Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

blog.zactownsend.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 192 posts

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#101

Post by mannyv »

yodsanklai wrote: post #98
chollida1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present. Why would they fire him after a singe incident? Sounds like McKinsey is a more companionate organization than you, and that's saying something:)

That's what I thought. Having the partner present seems to be the right way of handling this. The company is responsible for employees well-being and shouldn't let a client bullying them.

Client bullying?

Saying the works sucks isn't bullying, unless you didn't know you were incompetent.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#102

Post by phendrenad2 »

Valuable article, it's rare to see a glimpse into McKinsey in normal human language.

The fact that the company has become a sort of pseudo-VC (mentorship but not financing) for small teams within megacorps is interesting. I wonder why large corps find it so difficult to innovate. I think that they become somewhat "load-bearing" in society and the lines between the company and the market begin to blur. Any change the company makes causes a misalignment because they shaped the market to fit themselves.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#103

Post by warkdarrior »

bee_rider wrote: post #56
SoftTalker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is life insurance specifically. It's not very hard to prove someone is dead, is there really much room for argument over paying out the policy benefit?

If the plan is to just pay out after confirming the person is dead, what’s the AI doing? It could be replaced by a “upload your death certificate here” box.

Most of life insurance policies have exceptions. For example, they won't pay out if you commit suicide. So the conditions of the death must be assessed against the insurance policy before payout.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#104

Post by nradov »

throw10920 wrote: post #82
matwood wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's a misallocation of human capital which slows progress for all of society. We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

Claims handling is fake jobs?

No, but claims processing is already highly automated across much of the insurance industry and the level of automation will only increase in the future.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#105

Post by mannyv »

Oras wrote: post #5

> Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000. So 3 years at McKinsey taught OP the corporate BS. That paragraph doe…

There are different metrics that people use to say they're the biggest.

Some of them off the top of my head are number customers, number of active policies, premium amount, assets under management, time to claim resolution, etc. He's talking to business people who understand the insurance market.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#106

Post by patmcc »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #31
energy123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical issues of putting people out of a job? Please. This mindset has to be called out because it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy. Economic productivity putting people out of jobs is both good and necessary and it is unethical to work against it.

> it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy What part of that is suffering, if it enables 100k constituents to put food on the table?

We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we?

We shouldn't employ people in economically un-viable ways just because they need income. We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work, or a combination of the two.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#107

Post by nradov »

alpha_squared wrote: post #36
guywithahat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as inherently a problem; AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims, and responds a lot sooner. That said I suspect the founder is seriously overestimating the number of highly intelligent, competent people he can hire, and underestimating how much bureaucratic nonsense comes with insurance, but that's a problem he'll run into later down the road. Sometimes you have to hire three…

> AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims Respectfully, no it can't. From a Western perspective, specifically American, and from an average middle-class person's perspective, specifically American, it only appears to be fair. However, LLMs are a codification of internet and written content, largely by English speakers for English speakers. There are <400m people in the US and ~8b in the world…

Nope. Claims adjudication LLMs aren't trained on random Internet content. If you're going to criticize then at least get your basic facts right.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#108

Post by nradov »

thwarted wrote: post #87
nathan_compton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the commenter was definitely somewhat glib in their statement, but I don't think the case is as clear cut as you think. The way I've come to think of the current moment in history is that capitalism allocates resources via markets and we use this system because in many situations its highly efficient. But governments allocate resources democratically exactly because we do not always want to allocate resources…

One might argue that the government allocating some resources is more efficient than the market doing so purely because specific outcomes are desired that the invisible hand is not motivated or incentivized to provide. If the goal is to keep people healthy, efficiency is based on how successful that is, not on the monetary cost. Few people seem to understand it this way, though.

In most cases government employees simply aren't prescient enough to allocate resources efficiently. Like in theory maybe central planning could be more efficient if everything worked correctly, but in practice it never works efficiently at scale. Much of the resources simply end up wasted.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#109

Post by thenewwazoo »

burningChrome wrote: post #80
throw10920 wrote: post #6

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…

>> that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human. Real world evidence supporting your argument: United Health Group is currently embroiled in a class action lawsuit pertaining to using AI to auto-deny health care claims and procedures: The plaintiffs are members who were denied benefit coverage. The…

> 90% error rate, meaning nine of 10 appealed denials were ultimately reversed.

This is a fantastic illustration of selection bias. It stands to reason that truly-unjustified (some hidden variable) denials would be appealed at a higher rate and therefore the true value is something less than 90%.

That's not to say UHG are without blame, I just thought this was really interesting.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#110

Post by mannyv »

MPSFounder wrote: post #69
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical folks (business/marketing/artistic/bullshit types) can be founders of tech companies, but there needs to be significant tech prescence at the top. I think as a general rule, at least a third of the equity needs to be devoted to technical folks if the company wants to succeed. Ideally you get someone whose good at both, or at least competent at one and really good in the other, such as Jobs or Gates.

The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leaders…

Actually, this is wrong depending on the company and what the specific situation is.

Look at DEC, a classic engineering company failure. DEC failed because they were led by engineers who didn't understand the market. It apparently was a great place to work, because they were so NIH that they built everything from scratch.

Then look at Intel, a company that is in the process of failing because they listened to their customers too much. None of their customers wanted GPUs, or mobile chips, or power savings - until they did. By that time Intel was already behind the curve.

Then look at Microsoft under Ballmer - a company that probably illustrates the point you're trying to make. But then they won with Nadella, luckily.

Apple is a bit different and a bad example because unlike other companies they attempt to define the future. Most companies aren't in a position to try, much less succeed, at this.

Post reply on HN