Signals

I bought my first Tesla in 2020, a Model X, and there’s been one in the driveway ever since. A month ago we picked up a new Model Y, this one on Tesla’s newer hardware platform, with a fresh set of cameras and sensors built specifically for full self-driving. I expected an upgrade. What I got was a different category of product.

The 2020 X came with whatever Tesla was calling Full Self-Driving that year, and it was fine: it held a lane, kept a following distance, took some of the tedium out of a long highway stretch. But it was still very much a car you drove. Every update was incremental, a smoother lane change here, a cleaner stop there. You could feel Tesla iterating on the same idea, cruise control with better manners.

A month with the new Y and I can tell that idea is finished. This isn’t a better version of the old system; it’s a different mode of transportation. I just finished a 260-mile round trip, and the first leg went door to door without a single intervention: neighborhood streets, open highway, then the specific misery of Atlanta rush-hour traffic on a weekday morning. The car handled all of it well, not just safely. It doesn’t clamp to the speed limit like a piece of compliance software. It handles like a genuinely good driver: a few miles over the limit, the way real traffic actually moves, closing a gap to merge onto the highway, easing off early to let someone else in. That’s the detail that convinced me. Software following rules is easy to spot. This drove like someone who’d made the trip before.

You don’t have to like Elon Musk to notice that his company built the best transportation product in its category. A vehicle is just the tool we’ve used to do that job. The job-to-be-done is transportation: getting someone from one place to another. Driving has just been the method we were stuck using to do it, and most people who drive would hand off that method the moment they trusted an alternative.

That reframing is already built into the car. Sit in the new Y and look at the cabin: take away the wheel and the pedals and the two front seats are nearly identical. Tesla pulled the instrument cluster from in front of the driver in favor of one shared screen in the center, and angled that screen straight ahead instead of toward the driver’s seat. Ride in the passenger seat and you have exactly the same access to the car as whoever is “driving.” A company doesn’t spend engineering effort making both front seats interchangeable unless it’s planning for a car where neither one needs to be the driver’s seat. Tesla built this cabin for that car years before the software could justify the decision, for a future where it won’t matter which seat you climb into: you sit down, and the car takes you where you’re going. The real job here is transportation, not driving. The software just caught up.

That doesn’t mean Tesla let the driving experience go slack while chasing the bigger goal. Take the wheel back on a good stretch of road and the Y is still a great car to drive: quick, planted, all that instant torque available the moment you ask for it. Optimizing hard for the job of transportation hasn’t cost them the job of being fun to drive when you want to.

None of this means the technology is finished. I wouldn’t trust it on every edge case yet, and neither does Tesla — a person still has to be ready to take over. But the trust being built here comes from a specific mechanism, not a marketing claim. The car has to share the road with human drivers for years before anyone lets it replace them, and the only way to earn that is to drive in a way other humans can read: a little assertive, a little imperfect, familiar enough that nobody nearby has to guess what it’ll do next. A system built to optimize the rulebook creates friction with everyone driving around it. This one is optimized to fit in, and fitting in is the harder engineering problem.

I’m not the only one who landed here recently. DHH picked up his own new Model Y around the same time and wrote about the same shift, calling FSD a luxurious experience, like being driven by the Queen’s own chauffeur, and saying it drives better than almost any human who’s ever driven him. I agree. When two people separately land on the same read of the same product, the two of us probably aren’t imagining it.

Every new technology climbs the same curve: a small group willing to hand over control before it’s fully proven, then everyone else once that proof exists. FSD is still on the early part of that curve. It takes a real comfort with risk to let a car drive you through Atlanta traffic with your hands in your lap. But trust climbs that curve one uneventful trip at a time, and Tesla already built the car for what’s waiting on the other side of it.

Companies are taking a hard look at their AI spending and deciding the numbers don’t add up. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months — on a coding tool its engineers couldn’t stop using. Another company spent half a billion dollars before anyone thought to set a limit. Forrester now expects enterprises to postpone about a quarter of their planned AI investment into 2027 because the returns haven’t shown up.

I’ve heard this argument before. It’s the same one people made about the cloud in the early 2010s.

