8 ms·

How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

154 points by zt 1y ago

MPSFounder 1y ago
Author is not consistent. He mentions in 25 cases, the firm hiring McKinsey did not know the answer beforehand. Yet, Leap is based on firms already knowing the answer. The reason McKinsey is hired is to avoid internal conflicts over which manager takes the reigns. I doubt McKinsey is providing solutions to these industries (as in, introducing a product that was not pitched internally by someone already. In fact, in most cases, a manager will pitch the solution and McKinsey's job is purely finding the right managers to leave this internal "startup" to). Should that be the case, I would love to be proven wrong. However, every consultant I had met is no engineer or tech leader. They are merely consultants, restructuring the answers in ways that avoid conflicts within established giants. Most of them are Ivy League graduates that never worked in the technical field (got hired at Bain or McKinsey fresh out of school). Often we would make up stacks to demonstrate how ignorant they can be of technology. Managers and business people love McKinsey. As an engineer, I have not met any tech founder or technical engineer that esteemed the field (just listen to Steve Jobs' opinion on consulting). I attribute the mess that Google is under Sundar to McKinsey (not even mentioning the Opioid crisis where their hands are stained too). The redeeming factor is the author describes them as the enemy and is at least honest about his reasons for joining (stability and established resume name)
- throwanem 1y ago
  "As an engineer," you've probably yet to realize "technical cofounder" is p97 a polite way to say "second-class citizen." You get more equity than a "founding engineer," I hope. So there's that.
  - MPSFounder 1y ago
    Here's a tip to every reader. If your founders or co-founders are not technical (and never have been) and are pitching stacks using buzzwords, run. Equity is worthless if the startup goes under
    - throwanem 1y ago
      Here's another. Exit and product are totally orthogonal. I would rather work for someone honest than for a bullshit artist. But I wouldn't necessarily decline to work for the world's best bullshit artist. Just that you want to be very sure you know who at the table is the sucker.
    - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
      Non-technical folks (business/marketing/artistic/bullshit types) can be founders of tech companies, but there needs to be significant tech prescence at the top. I think as a general rule, at least a third of the equity needs to be devoted to technical folks if the company wants to succeed. Ideally you get someone whose good at both, or at least competent at one and really good in the other, such as Jobs or Gates.
      - MPSFounder 1y ago
        The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leadership consists of Cook, Luca, Schiller, Eddy Cue, Williams, Ternus and Craig (they are the ones that effectively make the big decisions). Craig and Ternus are the only "engineers", and neither of them have been engineering first. This is not a founders story, but I am trying to highlight how non-technical folks will put in the decision making seat non-technical folks, which will harm your product in the long run. You can be the best engineer out there. If you report to someone who holds the reigns and is not technical, you are facing a tough road. Of course, there will be exceptions. However, this is rather the norm, and in startup culture, where the odds are already stacked against you, I'd advise against it.
        mannyv 1y ago
        Actually, this is wrong depending on the company and what the specific situation is. Look at DEC, a classic engineering company failure. DEC failed because they were led by engineers who didn't understand the market. It apparently was a great place to work, because they were so NIH that they built everything from scratch. Then look at Intel, a company that is in the process of failing because they listened to their customers too much. None of their customers wanted GPUs, or mobile chips, or power savings - until they did. By that time Intel was already behind the curve. Then look at Microsoft under Ballmer - a company that probably illustrates the point you're trying to make. But then they won with Nadella, luckily. Apple is a bit different and a bad example because unlike other companies they attempt to define the future. Most companies aren't in a position to try, much less succeed, at this.
- greatgib 1y ago
  As having been through consulting a little bit, I can confirm that most of the times you pay a very expensive price for inexperienced and incompetent consulting work most of the time. It is not malevolence but more a deficiency by design. First as you said, most consultants are not real "leaders" or "tech leaders" and when you start to get experience, you leave consulting or you raise the hierarchical ladder to become a more senior manager, that spend more time finding contracts, negotiating, dealing with the customer proposals and renewal than doing the actual job. In the end, you have juniors that are doing the tasks pretending to be sector experts or like the guy in the article, you are propulsed "CEO" of the big entity of a big corp just after 4 or 5 years of basic consultant experience, not even having worked in real non-conducting job. In the end, when you buy a mission to such a firm, most of the cost goes to structural costs and daily rate of a chain of useless parasitic executives like directors, executive partners, vice president, that will spend 10 minutes per month reviewing slides on the project. The consulting doing the job