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How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

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Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#171

Post by [deleted] »

verall wrote: post #112
johnobrien1010 wrote: post #15

Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/ For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed. Also, the fact that th…

I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance: > You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation

[deleted]

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#172

Post by apetrov »

blitzar wrote: post #157
burningChrome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> has a 90% error rate, meaning nine of 10 appealed denials were ultimately reversed. feature, not bug working as intended, closing ticket

tested, works for me

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#174

Post by nradov »

Zanfa wrote: post #162
nradov wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why wouldn't they be? LLMs need a lot of content for training and there's multiple orders of magnitude less to train on of if you limited it to insurance-specific content, so you'd probably get a really crappy LLM. And training from scratch is really expensive anyway. At best they'll be using fine tuned enterprise OpenAI / Anthropic models, more likely a regular model with a custom prompt.

They use actual production claims data and policy documents for training. Not random garbage from the Internet.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#175

Post by wnc3141 »

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…

A few more things 1) these digital (or AI) first substitutes for traditional firms almost always rely on dark patterns to hit their metrics.

2) Having many firms serve a market is always better for consumers as well instead of a single firm. (with a few notable exceptions)

3) In terms of large scale, its impossible to scale efficiently across countries as you navigate new political and economic structures.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#176

Post by nathan_compton »

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.

I'm not sure this is the way to think about it. It obviously matters if money is being wasted, but the question is to what end is the money utilized?

In capitalism, roughly speaking, the purpose of spending money is to generate a return on investment and the market does a reasonable job of doing that and a reasonable knock-on effect is rising standards of living, etc.

But in health care, for example, we might decide that a return on investment isn't the point, but the efficient allocation of resources still matters, to the end of making people healthier. Its more that free markets really struggle to optimize efficiency that isn't directed towards ROI. I think its a genuinely moral philosophical question - if you really prioritize freedom over all else, then markets are sort of the best you can do and you just give up on collective or philosophically motivated goals. But, genuinely, and I think the current political moment underscores this basic fact, people care about plenty of other things besides freedom and even besides democracy.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#177

Post by tecleandor »

verall wrote: post #112
johnobrien1010 wrote: post #15

Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/ For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed. Also, the fact that th…

I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance: > You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation

Oooooouch, I missed that when checking their site, and that's extra shady. Especially when at the footing of the page you can see:

  Neither Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited nor its affiliates Meanwhile Services (Bermuda) Limited and Meanwhile Incorporated, are lawyers or accountants. They do not provide legal or tax advice. You are wholly responsible for obtaining your own legal and tax advice.
And everything incorporated in Bermuda, and regulated only by Bermuda laws, makes it very impractical as an insurance (go and claim whatever you want against them from your country, I don't think it will be easy) and very obviously a tax evasion thing.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#178

Post by tecleandor »

watwut wrote: post #168
comrade1234 wrote: post #8

My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards. The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife st…

Are you genuinely surprised they dis not fired him for a single incident?

McKinsey (or Boston, or any of their peers...) happily recommends firing hundreds or thousands of people for any vague reason each time time are brought for an "optimization process".

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#179

Post by greatgib »

MPSFounder wrote: post #2

Author is not consistent. He mentions in 25 cases, the firm hiring McKinsey did not know the answer beforehand. Yet, Leap is based on firms already knowing the answer. The reason McKinsey is hired is to avoid internal conflicts over which manager takes the reigns. I doubt McKinsey is providing solutions to these industries (as in, introducing a product that was not pitched internally by someone already. In fact, in m…

As having been through consulting a little bit, I can confirm that most of the times you pay a very expensive price for inexperienced and incompetent consulting work most of the time.

It is not malevolence but more a deficiency by design. First as you said, most consultants are not real "leaders" or "tech leaders" and when you start to get experience, you leave consulting or you raise the hierarchical ladder to become a more senior manager, that spend more time finding contracts, negotiating, dealing with the customer proposals and renewal than doing the actual job.

In the end, you have juniors that are doing the tasks pretending to be sector experts or like the guy in the article, you are propulsed "CEO" of the big entity of a big corp just after 4 or 5 years of basic consultant experience, not even having worked in real non-conducting job.

In the end, when you buy a mission to such a firm, most of the cost goes to structural costs and daily rate of a chain of useless parasitic executives like directors, executive partners, vice president, that will spend 10 minutes per month reviewing slides on the project. The consulting doing the job will be paid at most the double of what a good freelance can expect.

And regarding the spirit, the fun thing is that even when you do bad or evilish things, there is kind of a mental block brain process that makes you truly believe that you are doing an useful and much needed work. Despite it not the case.

In my own case, often I had this bad feeling deep in. A background that a customer that we were negotiating a mission for millions, could have just hired a decent developer for just a few thousands euros and have quite profited from a most good and successful system.

But like, in Matrix, when you are inside the system, it is hard to consider things outside the box.

In the same way that again in the example of the blog post, I'm quite sure that the big company would been able to find hundreds of existing employees that would have fitted the bill well and better for a lot cheaper.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#180

Post by potato3732842 »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #109
burningChrome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

It's not necessarily even selection bias. It might just be how they roll.

I'd say half of all municipal permitting offices and 90% of welfare/disability offices operate on the principal of "deny them all and see which ones come back around". Wouldn't surprise me at all if the behavior spread to healthcare.

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