by
Matt Bucher
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Belan is the Chairman and CEO. When I first met him, after I’d been hired and flown to San Francisco, I was shocked when I saw his name.
My great-grandfather had been named Belan when he was born, but had been adopted later at the age of 21 and he changed his name.
We call him Leo Steven. But I never met him.
When I met this Belan, the CEO, this was the first thing I told him.
Belan was a family name. On my dad’s side.
Just as I started to launch into the story, he cut me off: Interesting. Huh. Well, about this strategy deck you’re working on…
I’d never met another person named Belan in my life, and I doubt he had either but that apparently didn’t matter to him at all. He was all business, all the time. I could feel the stress emanating off him like steam.
Leo Steven was adopted, in Powersville, Missouri, when he was 21.
- Willard Howard Taft was President.
Why would anyone adopt a 21 year old? Is that even possible? Man adopts man.
laughed out loud at that
More titles:
- Lexemic Lush Landscape
- Marks on a Street in Rome
- The Berlin of the Mind
- Our Own Yellow Brick Road
- Why_You_Should_Hate_AI_FINAL_v2
The deck is such a mixture of content and styles that I fear no one title will be able to capture it.
My plan for the deck is to use it as a sort of intellectual grenade on the way out the door.
I showed Belan an early draft of the deck, maybe 90 slides, and he said "it's trying to get at something unimportant, but it's not there. I don't like all these little bits of unconnected trivia."
So I added 454 more slides.
I went to San Francisco then because I wished to live deliberately.
Too sincere. Too poor. Lasted only a few years.
But left with enough experience to land a string of higher-paying "comms" jobs at tech companies. So one could write in one's free time, one told oneself.
relevant for BH - draw out the cliche, make the reader understand what happened without being explicit about it
Trying to think of something to text Amanda to get her to prove she is not a bot.
Maybe I should send her a CAPTCHA.
Hey Amanda, can you recommend a place to eat in SFO?
Yankee Pier, she texts back immediately.
Too easy. I try again.
Anything else I should know? I ask her.
Get the popcorn shrimp! She replies.
Could be a Yelp bot. Still not sure. For now.
pano inspo - lots of characters confused about who is a bot and who is not [capture the fact that lots of startups love to advertise AI capability to get investment but that it's hard to get right so as a stopgap measure they often employ people. also that certain things can be automated, lots of unexpected bots too.]
At a previous AI automation job, I found a deck so jaw-droppingly packed with incoherent HR jargon that I immediately copied it onto a flash drive.
And have used bits and pieces of that deck in writing every performance review and self-evaluation I've had to write in the past decade.
pano idea someone using a bot or chatgpt-style thing to write perf reviews