will be paid at most the double of what a good freelance can expect. And regarding the spirit, the fun thing is that even when you do bad or evilish things, there is kind of a mental block brain process that makes you truly believe that you are doing an useful and much needed work. Despite it not the case. In my own case, often I had this bad feeling deep in. A background that a customer that we were negotiating a mission for millions, could have just hired a decent developer for just a few thousands euros and have quite profited from a most good and successful system. But like, in Matrix, when you are inside the system, it is hard to consider things outside the box. In the same way that again in the example of the blog post, I'm quite sure that the big company would been able to find hundreds of existing employees that would have fitted the bill well and better for a lot cheaper.
JohnMakin 1y ago
This reads like a linkedin post and I'm only commenting because I'd like to hear more about the 2nd type of big-org problems he faced that he felt weren't fixable, and why - but instead got a pitch to his new startup, which I guess should've been expected from the title. Just hoped for more substance.
SoftTalker 1y ago
I was having trouble connecting the article to the title. Who is the "enemy" getting "known" in this piece?
- davidjfelix 1y ago
  My understanding was that the "enemy" was McKinsey, a firm that has a reputation to me as being an expensive consulting firm filled with MBA types who frequently are hired by companies. My understanding of this reputation is: This often happens at the detriment of either product quality or employee satisfaction. It's debatable if they actually have a reputation of providing value. I think short term? Maybe, albeit expensive. Long term? I'd say no.
Oras 1y ago
> Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. So 3 years at McKinsey taught OP the corporate BS. That paragraph doesn't say anything useful.
- jdbernard 1y ago
  Yes it does, it's just dressed up in corporate speak: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We think we can be bigger (more customers, more sales, more money) than all existing players. > We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We're looking to eclipse the population of any one country and we're going to use something like Bitcoin to side-step national currencies (and maybe also to avoid existing regulatory structure, not clear from the ambiguous language). > We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. We believe we can automate or use AI to eliminate the need for people to actually support these billion customers. All three of those are very bold statements/goals.
  - antihipocrat 1y ago
    Unless they are planning on sending AI powered robots to attend court cases and prepare submissions they're going to need to hire or retain at least 100 lawyers for an insurance company serving that many customers.
- mannyv 1y ago
  There are different metrics that people use to say they're the biggest. Some of them off the top of my head are number customers, number of active policies, premium amount, assets under management, time to claim resolution, etc. He's talking to business people who understand the insurance market.
throw10920 1y ago
Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, I see one very concrete moral problem: that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human, and forcing all interaction with the company to go through AI. That, to me, is deeply disturbing, and very very difficult to justify.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  I don't think there an ethical responsibility to worrying about your competitor's labor. That would lead to stagnation and it's own sort of ethical issues.
  - John23832 1y ago
    You misread. The poster is speaking about the ethical handling of customer service.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      This comment is replying to the sentiment: > Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, […] I’m pretty sure. Although, the original comment was basically putting that issue aside, so I’m not sure what there is to say about it.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        You got that right, and yes, I was putting that issue aside, although my counterpoint to GGP argument would be "the ethical issues aren't from the competitor's perspective, it's from the perspective of the whole workforce, industry, and/or economy as a whole".
comrade1234 1y ago
My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards. The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife still feels bad for it but still… Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.
- yodsanklai 1y ago
  McKinsey employees are people too
- biker142541 1y ago
  Genuinely funny. Had to once interface with a small team from Deloitte on a project, and pushed hard during an early meeting for them to outline the problems and scope. Just complete incompetence... I didn't make anyone cry, but definitely squirm a lot. Just asking questions about their understanding, process to close gap of understanding, and project management plans were enough to make clear to the main executive stakeholder on our end that this was going to be a trainwreck. They were fired shortly after.
- shitpostbot 1y ago
  [dead]
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  I don't care if you went to Ivy League and graduated at the top of your class, I really don't get WTF someone whose life experience has been almost exclusively in school really knows running about business. Get at least a few years work experience and call me. Or alternatively, start your own dang business if you are really that smart.
