The art of speed

Speed is survival

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A personal story

Back in 2019, when I was working at a bank as a researcher, I got called for an absurd mission. At that stage, I was no longer on the trading desk. I had been transferred to what they named the AI Lab of one of the largest French banks in New York. This was the time between my brief stint on trading floors and before I became an entrepreneur. A time when I understood what was a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and why a rogue team of anti-social programmers working in a dumpy office could run circles around corporate zombies.

My unfitness for the role of trading desk operator was second only to my unfitness as a researcher in the AI Lab. It was not about technical skills. I was technically competent, if far from great. The problem was my attitude: an absence of deference, a rejection of authority, and a no-bullshit manner that simply does not work in the corporate middle-office world. It took me years to realize the danger of becoming good at something you do not actually like. In my case, it took me about two and a half to three years. I was not exactly good, but I was not too bad. At some point, I could actually have slipped into the corporate mode.

One I told a friend my fear of staying at the bank forever. His answer: “Do not feel like you are a unique snowflake. You are going to eventually become exactly like the people you work with And they all looked the same because they all became the same”

That is the danger of the corporate world. It’s a twenty-plus years mold turning people into clones.

I earned good money, more than I had ever earned before (not too hard to accomplish). Yet I was asking myself where does money stop making you fulfilled? As a side note, at the time I was still forbidden to have a credit card in France because I was on the banned-list, but that is a story for another day.

Back to the absurd mission, the manager of the team gave me a task: use natural language processing models, the predecessors of modern LLMs before “attention” came into fashion, to clean up typos in manually written text.

The project was quite vanilla. Some operators overseas, often in India, would frequently mistype client tiers such as Gold, Platinum, or Silver. Sometimes you would get “Gaold” or “Platinuuam.” I had a database of thousands of such lines. My job was to standardize them so data analysts could run algorithms on clean data. The type of task that makes you question your whole existence and want to open a pizzeria in Latin America, which I eventually did.

I suggested the obvious solution: do not let people type freely. Just give them a dropdown menu with predefined tiers. Problem solved at the source. Not exactly rocket science.

Instead, they wanted me to build a real-time NLP algorithm that would normalize and correct as people typed. The algorithm itself was trivial, essentially fuzzy string matching. But the real problem was not the algorithm, it was the bank. For a startup, this would be a one-afternoon project. For a bank, it was a six-month to one-year odyssey. Every small change required authorization from multiple layers of bureaucracy. What should have been a two-person task suddenly involved 20 or 30 stakeholders. Among those people, most of them act like parasites who see any deviation from the standard corporate sloth mode as an existential threat.

I was not exactly thrilled wasting my time on such a trivial problem. I was already ready to leave, and no one at the bank was particularly keen to keep me around anyway. So I kindly suggested the upper management to fuck off with that project, knowing perfectly what it would mean for me. Their slowness to react worked in my favor. They did not fire me on the spot. They waited and waited, and in the end I left voluntarily. This is what happens when a big company wants to implement a small change. They cannot because they have to move too many parts. They have natural inertia. They are slow. They are zombies.

And that, dear reader, is the point of today’s piece: speed, and how to achieve it in your business.