Back then the case against moving to AWS went like this: we already run our own data centers, we run them well, and we run them for less than Amazon would charge us. So why move? On the spreadsheet, the skeptics were often right. A company that had already sunk the capital into its racks and knew how to keep them humming could beat cloud pricing on raw unit cost for years.

They were answering the wrong question.

The cloud was never about running the same workloads for less money. It was about what you no longer had to think about. Moving to AWS turned infrastructure from a capital expense into an operating expense, from a thing you bought, racked, and depreciated into a thing you rented by the hour and stopped paying for the moment you stopped using it.

I lived this one. In my early days as CTO of Mailprotector, our real weakness wasn’t the software — it was everything underneath it: buying, racking, and babysitting the hardware our products ran on. Before AWS was anywhere close to ready to replace a data center, I wrote “AWS as a data center?” in a notebook and circled it. A year or two later we started migrating — and not to save money; the spreadsheet didn’t make that case yet. We did it to stop spending our attention on machines and put it where we could actually differentiate: the software. A couple of years after that, we turned the lights off on our last data center and never looked back. In hindsight it’s hard to separate that one decision from the company’s success — maybe even its survival.

Most companies never framed it that way. They measured the cloud against their own data centers, saw a higher unit cost, and stopped there — and because they already had data centers, the shift didn’t help them. It helped the company that didn’t exist yet. A startup in 2012 could spin up infrastructure that would have required millions in upfront capital a few years earlier, and pay for it out of revenue as it grew. Whole categories of companies got built that couldn’t have raised the money to build themselves the old way.

That generalizes well past the cloud. A general-purpose technology rarely just lowers the cost of what you already do; what it offers is a different cost structure, and different cost structures get used by different companies.

When an established company asks whether AI is worth what it’s spending, the buried question is whether AI makes the current operation cheaper. Often the honest answer is: not by enough to matter. Bolting a model onto a process that was designed around people rarely pays for itself. A lot of the spending getting scrutinized right now genuinely is waste. The scrutiny isn’t wrong.

But “our AI spending isn’t paying off” and “AI doesn’t pay off” are very different conclusions, and the distance between them is exactly where the data-center operators got caught. They weren’t wrong about the numbers. They were measuring the wrong company.

The company that mattered was being built on rented infrastructure, with a cost structure they could never reach by trimming their own. It’s being built again now, with AI in the foundation instead of bolted to the side. That’s the spend worth watching, and it isn’t yours.

Email is a communication medium that is used by nearly everyone on the Internet. It’s one of the few protocols so widely used, second only to maybe HTTP. That is the power of email. Everyone has it and uses it.

But the security of email is a topic that is often misunderstood. This is largely because there is no single answer to the question, “how secure is an email message?” As a general rule of thumb, by default it should be treated as a very insecure medium of communication. There are ways to secure your email but let’s start out with a discussion of the different pieces at play.

How secure is the email message content?

When discussing the security of an email message, you need to break it up into two pieces. First comes the content of the email message itself.

The most insecure parts of an email message are the sender, recipient, and subject of the message. This information is extremely insecure and visible to anyone who touches the message. Think of it like the names and addresses on the outside of a mail envelope. So you should treat these parts carefully because even if you are using encryption on the email message itself, which we’ll discuss later, these components will not be protected.

This is the virtual envelope with your content on the inside. If you were to come across a letter, how easy would it be to view what’s inside? Not that hard, right? You simply open the envelope. Email messages, by default, are no different. While in transit and once they get to their destination, email messages are like envelopes that anyone with access can open and view the contents.

How secure are email transmissions?

The second aspect of email message security is the transmission of messages from the sender to the recipient. This area is very misunderstood. By default, you have very little control over how a message is handled in transit. Sure, you can make sure your email client is using SSL or TLS when connecting to send the message, and you should, but once you hand it off to the first email server, you are also handing over control on how that message is handled from that point on. Depending on who you are sending the message to it may or may not be transmitted using encrypted connections from hop to hop. This essentially means that the contents of your message could be openly transmitted over the Internet by a bad email provider or ISP. And when this happens, an unencrypted message could be viewed by telcos, ISPs, or government organizations.