  - guywithahat 1y ago
    The whole business is nonsensical. The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain, a recent Harvard grad is useless. From what I've heard, tons of their consultants are young people with minimal real industry experience
Fomite 1y ago
"I wanted to derisk my resume by working somewhere with high signaling." You can take the founder out of a consultancy, but you can't take the consultancy out of the founder.
- account-5 1y ago
  Without googling I have no clue what that sentence means: "I wanted to derisk my resume by working somewhere with high signaling."
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    It means he wanted somewhere impressive on his resume so people trusted him more.
    - jjeaff 1y ago
      In my opinion, this is an example of using fancy words to explain something simple that not only hides the meaning, but is actually less precise. The use of de-risk just doesn't work in the context of a resume. It's not "risky" to have a less impressive resume. it's just less impressive.
      - Fomite 1y ago
        Agreed. "I wanted to buff my resume."
johnobrien1010 1y ago
Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/ https://meanwhile.bm/ For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed. Also, the fact that the disclosure seems to limit sales to being only occurring in Bermuda seems intentional. I suspect that this product would be highly illegal in most if not all US states, so they must offer this only for sale in Bermuda to avoid that issue.
- n_ary 1y ago
  Did I read that right? Sam Altman is funding this? If true, I am having some new perspective him.
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    I assume from your comment that you haven’t heard of WorldCoin, also funded by Altman. https://world.org/ https://world.org/
- verall 1y ago
  I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance: > You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - tecleandor 1y ago
    Oooooouch, I missed that when checking their site, and that's extra shady. Especially when at the footing of the page you can see: Neither Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited nor its affiliates Meanwhile Services (Bermuda) Limited and Meanwhile Incorporated, are lawyers or accountants. They do not provide legal or tax advice. You are wholly responsible for obtaining your own legal and tax advice. And everything incorporated in Bermuda, and regulated only by Bermuda laws, makes it very impractical as an insurance (go and claim whatever you want against them from your country, I don't think it will be easy) and very obviously a tax evasion thing.
TrackerFF 1y ago
In my home country (Norway), I've met plenty of startup founders that come from MBB consulting. Actually a pretty "normal" path here, compared to jumping straight into entrepreneurship out of college. But that also has something to do with how risk-averse investors here are, compared to the US (no one here is going to give inexperienced college kids a bunch of money, unless they've proven themselves to be bona fide serious people) - and the fact that consultants actively get to see market needs in real time, and in positions where other external people might not.
rafelolszewski 1y ago
[dead]
mentalgear 1y ago
Thought :know your enemy: would refer to the corporation investigative "When McKinsey comes to town" book (McKinsey's major involvements in lobbying for tobacco involvement, Opioid epidemic, and many more crimes left mostly unpunished).
Lienetic 1y ago
I was confused by this as ChatGPT launched in Nov 2022 and had tens of millions of users by end of 2022. > And though when we started our business in 2023 (ChatGPT wasn’t out yet), you could begin to feel that something like that was possible in a way it wasn’t before. perhaps a typo in year?
georgeburdell 1y ago
Not responding about the article, but I remember interviewing with McKinsey as a graduating PhD. I had just passed their test and was going through the case study interview and I got paired with a PhD in physics from MIT. I think the study was something about cognac sales and I just got disgusted with the waste of training and talent, and after I got home from the airport that evening I pulled out of the interview process even though I had no other employment options at the time. Somewhat ironically, over the past 20 years I’ve come to reject PhD-type career tracks after seeing how much PhD overproduction there is and how my older colleagues only had a BS or MS. These days, I yearn to leave my Big Tech job to start a “boring” business. Right now I’m taking Accounting 101 at a local university to understand business financials better.
whistle650 1y ago
Looking at the home page of Meanwhile only made me think of how life insurance is such a different thing than, say, a mortgage. With life insurance, counterparty risk matters. You don't care about your mortgage counterparty. I'm not going to buy life insurance from an insurer with Youtube videos of Anthony Pompliano on their home page. Know your enemy.
mettamage 1y ago
> I learned deeper truths about where startups can win and compete. Now that I'm working at a big organization (a Fortune 500 company), I can relate. I'm by far the most innovative person in my team and I'm being held down because I'm not doing my role (as I'm not a dev but a data analyst at the moment). If I'd be doing my role however, then we wouldn't be innovating and the C-suite wants us to innovate with AI. I'm the only one at my department that can create actual AI automations. And the IT department is basically stripped out by upper management. If anyone wants an actual dev building AI automations and think how we can disrupt with the state of the art, my email is in my profile.
