Issue No. 40

My daughter is one month into kindergarten at Alpha School, and I’m increasingly convinced that I need to enroll myself.

The curriculum feels like Tony Robbins training crossed with the principles of Marcus Aurelius: build confidence, do hard things, control your reaction, take feedback well, and don’t fall apart when something doesn’t go your way. They even hold Socratic style town halls on how to build the best culture within their school.

My favorite thing I learned this week is that they explicitly teach the kids how to lose. One of their phrases is, “failure is fuel.” Lose the game, finish it, congratulate the winner, learn something, and play again. The goal is to make failure useful.

As business people out in the world, failure is a part of daily life. We miss out on an investment; an allocator passes on our strategy; a candidate we wanted to hire goes to another firm. It is critical we learn to navigate failure as it happens, but we must also know that our ultimate success may very well stem from it.

The people I admire most care deeply about winning, but are steady enough to lose well. They learn from it and move on. Not a bad lesson for kindergarten.

— Jillian

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While I am scrambling to build new tools for our firm with AI, I took a minute to pause and assess where we stand. Within the last year, we have accelerated our AI buildout significantly. I can confidently say that I believe we are in the top 1% of financial firms usage of AI. Some stats and comments:

• All 18 employees have corporate/team Claude and OpenAI accounts
• We have 3 team members building in Claude Code and/or Codex, 2-3 being activated shortly
• The team has access to 17 Connectors (+ Github) activated in Claude connecting tools
• Six (6) organization-wide skills have been provided by 4 different team members (all staff maintain a set of personal skills)
• We released a firm-wide Pier Plugin this week
• I've been shared Artifacts from 7 different team members, though everyone maintains their own Artifacts.
• I have 5 Scheduled Tasks running. I don't have firm-wide stats on this.
• Claude is ~90% integrated into Slack. The Claude bot is active for discussion, though still struggling with a few connections. All staff can post to Slack from Claude.
• I have four (4) different agents running within my Slack. I don't have firm-wide stats, but everyone has access to those 4 and more if they desire.
• Our Infrastructure Projects notion board currently tracks 32 ongoing AI projects.
• We recently launched an internal Command Center (below) that will connect to all tools and act as a central location for all reporting. Version 2 will allow limited feedback and controls.

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- Conor