Rosa Del Mar

Issue 24 2026-01-24

Rosa Del Mar

Daily Brief

Issue 24 2026-01-24

Automation Of Admin Work And Global Finance Ops Drag

  • A cited study is claimed to estimate that shadow work costs companies more than $1.7T per year due to hours wasted on manual tasks.
  • Adding a highly personalized postscript referencing a recipient’s specific preferences materially increases outbound response rates (claimed ~3x).
  • Harry Stebbings says he emailed Marc Benioff 53 times (every Sunday) before receiving a reply agreeing to come on the show.

Process Shift Prototype First Vs Upfront Artifacts

  • The traditional design process emphasizing extensive upfront research and artifacts before building anything may be outdated for today's world.
  • AI-assisted programming reduces the cost of building the wrong thing by making implementation faster.
  • When people can make almost anything, differentiation shifts from ability-to-build toward choosing and curating what to build.

Ideation And Problem-Framing As Adoption Bottlenecks

  • A key barrier to most people building software is that many real-world problems are not perceived as software-shaped and therefore do not trigger software solutions.
  • Programmers are trained to interpret repeated tasks as candidates for automation, making them more likely than non-programmers to notice software-shaped solutions.
  • When non-programmers are told they can instantly create any app, they may respond positively but still fail to build anything because they cannot think of an idea.