throwaway743 1y ago
McKinsey should not be anyone's role model.
w10-1 1y ago
Key claim: "disruption" is impossible for BigCompany. SmallCo can do it, but only if they both (1) have something technically hard to replicate, and (2) target a marketing niche that is a irremediable blind spot for BigCompany's. Since his venture now is life insurance, Geico is likely the comparable case in point. I really think every founder (and startup worker) needs to take seriously the marketing side of the business, and not just believe that new technology will win. (While I, too, am allergic to bitcoin scams, given increasing levels of political corruption monkeying with markets, rates, and regulation, I can also see it as an enticing alternative for those looking to get long-term investments off the dollar. For insurance, the main question is, will the money be there and be made available? Having seen even highly-regulated pensions fail (without federal insurance recourse in the case of religious hospital behemoths), I can see how technical guarantees independent of regulation or law could be compelling.)
nforgerit 1y ago
Oh McKinsey had a name for that program ("Leap"). I once worked at a "Telco Enterprise Startup" in Berlin founded by them. They essentially lied about any anticipated KPI potentials and let their "tech" people put together a 15k EUR/month (before public release) platform on AWS which was such a pile of mess, it made the second year's CTO start from scratch. After some heavy arguments because of their poor performance, McKinsey agreed to let some "non-technical" people work there for a couple of months for free. All arguments you'd had with the McKinsey "Engineers" felt like talking to AWS Sales, they had barely any technical insights but a catalog of "pre-made solutions" to choose from.
phendrenad2 1y ago
Valuable article, it's rare to see a glimpse into McKinsey in normal human language. The fact that the company has become a sort of pseudo-VC (mentorship but not financing) for small teams within megacorps is interesting. I wonder why large corps find it so difficult to innovate. I think that they become somewhat "load-bearing" in society and the lines between the company and the market begin to blur. Any change the company makes causes a misalignment because they shaped the market to fit themselves.
vonnik 1y ago
this is a great piece! one nitpick: > And though when we started our business in 2023 (ChatGPT wasn’t out yet), you could begin to feel that something like that was possible in a way it wasn’t before. ChatGPT launched in late 2022...
- zt 1y ago
  Fixed in the article now -- started the company in Jan 2022
tiffanyh 1y ago
> Meanwhile: to break into a highly-regulated, commoditized market like insurance, you need both a truly differentiated product that incumbents can't easily replicate and an associated distribution strategy that leverages their blind spots. Having worked in highly regulated industries, I’ve learned that the best way to disrupt incumbents is by creating a product that assumes more business risk than is typically accepted. Large, regulated companies are extremely risk-averse—so if you can take on that risk in a smart, innovative way, you’ll win.
- Alpha3031 1y ago
  What if you take that risk by putting "crypto" in it? I think it might work out for our founder here but I am not so optimistic about the results for any of the poor schmucks suckered into this scheme.
dzink 1y ago
The engineer in me immediately looks for ways to map out how tax avoidance via crypto trading on life insurance funds via a Bermuda company can possibly go wrong. Insurance has a nice long term cash flow that has proved very sweet for Berkshire Hathaway, and investment on top of that gets perks for the insurance. However Crypto, which has liquidity issues and is heavily scammed/stolen would benefit far more than the users of business. The holdings would stay for decades, allowing arbitrage of the main company with user investments. If there is a leak or a collapse of the crypto, the customers won’t know it until they can’t get their funds back, but since AI is handling the claims, they may never even find out the real reason they can’t get their money back. And since it’s life insurance, the buyer might never find out, while their descendants or loved ones may not know how to deal with it or be plenty confused by the lack of customer service. Very novel scheme.
MR4D 1y ago
Lots of people are misreading this post. The key phrase is LIFE Insurance, not HEALTH Insurance! They are vastly different markets. You don’t deny claims for life insurance as companies would do for health insurance. It’s a very different set of circumstances to have to deny life insurance.
niemandhier 1y ago
Insurance business is mostly about hoarding and investing money so you can actually pay when you have to. Unless you can solve that part of the problem as well as the big players, you will run into problems at some point, using extrem value theory you can even estimate when.
- kwere 1y ago
  >Insurance business is mostly about hoarding and investing money so you can actually pay when you have to. In Crypto this mean rugpull time
account-5 1y ago
This persons vision of their company sounds like a nightmare I'd pay more to avoid.
liampulles 1y ago
My experience working at a consulting company was that we were a software development agency with change management. It can work well. However as a consultancy, the incentive is also to continually develop our integration into your organization so that you continue to need us. Very much a symbiotic vs parasitic relationship.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

