strategies often are timeless. Jeff Bezos figured out the same thing from a different angle.

He’s said that most people incorrectly obsess over what's going to change in 10 years, while almost nobody ever asks about what's NOT going to change.

Instead of focusing his energy on changes, he focused it on constants.

The result? Pure magic. So today, we wanted to highlight another constant we all share, but largely underutilize:

Being a homo sapien.

Damn, that sounds cringe… But it’s not a joke. Do you sneeze? Congrats, you’re halfway there. The alpha move in an AI world is almost offensively simple: be a human who uses AI but goes the extra mile to do the human thing.

Because here's what's coming. AI is about to hose down every scalable channel simultaneously. Soon, everyone will be automating 700 LinkedIn messages a day, and none of them will land because everyone will be doing it and everyone will know.

As everything digital turns hollow, the value of the unscalable human touch is about to go through the roof.

There are a lot of ways you can add a touch of humanity in your business.

We call them Magic Moments.

As JFK put it, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.” Sure, he was talking about landing on the moon 250,000 miles away, and we're talking about a handwritten thank-you note. But both count.

Here's some of what we do:

Costs almost nothing. Makes people feel like a million bucks.

In a world where every interaction is getting sanded down into a frictionless automated nothing-burger, a little humanity hits like a defibrillator.

Take Carmelo, for instance.

Carmelo is a member of our Growth Boardroom.

He runs a private security company and tracks success by a metric that would make most MBAs visibly uncomfortable.

"It's not the number of zeros in a bank account. It's the number of zeros we can give away."

And he means it. Every quarter, he and his business partner Alex give back to their community. Thanksgiving dinners. Book bags for 100 families. Uniforms for a youth football team that couldn't afford them.

"They put our logo on the shirt and on the shorts. That's success right there."

It’s not Carmelo’s goal, but these are amazing magic moments for his business. Nobody is gonna out-loyalty Carmelo in that zip code. Nobody.

Here’s another cool example we recently read about:

Apparently, there’s a clever business owner out there who sends every churned customer a $50 Amex gift card and a handwritten note that essentially says: “We failed you, want to tell us how?”

Here’s the secret sauce:

As we put it recently, great sales and customer skills are about to be worth more than ever, and almost everyone is getting worse at them.

Not "could use a refresher" worse. Measurably, statistically, foundationally worse.

We are collectively becoming phone-obsessed weirdos who can't hold eye contact for six seconds. So here's a radical idea: get really good at the thing everyone else is getting terrible at.

Get good at being old school.

The bar is getting embarrassingly low. You can clear it (and then some), we promise you.

They said email was dead in 1995. Yeah, okay. Let’s check back again in 2035.

Customers buy from people they trust. Building that trust takes repetition, consistency, and usually, a direct line of communication.

A newsletter is one of the most direct ways to build that trust over the long term, which is why we invested in beehiiv.

beehiiv made it so that starting a newsletter is simple, monetizing it is possible, and growing it happens faster. Plus, they baked in automated monetization, referral programs, recommendations, and analytics.

If you launched a newsletter recently (or are thinking about it), send it over! Tell us what it's about! We want to know what you're building.

And one last point…

You want a moat? Here it is. The best small businesses of the future will operate on a barbell strategy.

On one side: leverage AI to do what AI does best. Bring ruthless scale and speed.

On the other side: become aggressively, inconveniently human. Show up in person. Send the note. Remember the name, send the flowers, and call the phone. Do the thing that doesn't scale.

The ones who figure out both ends of that barbell?

They’re gonna eat everyone else’s lunch.

-Team Contrarian

DOPAMINE HIT