Exactimo

We talk a lot about Seth Godin in our Product Bootcamps. In fact, his quote about User Research ("Don't find customers for your products ... find products for your customers") kicks off the 6️⃣ step product innovation process that we teach. Seth appeared on Lenny's Podcast recently and the episode was 🔥 In the conversation, they discuss: 💜 How to build remarkable products 🤼 Why tension in key to any great strategy ✨ How Seth uses GenAI to write books It's well worth listening to (see link in first comment)

How to become a Product Manager ➡ We've just refreshed our "How To Get Into Product Management guide" with additional profiles of our bootcamp alumni who are now working in Product. This week, say 👋 to Alex Henderson, MBA graduate from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Product Manager at Cur8 Capital. Key takeaways: 👥 Product is as much about organising people as it is about building product. Alex describes how he leads multiple product development "squads" (this organisational set up was popularised by Spotify. 🎯 Product is about impact. Alex is clear on what his goals are: "My role is all about choosing how to improve the investor experience and increase our assets under management with our finite resources". ➿ Product has very fast feedback loops, meaning you can see your decisions impact the business in real-time 📖 Alex talks about "framing your career narrative" and the importance of "metacognition", i.e. being able to explain how and why you arrived at a decision as key to his success. You can read Alex's full responses in our guide (see comment in the first link). cc: Madeleine Paler, Ben Garner

BREAKING: Amazon woke up this week and chose violence. They just announced their own foundation models, 75% cheaper. Plus AI Chips. Plus super computer. They’re coming for EVERYONE. It's like a coordinated attack on every major AI battlefront. Amazon is simultaneously challenging OpenAI/Microsoft in foundation models, NVIDIA in chips, xAI in supercomputing, and securing powerful allies like Anthropic and Apple. And SAP loves all this, BTW. With #AWSreInvent in the books, this is what we have from Amazon: 1. Foundation Model Domination - Six new Nova models that match or exceed competitors - 75% lower costs than current market leaders - Already powering 1,000 Amazon applications - 2025 roadmap includes groundbreaking speech-to-speech and "any-to-any" models - Supporting 200+ languages while others stay English-focused 2. The Chip Revolution - Trainium2 chips showing 4x performance gains - Slashing costs by 50% compared to Nvidia - Apple signed on as major customer - Deep collaboration with Annapurna Labs - Next-gen Trainium3 already in development 3. Project Rainier: The Super Computer - Building world's largest distributed AI compute cluster - Hundreds of thousands of Trainium chips working in unison - 5x more powerful than Anthropic's current systems - Multi-location design for unprecedented scale - Direct challenger to xAI's Colossus 4. The Anthropic Power Play - Massive $8B investment - Secured position as primary cloud provider - Exclusive access to future Claude models - Deep technical collaboration on chip optimization - Early access for AWS customers The most impressive part: Amazon's creating an entire ecosystem. They're simultaneously solving for compute (Project Rainier), chips (Trainium), models (Nova), and partnerships (Anthropic) - all while undercutting everyone's prices. This is bonkers, man.

There are starters and there are permission-seekers. The greats don't wait. Every major innovation started with someone doing something small. YouTube began with a few friends posting grainy videos. Amazon started by selling books from a garage. Google began as a grad school project. What separates dreamers from doers isn't talent or luck—it's the willingness to start before feeling ready. The perfect moment is a myth. The right time is now. But here's the key: Start small and learn fast. Your first move doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to teach you something. Stop looking for the perfect move. Focus more on the next small step that moves you closer to the goal. Motion creates momentum, and momentum reveals opportunities that standing still never could. The world rewards starters, not waiters. Your move: Leave a comment with one small action you'll take in the next 24 hours. Not a plan. An action.