154 points by zt 1y ago

Author is not consistent. He mentions in 25 cases, the firm hiring McKinsey did not know the answer beforehand. Yet, Leap is based on firms already knowing the answer. The reason McKinsey is hired is to avoid internal conflicts over which manager takes the reigns. I doubt McKinsey is providing solutions to these industries (as in, introducing a product that was not pitched internally by someone already. In fact, in most cases, a manager will pitch the solution and McKinsey's job is purely finding the right managers to leave this internal "startup" to). Should that be the case, I would love to be proven wrong. However, every consultant I had met is no engineer or tech leader. They are merely consultants, restructuring the answers in ways that avoid conflicts within established giants. Most of them are Ivy League graduates that never worked in the technical field (got hired at Bain or McKinsey fresh out of school). Often we would make up stacks to demonstrate how ignorant they can be of technology. Managers and business people love McKinsey. As an engineer, I have not met any tech founder or technical engineer that esteemed the field (just listen to Steve Jobs' opinion on consulting). I attribute the mess that Google is under Sundar to McKinsey (not even mentioning the Opioid crisis where their hands are stained too). The redeeming factor is the author describes them as the enemy and is at least honest about his reasons for joining (stability and established resume name)

throwanem 1y ago
"As an engineer," you've probably yet to realize "technical cofounder" is p97 a polite way to say "second-class citizen." You get more equity than a "founding engineer," I hope. So there's that.
- MPSFounder 1y ago
  Here's a tip to every reader. If your founders or co-founders are not technical (and never have been) and are pitching stacks using buzzwords, run. Equity is worthless if the startup goes under
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Here's another. Exit and product are totally orthogonal. I would rather work for someone honest than for a bullshit artist. But I wouldn't necessarily decline to work for the world's best bullshit artist. Just that you want to be very sure you know who at the table is the sucker.
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Non-technical folks (business/marketing/artistic/bullshit types) can be founders of tech companies, but there needs to be significant tech prescence at the top. I think as a general rule, at least a third of the equity needs to be devoted to technical folks if the company wants to succeed. Ideally you get someone whose good at both, or at least competent at one and really good in the other, such as Jobs or Gates.
    - MPSFounder 1y ago
      The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leadership consists of Cook, Luca, Schiller, Eddy Cue, Williams, Ternus and Craig (they are the ones that effectively make the big decisions). Craig and Ternus are the only "engineers", and neither of them have been engineering first. This is not a founders story, but I am trying to highlight how non-technical folks will put in the decision making seat non-technical folks, which will harm your product in the long run. You can be the best engineer out there. If you report to someone who holds the reigns and is not technical, you are facing a tough road. Of course, there will be exceptions. However, this is rather the norm, and in startup culture, where the odds are already stacked against you, I'd advise against it.
      - mannyv 1y ago
        Actually, this is wrong depending on the company and what the specific situation is. Look at DEC, a classic engineering company failure. DEC failed because they were led by engineers who didn't understand the market. It apparently was a great place to work, because they were so NIH that they built everything from scratch. Then look at Intel, a company that is in the process of failing because they listened to their customers too much. None of their customers wanted GPUs, or mobile chips, or power savings - until they did. By that time Intel was already behind the curve. Then look at Microsoft under Ballmer - a company that probably illustrates the point you're trying to make. But then they won with Nadella, luckily. Apple is a bit different and a bad example because unlike other companies they attempt to define the future. Most companies aren't in a position to try, much less succeed, at this.
greatgib 1y ago
As having been through consulting a little bit, I can confirm that most of the times you pay a very expensive price for inexperienced and incompetent consulting work most of the time. It is not malevolence but more a deficiency by design. First as you said, most consultants are not real "leaders" or "tech leaders" and when you start to get experience, you leave consulting or you raise the hierarchical ladder to become a more senior manager, that spend more time finding contracts, negotiating, dealing with the customer proposals and renewal than doing the actual job. In the end, you have juniors that are doing the tasks pretending to be sector experts or like the guy in the article, you are propulsed "CEO" of the big entity of a big corp just after 4 or 5 years of basic consultant experience, not even having worked in real non-conducting job. In the end, when you buy a mission to such a firm, most of the cost goes to structural costs and daily rate of a chain of useless parasitic executives like directors, executive partners, vice president, that will spend 10 minutes per month reviewing slides on the project. The consulting doing the job will be paid at most the double of what a good freelance can expect. And regarding the spirit, the fun thing is that even when you do bad or evilish things, there is kind of a mental block brain process that makes you truly believe that you are doing an useful and much needed work. Despite it not the case. In my own case, often I had this bad feeling deep in. A background that a customer that we were negotiating a mission for millions, could have just hired a decent developer for just a few thousands euros and have quite profited from a most good and successful system. But like, in Matrix, when you are inside the system, it is hard to consider things outside the box. In the same way that again in the example of the blog post, I'm quite sure that the big company would been able to find hundreds of existing employees that would have fitted the bill well and better for a lot cheaper.

