Four For Friday | June 6, 2025

LF176 | Google's 'digital portrait', Mary Meeker's Tech Bible / Doorstop, 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship, golf courses and Parkinson's + DontBuildThis

Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.

1. Google and BBC launch digital twins

Google is offering to create a digital ‘portrait’ of you (clearly a word that performed better in focus groups that ‘twin’), which can then tell people what they need to know about you and your expertise. The big question here is - who owns the data, the metadata and the value it creates? I’m not sure that folks will be over the moon giving yet more of their insights and profiles to Google, but props to them for testing the idea.

The BBC has taken a different approach - building a digital twin of national treasure Agatha Christie, who will help you write better. (H/t to Adam for the links)

Prifina promises a more transparent approach around data ownership, saying that the user should have full ownership and control over their data.

Still early in the evolution of the space, but I’m really interested in novel distributed ownership models (e.g. blockchain-based) that allow me to have genuine control and benefit from my data - whether it’s my (ever fascinating…) thoughts on ecosystem strategy, weekly purchases or biomarkers. On that front, interesting to see Brazil roll out a pilot (of US tech) to allow people to monetize their own data.

The So What? Expect to see a ton of digital twins coming to the market and offering to ingest every item of your data. Be sure to ask who owns, controls and benefits from the data you give it.

2. Mary Meeker’s latest tome on AI

Mary Meeker is one of the foremost chroniclers of tech landscape, and has just dropped a BIG tech report with a focus on AI. \

This is the first such report since 2019, and so is getting quite a bit of attention. Worth diving into directly as there are so many interesting nuggets, before having your LLM summarize it for you.

Of the many charts, I liked this one - shows how in just a few months the latest models are more often than not taken for humans. Time to redefine the Turing test.

Martha Lane Fox’s take on this was ‘Acceleration alone cannot be the goal. Widespread, meaningful usage must be.’ We need to harness this stuff for society, not the billionaires.

The So What? Trying to keep up with - or predict - the cutting edge of AI is a mug’s game. But speaking to real people and falling in love with the problems to solve, then reading a report like this every month or so, is probably the way to do it.

3. Disciplined Entrepreneurship

A structured 24-step process out of MIT for making entrepreneurship work. This lends itself to a coach-in-a-bottle model to provide feedback for startups.

The 24 steps, presented by theme are:

Theme 1: Who is your customer?

1. Market segmentation

2. Select a beachhead market

3. Build an end user profile

4. Calculate the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the beachhead market

5. Profile the persona for the beachhead market

6. Full life cycle use case

7. High-level product specification

8. Quantify the value proposition

Theme 2: What can you do for your customer?

9. Identify your next 10 customers

10. Define your core

11. Chart your competitive position

Theme 3: How does your customer acquire your product?

12. Determine the customer's decision-making unit (DMU)

13. Map the process to acquire a paying customer

Theme 4: How do you make money off your product?

14. Calculate the TAM size for follow-on markets

15. Design a business model

16. Set your pricing framework

Theme 5: How do you design and build your product?

17. Calculate the lifetime value (LTV) of an acquired customer

18. Map the sales process

19. Calculate the cost of customer acquisition (COCA)

20. Identify key assumptions

21. Test key assumptions

Theme 6: How do you scale your business?

22. Define the minimum viable business product (MVBP)

23. Show that the dogs will eat the dog food (i.e., get paying customers)

24. Develop a product plan

The So What? A useful resource for anyone building a business - starting to move the art to a science, while still leaving some room for art.

4. Live near a golf course, get Parkinson’s…?

Fascinating research highlighting the link between Parkinson’s disease and proximity to golf courses.

While you would have assumed that green open spaces and lots of physical activity would reduce the incidence of the disease, it seems likely that the pesticides they use in industrial quantities to keep the grass looking good is likely triggering the disease.

This is a ‘dose-response’ relationship, meaning the closer you live, the higher it gets, so easier to suggest it’s causation not just correlation.

The So What? We’re increasingly discovering new drivers of human longevity have been under our noses and ignored for too long. A place based approach is essential for healthy aging.

Bonus AI tool: Dontbuildthis

If you know a budding founder (who has thick skin) feel free to share with them this rather spicey Gen AI analsysis site: DontBuildThis. It assesses startups concepts, finding them almost universally lacking, but uses the type of language that founders may hear from a grumpy (or cautious) VC. It also has some suggestions at the end, which can be helpful. Better to be flamed by a random bot than by a funder in a meeting room). Enjoy.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome.

- Stephen