#86. Nero’s Weekly
Week 11: Discovery over invention, focus over breadth, and the hard choices that drive success
Dear Friend 👋,
I realise that I have not released a version of my free curated Newsletter, Nero’s Weekly since March so here goes. Here is the latest edition of of ‘Nero’s Weekly’ in 2025. Past editions.
As always, the goal is to enable you to be better informed and effective in your work and enterprise. To transform your career. Ambitious? I know 😊
In this edition:
AI - How the AI market is crystallizing around vertical focus and Google’s 33x efficiency breakthrough
Business - Why customer selection and problem discovery are your highest-leverage decisions
Tech/Product Building - Product innovation as discovery, and what happens when AI hallucinates your roadmap
Africa - West Africa’s 400M-person economic zone and Nigeria’s pharmaceutical independence push
Career - Building agency and lessons from OpenAI’s formative years
Enjoy😊.
Nero’s Pick – My latest article, 85. What I Learned from Gibson Biddle [CEO Notes], explores the product strategy insights I gained from Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix. I learnt so much about strategy and making impactful decisions from attending this session, and writing about it.
Gibson’s frameworks on product strategy, the DHM model (Delight customers in Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing ways), and his approach to consumer science offer valuable lessons for anyone building products. If you’re thinking about how to create defensible competitive advantages while delighting users, this deep dive is for you.
🤖AI
Elad Gill – AI Market Clarity – Beyond the hype and speculation, we are finally seeing consolidation of the AI market into clearer patterns. Renowned tech entrepreneur Elad Gill identifies emerging categories and business models that are proving sustainable. One big ongoing shift is moving from “AI chat” tooling to agentic workflows. Application companies are discovering the importance of focusing on a vertical. The key insight: AI companies that solve specific problems for defined customers are outperforming those chasing horizontal platform dreams.
Google – AI Energy Efficiency Breakthrough – Google released actual data on AI energy consumption, cutting through all the speculation and made-up numbers floating around. Gemini currently uses about 0.24 watt-hours per text query—roughly 9 seconds of running your TV. Even more impressive? That’s a 33x reduction in just 12 months.
🏭Business
Growth Strategy – Your Biggest Growth Lever: Selecting the Right Customer – Most companies obsess over product features, pricing, and go-to-market tactics but there is an even more important strategic decision: who they serve. The right customer segment can make an average product successful, while the wrong segment can doom an exceptional product.
The second most important question? Which problem(s) you choose to solve for them.
Will Larson - Orchestration vs. Leadership - Will Larson draws a crucial distinction between orchestration—coordinating people and resources to execute plans—and leadership—setting direction and inspiring others to follow. He argues that most managers are stuck in the role of orchestrator, but what companies need are true leaders who align stakeholders around outcomes. I like how he breaks down the team’s work even further into 6 steps:
Problem discovery: Identifying which problems to work on
Problem selection: Aligning with stakeholders on the problems you’ve identified
Solution discovery: Identifying potential solutions to the selected problem
Solution selection: Aligning with stakeholders on the approach you’ve chosen
Execution: Implementing the selected solution
Ongoing revision: Keeping your team and stakeholders aligned as you evolve the plan
“Picking the right problems and solutions is your highest‑leverage work”. I love this.
In orchestration-heavy roles, you might focus only on steps 4-6. In leadership-heavy roles, you own all six steps. Many managers don’t even realize they are expected to perform the full set. But now you know 😊.
📱Technology & Product Management
Boz (Meta) – Product Innovation Is Discovery, Not Creation – Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, argues that real product innovation is about discovering what already exists in the world – latent user needs, technological possibilities, market dynamics – and bringing those discoveries together in new ways.
I love how he draws a similarity with filmmaking from a conversation with James Cameron (Avatar, Terminator, Titanic) who sees filmmakers experimenting toward discovering how audiences want stories told to them vs inventing how to tell stories. The experiments that work are those that deeply resonated with a large number of people. I love how Boz connects this with product development and how users have a mental model how a product should work.
Here’s what ties this all together: discovery narrows your focus. It reveals the single user and single problem worth solving. Not all users, not all problems—the ones that matter most. Start with the “Jobs to be Done“ framework to put this into practice.Ars Technica – When AI Recommends Your Next Feature – What do you do when ChatGPT hallucinates and tells users that your company has a feature that doesn’t exist? Do you put up a disclaimer that it’s wrong, or do you lean into it? This was the case faced by the CEO of Sheet music platform Soundslice. ChatGPT told users that Soundslice could import a text-based guitar notation format. He noticed that users were submitting screenshots of ChatGPT conversations asking about it.
“We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand,” Holovaty explained. Great case study of making the best of a unique situation. When AI hallucinates your features into existence, maybe that’s just extreme user research. 😊
🌍Africa
Africa Business Communities – ECOWAS Launches Regional E-Commerce Committee – The Economic Community of West African States launched a regional e-commerce committee to harmonize fragmented payment systems, regulations, and logistics across West Africa.
Why this matters: The coastal corridor from Lagos to Abidjan is projected to become the fastest-growing urban region in the world, reaching 400 million people by 2050—larger than the United States in one economic zone. ECOWAS is building the infrastructure to unlock what could become one of the world’s largest digital markets.Business Day – Nigeria’s Pharmaceutical Research Hub Launches in Anambra – Nigeria opened a new pharmaceutical research hub in Anambra State, focusing on drug discovery and treatments for diseases prevalent in Africa.
The context: Africa imports over 70% of its medicines. Local research and manufacturing capacity represents both a public health imperative and economic opportunity—self-sufficiency and high-value jobs in one move.
🚀Career Corner
Henrik Karlsson – The Importance of Agency – Writer Henrik Karlsson explores a quality that distinguishes exceptional careers: agency – the ability to shape your circumstances rather than simply respond to them. It’s a combination of autonomy and efficacy. People with high agency don’t wait for permission, perfect conditions, or complete information. They identify problems worth solving and begin solving them. They ‘get up and go towards a purpose’.
They find ways around obstacles rather than stopping at them. The good news? Agency isn’t innate; it’s cultivated through practice. Start small: solve a problem no one asked you to solve, create something without waiting for approval, reach out to someone “out of reach.” Each act builds the muscle of agency, and over time, transforms how you approach your career and life.Calvin French-Owen – Lessons from OpenAI’s Early Days - Calvin French-Owen, an early OpenAI employee, reflects on what made the company’s formative years so productive. The pattern: speed over perfection, ambitious thinking over incremental improvements, and a culture where people worked on what energized them.
His key insight? The best ideas came from giving talented people problems to solve, not solutions to implement. There’s that theme again—discovery, not prescription.
As AI reshapes every industry, these lessons matter beyond OpenAI. How might you create space for ambitious exploration in your own work while staying focused on real problems?
There you have it.What did you think? I’d love your feedback on this edition—what worked, what didn’t, what you’d like to see more of. Takes 2 minutes: LINK
“I have an uncompromising sense of detail which permeates everything I do. The meals I serve, the parties I have, the business I created, the places I go, my friends, my family, my business associates everything must be treated with infinite respect and care.”
Until next time,
Nero
The Best is Yet to Come
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