JohnMakin 1y ago

This reads like a linkedin post and I'm only commenting because I'd like to hear more about the 2nd type of big-org problems he faced that he felt weren't fixable, and why - but instead got a pitch to his new startup, which I guess should've been expected from the title. Just hoped for more substance.

SoftTalker 1y ago

I was having trouble connecting the article to the title. Who is the "enemy" getting "known" in this piece?

davidjfelix 1y ago
My understanding was that the "enemy" was McKinsey, a firm that has a reputation to me as being an expensive consulting firm filled with MBA types who frequently are hired by companies. My understanding of this reputation is: This often happens at the detriment of either product quality or employee satisfaction. It's debatable if they actually have a reputation of providing value. I think short term? Maybe, albeit expensive. Long term? I'd say no.

Oras 1y ago

> Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. So 3 years at McKinsey taught OP the corporate BS. That paragraph doesn't say anything useful.

jdbernard 1y ago
Yes it does, it's just dressed up in corporate speak: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We think we can be bigger (more customers, more sales, more money) than all existing players. > We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We're looking to eclipse the population of any one country and we're going to use something like Bitcoin to side-step national currencies (and maybe also to avoid existing regulatory structure, not clear from the ambiguous language). > We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. We believe we can automate or use AI to eliminate the need for people to actually support these billion customers. All three of those are very bold statements/goals.
- antihipocrat 1y ago
  Unless they are planning on sending AI powered robots to attend court cases and prepare submissions they're going to need to hire or retain at least 100 lawyers for an insurance company serving that many customers.
mannyv 1y ago
There are different metrics that people use to say they're the biggest. Some of them off the top of my head are number customers, number of active policies, premium amount, assets under management, time to claim resolution, etc. He's talking to business people who understand the insurance market.

throw10920 1y ago

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, I see one very concrete moral problem: that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human, and forcing all interaction with the company to go through AI. That, to me, is deeply disturbing, and very very difficult to justify.

DiggyJohnson 1y ago
I don't think there an ethical responsibility to worrying about your competitor's labor. That would lead to stagnation and it's own sort of ethical issues.
- John23832 1y ago
  You misread. The poster is speaking about the ethical handling of customer service.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    This comment is replying to the sentiment: > Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, […] I’m pretty sure. Although, the original comment was basically putting that issue aside, so I’m not sure what there is to say about it.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      You got that right, and yes, I was putting that issue aside, although my counterpoint to GGP argument would be "the ethical issues aren't from the competitor's perspective, it's from the perspective of the whole workforce, industry, and/or economy as a whole".

comrade1234 1y ago

My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards. The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife still feels bad for it but still… Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.

yodsanklai 1y ago
McKinsey employees are people too
biker142541 1y ago
Genuinely funny. Had to once interface with a small team from Deloitte on a project, and pushed hard during an early meeting for them to outline the problems and scope. Just complete incompetence... I didn't make anyone cry, but definitely squirm a lot. Just asking questions about their understanding, process to close gap of understanding, and project management plans were enough to make clear to the main executive stakeholder on our end that this was going to be a trainwreck. They were fired shortly after.
shitpostbot 1y ago
[dead]
SJC_Hacker 1y ago
I don't care if you went to Ivy League and graduated at the top of your class, I really don't get WTF someone whose life experience has been almost exclusively in school really knows running about business. Get at least a few years work experience and call me. Or alternatively, start your own dang business if you are really that smart.
- guywithahat 1y ago
  The whole business is nonsensical. The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain, a recent Harvard grad is useless. From what I've heard, tons of their consultants are young people with minimal real industry experience

Fomite 1y ago

"I wanted to derisk my resume by working somewhere with high signaling." You can take the founder out of a consultancy, but you can't take the consultancy out of the founder.