Any decent email hosting company will use encrypted connections when receiving and sending email to other email hosts. At Mailprotector, we always default to using TLS encryption for all email message transmissions. Unfortunately many other email hosting companies still don’t support encrypted connections, so whenever you send a message, you have to consider the possibility that it isn’t going to be transmitted securely.

How to make your email more secure

So now we know why email is, by default, a very insecure communication method. But there are ways to make it more secure.

Check your email client settings

Start by checking your email client settings to make sure you are using SSL or TLS in your inbound (receiving) and outbound (sending) connections. Any competent email provider offers this option and if yours doesn’t, switch to one that does immediately. Setting your client to use a secure connection is especially important when using public networks or wifi (like you find at Starbucks) or when on an airplane. Take this recent story by Steven Petrow, a reporter who had his emails hacked mid-air while writing an Apple-FBI story…now that’s irony.

“I hacked your email on the plane and read everything you sent and received. I did it to most people on the flight.” He had verbatim detail of a long email that he repeated back to me essentially word for word.

The victim in this example wasn’t using a virtual private network (VPN) or even SSL/TLS connections when sending and receiving his emails. If you were in a similar situation, anyone on the same network as you could use software to capture the data being transmitted and view it since the data isn’t encrypted. Using SSL/TLS options for sending and receiving email is the bare minimum protection you should have on public networks. Ideally, you should also be using a VPN to protect any data you are transmitting while on public networks.

Look into full encryption options

If the security of your email is a high enough priority, you should also consider encrypting the content of the email messages you send. These technologies protect the actual content inside the message. Based on the mail analogy cited earlier, if someone were to get a hold of your encrypted email message, they wouldn’t be able to view or understand the content. It would be like opening a letter written in code.

A couple of methods for encrypting email content are S/MIME and PGP. However, there is a downside to both of these technologies. Each requires the sender and recipient to exchange encryption keys prior to sending an encrypted message. So there is a barrier to using these technologies and managing the keys can become frustrating. There are better options available.

At Mailprotector, for instance, we offer a way to make email encryption much easier with our Bracket Encrypted Email service. Not everyone needs this level of security, but some people do. Bracket lets you securely send encrypted email containing corporate and financial data, personal info, legal docs, medical records, but it’s much easier for people to use.

Summary: 3 steps to improve email privacy

1. Check your email client settings to make sure you’re sending and receiving email over encrypted connections
2. Ask your email provider if they encrypt all email in and out of their networks, and if they don’t find one who does (hint, hint)
3. Look into the possibility of utilizing full email encryption options

So while email remains one of the most popular and useful communication mediums, it can be quite insecure by default. That said, you do have options when improving the security of your email.

The goal is your destination. The system is your vehicle.

The key to accomplishing something significant is not in the large success but in the small successes. These small successes are based on the habits that will continually move you towards accomplishing your goal.

Most people think the secret of goals is to simply set a big goal and then everything else will just magically happen. They aim high and then never take the first step because it seems too big. They view accomplishing the goal as one giant step. This is where most goals fizzle out.

There is an important piece missing here. It’s not enough to just aim for something. Creating a system is the key.

I think there is a place for both goals and systems. However, they work better together than they do separately. You need to set goals to know where you want to go. But setting goals is not enough. You need to have a system that will get you there. The goal is your destination. The system is your vehicle.

The system should be actionable steps that you can consistently perform to move you toward your goal. These consistent steps will form habits. Those habits are the foundation for your system. Once you have a goal, work backwards to determine the habits that will are required to take you to your goal.

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, not only when they hit their ultimate goal. These small successes create momentum. And momentum is a powerful thing.

When I read the initial news about the Apple iPhone, I was excited to see what Apple had come up with.

I had no idea that I would be as impressed as I was after watching all of the iPhone demo videos.

Once again Apple has made all other related devices look like a complicated mess with their simple approach to user interfaces.

Apple has set a new bar for cell phone technology that all other companies are going to have to match. Even the most elegant of cell phones like the LG Chocolate series of phones looks obsolete next to the iPhone.

