Love it. I wonder if Jeff Bezos allowed his (in)famous Narratives to be written in Markdown.
Full disclosure: I couldn’t remember the name of the mandated document — “Narrative “ — so I asked Gemini. After a summary and bullet points(!!!) of the structure, meeting process, and his rationale, it concluded with this laughable question:
Would you like me to help you draft a template for a “Six-Page Memo” or a PR/FAQ for a project you are working on?
Love your pitch, Joan, but it may be an uphill battle!
A markdown file is small, format-independent, and (this matters more than people realise) greppable.
Many years ago, when I was leading a team of software engineers on a long-forgotten project at a company that currently seems to have lost its way (Microsoft), my predecessor had a saying that he tried to reinforce in every developer’s psyche:
Grep is your best buddy.
In that context, it was simple: did you just find/fix a bug? Great! Now use grep on the source code to find all instances of the affected things (usually variable names, but whatever), and see if they need fixing too. More often than not, they absolutely did.
I’ve never had to do a pitch for a startup, but I’ve spent many hours farting around in powerpoint in the corporate world. I think the pitch.md is a great way to think about the service/value you provide, and if you do need a deck, one could plug thier pitch.md right into iA Presenter.
I think of grep as part of the “UNIX Environment” that was invented in the 70s. If you’re fluent in UNIX, then command line tools are indispensable. If you’re not a frequent command line user, then it’s not that useful if something is grepable. The command line environment is an alternative to the more modern "Desktop GUI Operating System”. There are some interesting ideas floating in the back of my mind about how to get the best of both worlds, but that’s for another day.
One of my most frequent realizations about AI (and automation in general) is that there is a trend where a human form of expression (for other humans) becomes gradually an automated tool. Think keywords in resumes. Eventually people start writing with the machine parser in mind, and it becomes less like human expression and more like writing a program to be parsed by another program. The only sane response is to stop seeing it as a form of human expression. People might still expect it to be human readable, but that’s an artifact. If AI is going to read my pitch deck, then I’ll just start with a pitch.md and have generative AI write the pitch deck.
If there are still VC’s who want to see me do performance art in real life based on an AI generated set of slides, then I can do that. Or I can hire someone who does it well. The interesting question is: Where is the human expression? How are the humans saying meaningful things to other humans?
An inevitable part of “scaling up” the way we deal with people is that we increase the computer mediation of human expression and decrease the human-to-human direct contact. Direct can also mean just electronic words as long as they’re written by a human for a specific other human and read directly by that human. An ever diminishing part of our lives fits that criteria.
Aphorism:
As Terry Pratchet’s Granny Weatherwax reminds us: Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.