Permanent Equity Weekly #53

Growth as bottleneck removal. A business runs only as fast as its narrowest bottleneck. Plus a definition worth keeping: the fundamental purpose of technology is to give the user leverage over their time — and change often costs that leverage before it returns it.

Notes

• The task of growing a business can be defined as finding and eliminating bottlenecks to allow for greater capacity and throughput. Your business will only operate as fast as your narrowest bottleneck allows. #efficiency
• **The fundamental purpose of technology is to give the end user leverage over their time to accomplish more with less (time or money or both). **When change is necessary, we often lose this leverage as we spend inordinate amounts of time coaxing our systems to follow new process. Does your technology stack give you more flexibility to meet changing demands, or is it locking you in to processes that are no longer relevant or hold back your ability to respond to shifts in the landscape? Techification
• Tough times can cause true leaders to emerge, so be on the lookout for those who are willing to tackle new problems and encourage them to lead. If you have the capacity to do so, many industries have a richer talent pool than they’ve seen in years from which to hire. Now is a great time to encourage your current team out of their safe places and to support new leaders. #Leadership
• Our ghost kitchen future (The New Yorker) + “The ghost kitchen is an increasingly crowded space. In addition to Reef, there are Zuul and Kitchen United in the United States, Deliveroo in London and Paris, and Panda Selected in China. CloudKitchens, the new venture run by Travis Kalanick’s City Storage Systems, buys real estate, brings in kitchen facilities, and leases them to chefs and small-business owners, most of whom do not have other brick-and-mortar spaces. Ojalvo cites his own experience in the restaurant industry (as a partner, he worked on the expansion of Sushi Samba, a Peruvian, Japanese, and Brazilian fusion-restaurant chain with locations in Las Vegas and Amsterdam) to note that opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant is high-risk and expensive, whereas ghost kitchens are lower-risk, offering a more affordable way for entrepreneurs to enter the business.” Cloud Kitchens