One thing I was tired of hearing about new cell phones on the market is how nice the built in cameras are and that being a key selling point for the phone. You will not see one mention of the built in camera in Apples demo because even though it is there, it is not the reason you should want the iPhone.

Apple has done what all other cell phone manufacturers should do and built a personal communications device instead of adding all sorts of useless features to the already over complicated devices that are out there. And especially recently with the approach of a “new” model being the same old phone in multiple colors.

The hardest part now is waiting until July when they are expected to be released. I am glad that I already am a Cingular customer. If this phone really lives up the expectations, it would be reason enough for anyone to switch to Cingular if necessary for the iPhone.

I learned a valuable lesson this holiday season, and it was all done by watching college football. It was a simple lesson that I’ve heard many times but until I saw it in action, I did not fully understand the power of it.

Play to win

If you want to succeed at anything in life, make sure you approach it with an attitude that you are playing to win.

Expect the unexpected

Many of you may have missed it but the best college football bowl game may have been the least popular one. Boise State was not expected to be able to play with Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl this year. Not only did they play with them, they looked like a team that expected to win the game.

Even in the face of adversity as they were down by seven with 0:51 left in the game, they were playing like they came there to win no matter what it took. They ran some of the most impressive (and risky) plays but the most impressive move by the Boise State team didn’t happen during a play, it was a decision that was most likely made a few weeks ago.

The coaches were faced with what most teams wouldn’t even have considered a decision when they scored a touchdown in the first overtime. They had the choice to either kick the extra point to tie (and go to another overtime) or go for two to win.

Most teams would not have hesitated to kick the extra point and stick around to see another day. Not Boise State, they never even looked at their kicker to go on and kick the extra point. In fact, they were so quick to go for it, the other team had to call a timeout because they weren’t ready.

Boise State players and coaches were on the same page that they were there to win the game not just play along with Oklahoma. And it showed on the final play. It looked as if they had this play drawn up for this exact situation all year long. They were prepared and expected to win that game and they did.

So what does this have to do with my business or life?

Everything. When I saw this happen, I thought about many situations in business and life which I went in not to lose instead of going into it to win.

It is amazing how just that simple change in attitude can completely change the result. You should have the same approach to everything you do in life. Figure out ahead of time that you are doing something not just to do it but to win at it and succeed. It will not only change they way you approach that event but how you perform and most likely the result.

Why is it we describe the things we want to do in life as important instead of necessary?

The definition of important is “marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence” while the definition of necessary is “of an inevitable nature” or “absolutely needed”.

Instantly you can see the difference between the two words.

Look at the things that you do on a regular basis. A normal day will most likely involve you eating, going to work, and sleeping. Why is it that we do these things?

Because they are necessary.

If you decide that it isn’t necessary to go to work, then you won’t go. But the consequence of that decision is probably going to be losing your job.

So lets face it, what we do on a daily basis are things that are necessary.

How do you describe your dreams?

Things that you want to do are typically considered important but not necessary. That’s why they never get done. Until something makes the jump from important to necessary, you will never get to it. There are simply too many other necessary things in life to get to those that are just important.

It’s easy for someone to say that something is important to them. Important leaves room for it not to happen. You can always get to the important things tomorrow.

But when something becomes necessary, you will stop at nothing to make sure it happens. It must happen and it must happen now. Why? Because it is necessary.

History has shown that humans are capable of accomplishing the most amazing things. But in each circumstance, you will find one common factor, necessity. If you are having trouble getting what you want out of life, chances are, that something is only important to you, not necessary.

How can you make sure you accomplish more of your dreams?

That is simple, make your dreams and goals something that is necessary to you. Only then will it become a high enough priority in your life to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

If you can ask yourself the question “Is this something that I have to do?” and can honestly answer “Yes”, then that is not only important but necessary. You have made the first step to making it happen.

Can you change the way you think?

You are where you are in life because of the priorities you have and had. In order to change your life, you must change the way you think and prioritize. So the question really should not be can you change the way you think but rather…

Will you change the way you think?

Once you have made this decision, you will think about your dreams differently. You finally put them higher on your list of priorities. They will no longer only be important to you but now they will be necessary.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” —Christopher Reeve

Are your dreams inevitable?