Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Billions of dollars gone!
|
Unless you live in a rabbit hole, you know what recently happened with OpenAI. Yes, the company that created the famous, beloved, and vilified ChatGPT. Well… a Chinese company unexpectedly emerged with its own AI, Deepseek, which has shaken up the market and the industry. It offers the equivalent of the most advanced ChatGPT model but it’s free—at least for now. And not only that, Deepseek made its code open-source, making it accessible to anyone who wants to use or improve it. You’ll be able to do much more with less. How do you feel about? Still no bells… Well.. after the announcement, nearly all major tech companies saw their stock prices plummet. Nvidia, for example, the company that manufactures the chips used to build and train AI models, lost nearly $600 billion in market value in a single day. And this is the most important lesson hidden in this situation: Even the biggest, most famous, and wealthiest company can fall overnight. Even if it was the first to market. Not because they’re doing anything wrong. Simply because the moment your offering becomes a standardized product, a commodity within everyone's reach... You’re destined to be overtaken by a competitor sooner or later. There will always be someone who can commoditize your product even further, lower the price (or eliminate it entirely), and offer the same features as you. And this will happen to your company, or to you. Yes, to you. As a worker, as a professional… if you don’t keep evolving, improving, learning and getting far away of being a commodity… sooner or later… you’ll lose. Do you want to know anything different today? Here you are my pick.
PD 1: If you liked this email, don't keep it in secret and forward it to a friend. They will thank you enormously one day. PD 2: If somebody has sent you this email and you want to receive emails like this yourself, visit vicentevalencia.com PD 3: If you want unsubscribe, click the link below. |
Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
You arrive to the room like a child with new shoes. First project meeting. Excited. Then a guy with not much hair says… “The SPV will pass the risk down through back-to-back contracts, subject to equivalent project relief and the lenders’ step-in rights.” You nod. Of course you nod. You have a degree. Twenty years of experience. And a LinkedIn profile that says “strategic leader.” You cannot possibly ask what the hell that means. So you write “back-to-back” in your notebook. Twice. Must be...
It’s election time in New Zealand. And you know… Governments love infrastructure pipelines. Pipelines create jobs. Especially for consultants preparing slides about the pipeline. I won’t talk about NZ… today… or maybe I do later… Let’s talk about Nigeria. Yes… Nigeria has been building PPP pipelines for years. On steroids. And you know what happens if you abuse… Well… In 2020, its infrastructure commission reported adding 158 projects. Yes… projects… not speed tickets. This year, the...
Every crossing of a street, I tell my four-year-old son: “Check both sides before crossing.” He normally looks at it for two seconds and says: “Done.” This is not quality assurance. It is confidence. A simple process. One person does the work. Another person verifies it. Apparently, this governance innovation had not yet reached Edinburgh, in the “Ununited Kingdom”. In 2001, the City entered into a 30-year PPP to deliver and maintain a group of new and refurbished schools. Seventeen of them....