Live players, the vibe shift, and the UK's most innovative company
Hello there!
Welcome to the first issue of 2025.
I hope you all had a restorative and stimulating break over Christmas.
On the menu today we have a diverse selection of mouth-watering insights, drawn from culture, business, technology and vibes.
Shall we?
Live players
I’m fascinated by the concept of ‘Live vs Dead Players’, developed by Samo Burja at Bismarck Brief.
Most large companies are not mission-driven organizations designed and led to meet a technological or logistical goal and capture profit from the value they create. Rather, they are designed, managed, and treated as financial products optimized to meet financial metrics. New and nimble companies led by live players tend to have clear and charismatic goals, whether one thinks of Amazon's "everything store," OpenAI's aim to create artificial general intelligence, or SpaceX's mission to settle Mars.
Live players are individuals or groups capable of breaking from convention, forging new paths, and tackling challenges in ways never done before. They have an outsized impact on their environment, operating from first principles, improvising, and ignoring “the way things are done” to achieve their goals. Most organizations and leaders, by contrast, are dead players—bound by scripts, norms, and the tracks laid by others, with little ability to innovate or adapt.
A favourite metaphor from Burja is that live players are society’s “stem cells.”
Our society would be brittle, dying, ageing and ossifying without occasional live players. We need stem cells or society will undergo crisis.
What makes this concept so interesting is that it doesn’t hinge on profitability or commercial success. A company can be profitable but no longer mission-driven, merely optimized for financial returns. Apple under Steve Jobs was a live player, but today—despite being the world’s most valuable company—it hasn’t significantly altered its revenue streams in over a decade. It’s now focused on maximizing value extraction rather than creating new forms of value.
Live players also aren’t necessarily virtuous. Many, like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg, are controversial and operate for-profit companies. Others, like Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy) or Katalin Karikó (mRNA pioneer), may be less polarizing. Whether you admire their missions or not, live players are genuine innovators reshaping the world.
Lastly, this lens also explains what happens in M&A. I’ve seen independent agencies and consultancies, bursting with energy and on a mission to do things differently, sell to larger firms and inevitably stagnate. It’s not just about culture versus strategy—what’s really happening is that a mission-driven organisation with agility and drive gets absorbed into a larger entity that optimises for financial metrics and predictability. The energy is drained. It becomes a dead player.
The UK’s most innovative business
Octopus Energy has become the largest domestic energy provider in Great Britain, a year after becoming the biggest electricity supplier, and only nine years after launching.
This was a great interview with the CEO of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson. The whole thing is worth a watch - an example of a charismatic mission-driven live player that is deep in the weeds of the industry he is disrupting.
Two parts of the conversation really stood out:
[1] The mind-bending scale of China’s energy transition.
59% of all the renewable energy built in the world last year was in China
54% of all the cars sold in China so far this year are electric it's it's heading to 60%
The Chinese State Oil Company predicts no filling stations will exist in China by 2045 (and this is the company that operate the filling stations).
China has electrified 30% of its economy—i.e. electricity now accounts for nearly one-third of its total energy use. In the UK, that figure is just 20%, and it hasn’t grown in the last decade.
The reason behind this massive shift is that they realise their industrial competitiveness relies on them having access to cheap electricity, and masive investment in renewables is the way to achieve that.
[2] The insanity of the UK national grid and how it holds back the transition:
National pricing is driven by the highest cost: Every half hour, the National Grid buys electricity, but all suppliers are paid the same rate as the most expensive source (usually gas peaker plants).
• This penalises renewables: Cheap wind energy is priced the same as expensive gas-fired electricity, so consumers don’t see the cost savings. Even worse, when Scotland generates surplus wind energy, turbines are paid to shut down due to grid limitations, while consumers still pay high prices driven by demand in London.
• Which means missed opportunities: A centralized system discourages building renewables near demand centres, like the southeast, where they could reduce costs.
• So the UK is falling behind globally: Countries like Spain and Greece attract industries with cheap, renewable power, while the UK misses out.
We need decentralised, localised energy pricing to reflect real supply and demand, and incentivise renewable investments closer to where energy is used, to ensure lowers costs for consumers and businesses and less emissions.
