How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

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 most cases, a manager will pitch the solution and McKinsey's job is purely finding the right managers to leave this internal "startup" to). Should that be the case, I would love to be proven wrong. However, every consultant I had met is no engineer or tech leader. They are merely consultants, restructuring the answers in ways that avoid conflicts within established giants. Most of them are Ivy League graduates that never worked in the technical field (got hired at Bain or McKinsey fresh out of school). Often we would make up stacks to demonstrate how ignorant they can be of technology. Managers and business people love McKinsey. As an engineer, I have not met any tech founder or technical engineer that esteemed the field (just listen to Steve Jobs' opinion on consulting). I attribute the mess that Google is under Sundar to McKinsey (not even mentioning the Opioid crisis where their hands are stained too). The redeeming factor is the author describes them as the enemy and is at least honest about his reasons for joining (stability and established resume name)

"As an engineer," you've probably yet to realize "technical cofounder" is p97 a polite way to say "second-class citizen." You get more equity than a "founding engineer," I hope. So there's that.

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 automation/AI to serve them profitably. We plan to do with 100 people what Allianz and others do with 100,000.

Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, I see one very concrete moral problem:

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, and forcing all interaction with the company to go through AI.

That, to me, is deeply disturbing, and very very difficult to justify.

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 still feels bad for it but still…

Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.

"I wanted to derisk my resume by working somewhere with high signaling."

You can take the founder out of a consultancy, but you can't take the consultancy out of the founder.