account-5 1y ago
Without googling I have no clue what that sentence means: "I wanted to derisk my resume by working somewhere with high signaling."
- IshKebab 1y ago
  It means he wanted somewhere impressive on his resume so people trusted him more.
  - jjeaff 1y ago
    In my opinion, this is an example of using fancy words to explain something simple that not only hides the meaning, but is actually less precise. The use of de-risk just doesn't work in the context of a resume. It's not "risky" to have a less impressive resume. it's just less impressive.
    - Fomite 1y ago
      Agreed. "I wanted to buff my resume."

johnobrien1010 1y ago

Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/ https://meanwhile.bm/ For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed. Also, the fact that the disclosure seems to limit sales to being only occurring in Bermuda seems intentional. I suspect that this product would be highly illegal in most if not all US states, so they must offer this only for sale in Bermuda to avoid that issue.

n_ary 1y ago
Did I read that right? Sam Altman is funding this? If true, I am having some new perspective him.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I assume from your comment that you haven’t heard of WorldCoin, also funded by Altman. https://world.org/ https://world.org/
verall 1y ago
I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance: > You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tecleandor 1y ago
  Oooooouch, I missed that when checking their site, and that's extra shady. Especially when at the footing of the page you can see: Neither Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited nor its affiliates Meanwhile Services (Bermuda) Limited and Meanwhile Incorporated, are lawyers or accountants. They do not provide legal or tax advice. You are wholly responsible for obtaining your own legal and tax advice. And everything incorporated in Bermuda, and regulated only by Bermuda laws, makes it very impractical as an insurance (go and claim whatever you want against them from your country, I don't think it will be easy) and very obviously a tax evasion thing.

TrackerFF 1y ago

In my home country (Norway), I've met plenty of startup founders that come from MBB consulting. Actually a pretty "normal" path here, compared to jumping straight into entrepreneurship out of college. But that also has something to do with how risk-averse investors here are, compared to the US (no one here is going to give inexperienced college kids a bunch of money, unless they've proven themselves to be bona fide serious people) - and the fact that consultants actively get to see market needs in real time, and in positions where other external people might not.

rafelolszewski 1y ago

[dead]

mentalgear 1y ago

Thought :know your enemy: would refer to the corporation investigative "When McKinsey comes to town" book (McKinsey's major involvements in lobbying for tobacco involvement, Opioid epidemic, and many more crimes left mostly unpunished).

Lienetic 1y ago

I was confused by this as ChatGPT launched in Nov 2022 and had tens of millions of users by end of 2022. > And though when we started our business in 2023 (ChatGPT wasn’t out yet), you could begin to feel that something like that was possible in a way it wasn’t before. perhaps a typo in year?

georgeburdell 1y ago

Not responding about the article, but I remember interviewing with McKinsey as a graduating PhD. I had just passed their test and was going through the case study interview and I got paired with a PhD in physics from MIT. I think the study was something about cognac sales and I just got disgusted with the waste of training and talent, and after I got home from the airport that evening I pulled out of the interview process even though I had no other employment options at the time. Somewhat ironically, over the past 20 years I’ve come to reject PhD-type career tracks after seeing how much PhD overproduction there is and how my older colleagues only had a BS or MS. These days, I yearn to leave my Big Tech job to start a “boring” business. Right now I’m taking Accounting 101 at a local university to understand business financials better.

whistle650 1y ago

Looking at the home page of Meanwhile only made me think of how life insurance is such a different thing than, say, a mortgage. With life insurance, counterparty risk matters. You don't care about your mortgage counterparty. I'm not going to buy life insurance from an insurer with Youtube videos of Anthony Pompliano on their home page. Know your enemy.

mettamage 1y ago

> I learned deeper truths about where startups can win and compete. Now that I'm working at a big organization (a Fortune 500 company), I can relate. I'm by far the most innovative person in my team and I'm being held down because I'm not doing my role (as I'm not a dev but a data analyst at the moment). If I'd be doing my role however, then we wouldn't be innovating and the C-suite wants us to innovate with AI. I'm the only one at my department that can create actual AI automations. And the IT department is basically stripped out by upper management. If anyone wants an actual dev building AI automations and think how we can disrupt with the state of the art, my email is in my profile.

throwaway743 1y ago

McKinsey should not be anyone's role model.

