“Here’s how we did it” is one of my favorite phrases to hear in a healthy startup ecosystem. Collaborative learning benefits everyone and the startup which initiates the discussion gets the potential benefit of the smartest folks *outside* of the company improving the work.
Ambrook, a startup building financial tools for ground level independent American businesses, starting with farming and agriculture, recently spent six weeks helping everyone on the team get comfortable enough with AI tooling to begin automating some of their individual workflows. Ambrook has been a technology-forward team from its origins so this wasn’t about “how does AI change our company” but rather “we want the company to take this journey together” and see constant learning as a career opportunity, not a career threat.
I’ve written before how Ambrook is ‘legible to talent’ – doing the things which attract colleagues who want to live professionally at the intersection of excellence and meaning (oh yes, they’re hiring) – so it didn’t surprise that this was their approach, but the text from CEO Mackenzie Burnett that said “hey, we’re open sourcing this” was unexpected (and delightful).
Here’s Ambrook’s intro blog post on the work – Momentum Month, or Teach a Man to Fish. Authors Dan and Paige describe the how and why of this effort and link to a Google Drive with all the supporting files. As they note, “Six weeks doesn’t make a team fluent in everything. But it has helped us understand the possibilities, and the investment it takes to make that happen. The compounding is just getting started.”
The effort has already resulted in some good discussion within the Homebrew founder community and I hope it’s useful to you as well. Thank you Ambrook for showing and sharing!
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