"Encord is the last platform that you'll ever need to get your data ready for AI" 👇 Great video unpacking the value that Encord brings in helping companies manage, curate and annotate their data as well as analyse multi-modal AI models in one place. It also talks to the problems that technology companies have in building their own AI models based on poor data governance. Interesting to also note that 3️⃣ of our bootcamp alumni have recently landed jobs there, demonstrating that AI infrastructure companies are becoming foundational to this new wave of technology + they're hiring smart, commercially-savvy business school talent. Congrats Encord 🔥

How to become a Product Manager ➡ We've refreshed our "How To Get Into Product Management guide" with more profiles of bootcamp alumni who are now working in product. This week, say 👋 to Varun Bakshi, MBA graduate from Imperial College Business School and Product Manager at Amazon. Key takeaways: 🚚 Amazon is solving big, challenging problems that are not immediately obvious from the outside. Varun, for instance, helps them optimise their large-scale transportation network. 👣 Often the best ways into Product is to sidestep from another business function you already have experience in (e.g. Varun talks about his move from marketing). In our Product Bootcamp, we call this the "PM Two-Step". 🧠 Product means different things to different companies. Varun's tip is to "understand what product looks & feels like at the organisation" ✍ Varun calls out the ability to think and write as being key to being a great product manager. Amazon is also famous for putting lots of emphasis on writing (see PRFAQs). You can read Varun's full responses in our guide (see comment in the first link). cc: Chloe Chambers, Melody Goh FHEA

🔁 LLMs + Proprietary Data = Edge 🚀 In one of the modules of the Digital Bootcamp, we unpack what GenAI is, how it works and how it's impacting business. The last point we make is that companies that combine the power of Large Language Models with their own proprietary data will be the companies that fully exploit the AI opportunity. In this fascinating interview, Scale AI's founder explains where he's taking his highly cash-generative business (they currently label and annotate data to train AI models) ⤵ "Our responsibility is to utilise the exact same infrastructure and data factory that we've built to support enterprises in their own journey to make use of all their proprietary data towards building customised, specialised agents for their own business". To watch the full interview, click the link in the first comment.

In our Product Bootcamp, we talk about the power of visioning 🌟 Visioning is the act of developing a plan, goal, or vision for the future and it's often what separates winning product teams from losing product teams. 💫 A vision energises employees, investors and customers around a product's magic. One of the best examples of a well articulated vision is Steve Jobs when he rejoined the company after being ousted ⤵ A lot of people forget that Apple was down in the dumps at one point. So down that there was talk of bankruptcy and Microsoft had to bail them out. In this snippet of an interview with Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, he explains how people advised him against joining Apple, but it was Steve's "twinkle in the eye" and his incredible product vision that ultimately convinced him to join. Link to the full interview in the first comment.

➡ We've just updated our Guide To Understanding Generative AI 🎇 Scroll through or click to download to discover: ▶ the 7️⃣ ways GenAI is affecting business ▶ the 3️⃣ main technological building blocks that make it happen ▶ 6️⃣ cutting-edge AI companies that bootcamp attendees either work at or have founded including Claudio Randolph, Strategic Project Manager @ Qantev. 💡 Qantev have just raised a further 30M from Blossom Capital to revolutionise the claims process and fraud detection within health and life insurance by using AI to automate the decision-making process through the claims journey. 

"The most profound shift in technology that humanity will ever see" - Google's CEO. Yesterday's interview with Sundar Pichai on the David Rubenstein Show was 🔥 Five key insights ⤵ 1️⃣ He calls Artificial Intelligence "The most profound shift in technology that humanity will ever see", which is some statement to make given the pace of technological change. 2️⃣ He says that Google's core design in promoting the diversity of the web and enabling users to navigate it seamlessly (remember Google's mission has not changed to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") will not change. Why does this matter? He was making the point that Google will still hand users off to websites rather than keep them on Google via its AI Overviews and it will also continue to embed search ads against search queries with commercial intent (no surprise there given Paid Search ads are still the cash cow). 3️⃣ He speaks of the growing competitive threat to Google from Amazon and TikTok on its search and advertising businesses. Although this is in part to ward off legal claims of its monopolistic position, it also speaks to how the landscape is shifting around Google. 4️⃣ Alphabet as a holding company is still relevant. He referenced their other "big bet" companies such as Waymo (autonomous self-driving cars), Wing (Drone Delivery) and Calico (Long term drug discovery) as being strategically relevant, despite them all being capital intensive and years away from turning a profit. 5️⃣ When asked why he applied to Google back in 2004, he said "I loved tech and loved their search engine but I had ideas for how I could improve the product". This echoes our advice in our bootcamps around preparing for any interview with a bank of "Sit Up Statements" - little snippets of infomation or ideas that make interviewers "sit up and take notice". 📺 To watch the full interview, click the link in the first comment.