Otherwise, “there's a real risk that in 10 maybe even fewer years time we look like a middle income underdeveloped economy because we're still burning stuff”.
More companies like Octopus please!
The vibe shift
So the angry orange dude gets sworn in today, and among all the existential howls from those on the left, there has been some good commentary on the more interesting vibe shift.
Tyler Cowen was the first person I came across, last summer, to articulate a thesis that we were witnessing a genuine cultural shift, rather than a political one. Ezra Klein recently picked this up over at NYT, and added an interesting, and fairly damning, critique of the Democrats’ media strategy.
To the Trumpian right, mastering social media — and attention, generally — means being, yourself, a dominant and relentless presence on social media and YouTube and podcasts, as Trump and JD Vance and Elon Musk all are. It’s the politician-as-influencer, not the politician-as-press-shop. There are Democrats who do this too, like A.O.C., but they are rare.
Biden has no authentic relationship with social media, nor does Harris. They treat it cautiously, preferring to make fewer mistakes, even if that means commanding less attention. Since the election, I have heard no end of Democrats lament their “media problem,” and I’ve found the language telling. Democrats won voters who consume heavy amounts of political news, but they lost voters who don’t follow the news at all. What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.
Lastly, Iain Leslie also had a insightful piece on this topic, arguing most business leaders are reverting to positions that are closer to their genuine beliefs, and suggests that what we’re seeing is an example of a ‘preference cascade’, “when people who have felt compelled to falsify their opinions in public suddenly feel able to be honest, on seeing others do the same”.
This reminds of the idea of ‘pluralistic ignorance’, something I first came across whilst working on projects to tackle Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in West Africa. This is the concept that a large proportion (even a majority) of people might privately disagree with a norm but keep their private views hidden, for fear they are in the minority. What they need to see is evidence they are not alone, and that they will not be punished/sanctioned for revealing what they really think. Many of us will have come across this phenomenon as a child, with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Things learned about LLMs in 2024
This was an excellent overview of LLM developments by Simon Willison.
For instance, on ‘agentic AI’ and the hype around AI agents:
I find the term “agents” extremely frustrating. It lacks a single, clear and widely understood meaning... but the people who use the term never seem to acknowledge that.
If you tell me that you are building “agents”, you’ve conveyed almost no information to me at all. Without reading your mind I have no way of telling which of the dozens of possible definitions you are talking about.
The two main categories I see are people who think AI agents are obviously things that go and act on your behalf—the travel agent model—and people who think in terms of LLMs that have been given access to tools which they can run in a loop as part of solving a problem. The term “autonomy” is often thrown into the mix too, again without including a clear definition.
Terminology aside, I remain skeptical as to their utility based, once again, on the challenge of gullibility. LLMs believe anything you tell them. Any systems that attempts to make meaningful decisions on your behalf will run into the same roadblock: how good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool if it can’t distinguish truth from fiction?
AI tutors
Lastly, a great share by Ethan Mollick on a new paper demonstrating incredible results from an experiment testing GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. Six weeks of after-school AI tutoring (importantly, facilitated by a teacher) was equivalent to two years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.
It’s easy to compare new technologies to the absolute best our society has to offer and show that the tech falls short. But this is rooted in a narrow, blinkered view of how most people live their lives. Most students around the world don’t attend great schools, and have no hope of going to elite universities. Technology will help level the playing field.
I’m Michaeljon, a growth strategy and innovation leader.
I work with ambitious clients to create new products, services and business models that change behaviour and unlock new sources of growth.
I specialise in solutions that create both commercial and social impact.
Recent projects include:
🤸♂️ Working alongside a CEO to develop a new preventative medicine and longevity business. Including proposition, investor pitch deck, business model and service offering.
🌿 Leading a growth strategy and innovation project for a high street bank to drive sustainable energy adoption among homeowners. Leading to new propositions, business models and financial products that reduce emissions and increase revenue.
🚑 Partnering with a US health-tech founder to understand, and co-design with, opioid users, and discover how his cutting-edge technology could save lives. Then shaping the launch strategy, target market identification, product design and positioning.
Get in touch if this sounds like the type of expertise you need.