w10-1 1y ago

Key claim: "disruption" is impossible for BigCompany. SmallCo can do it, but only if they both (1) have something technically hard to replicate, and (2) target a marketing niche that is a irremediable blind spot for BigCompany's. Since his venture now is life insurance, Geico is likely the comparable case in point. I really think every founder (and startup worker) needs to take seriously the marketing side of the business, and not just believe that new technology will win. (While I, too, am allergic to bitcoin scams, given increasing levels of political corruption monkeying with markets, rates, and regulation, I can also see it as an enticing alternative for those looking to get long-term investments off the dollar. For insurance, the main question is, will the money be there and be made available? Having seen even highly-regulated pensions fail (without federal insurance recourse in the case of religious hospital behemoths), I can see how technical guarantees independent of regulation or law could be compelling.)

nforgerit 1y ago

Oh McKinsey had a name for that program ("Leap"). I once worked at a "Telco Enterprise Startup" in Berlin founded by them. They essentially lied about any anticipated KPI potentials and let their "tech" people put together a 15k EUR/month (before public release) platform on AWS which was such a pile of mess, it made the second year's CTO start from scratch. After some heavy arguments because of their poor performance, McKinsey agreed to let some "non-technical" people work there for a couple of months for free. All arguments you'd had with the McKinsey "Engineers" felt like talking to AWS Sales, they had barely any technical insights but a catalog of "pre-made solutions" to choose from.

phendrenad2 1y ago

Valuable article, it's rare to see a glimpse into McKinsey in normal human language. The fact that the company has become a sort of pseudo-VC (mentorship but not financing) for small teams within megacorps is interesting. I wonder why large corps find it so difficult to innovate. I think that they become somewhat "load-bearing" in society and the lines between the company and the market begin to blur. Any change the company makes causes a misalignment because they shaped the market to fit themselves.

vonnik 1y ago

this is a great piece! one nitpick: > And though when we started our business in 2023 (ChatGPT wasn’t out yet), you could begin to feel that something like that was possible in a way it wasn’t before. ChatGPT launched in late 2022...

zt 1y ago
Fixed in the article now -- started the company in Jan 2022

tiffanyh 1y ago

> Meanwhile: to break into a highly-regulated, commoditized market like insurance, you need both a truly differentiated product that incumbents can't easily replicate and an associated distribution strategy that leverages their blind spots. Having worked in highly regulated industries, I’ve learned that the best way to disrupt incumbents is by creating a product that assumes more business risk than is typically accepted. Large, regulated companies are extremely risk-averse—so if you can take on that risk in a smart, innovative way, you’ll win.

Alpha3031 1y ago
What if you take that risk by putting "crypto" in it? I think it might work out for our founder here but I am not so optimistic about the results for any of the poor schmucks suckered into this scheme.

dzink 1y ago

The engineer in me immediately looks for ways to map out how tax avoidance via crypto trading on life insurance funds via a Bermuda company can possibly go wrong. Insurance has a nice long term cash flow that has proved very sweet for Berkshire Hathaway, and investment on top of that gets perks for the insurance. However Crypto, which has liquidity issues and is heavily scammed/stolen would benefit far more than the users of business. The holdings would stay for decades, allowing arbitrage of the main company with user investments. If there is a leak or a collapse of the crypto, the customers won’t know it until they can’t get their funds back, but since AI is handling the claims, they may never even find out the real reason they can’t get their money back. And since it’s life insurance, the buyer might never find out, while their descendants or loved ones may not know how to deal with it or be plenty confused by the lack of customer service. Very novel scheme.

MR4D 1y ago

Lots of people are misreading this post. The key phrase is LIFE Insurance, not HEALTH Insurance! They are vastly different markets. You don’t deny claims for life insurance as companies would do for health insurance. It’s a very different set of circumstances to have to deny life insurance.

niemandhier 1y ago

Insurance business is mostly about hoarding and investing money so you can actually pay when you have to. Unless you can solve that part of the problem as well as the big players, you will run into problems at some point, using extrem value theory you can even estimate when.

kwere 1y ago
>Insurance business is mostly about hoarding and investing money so you can actually pay when you have to. In Crypto this mean rugpull time

account-5 1y ago

This persons vision of their company sounds like a nightmare I'd pay more to avoid.

liampulles 1y ago

My experience working at a consulting company was that we were a software development agency with change management. It can work well. However as a consultancy, the incentive is also to continually develop our integration into your organization so that you continue to need us. Very much a symbiotic vs parasitic relationship.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]