You Can't Google What You Don't Know

I nearly sent you a very different email this week.

One of those bullshit product launch emails where I tell you I’m “thrilled to announce” something and pretend this was all part of a carefully laid out plan.

It wasn’t.

For the last six months, I’ve been building something. For myself to start with.

As a way to understand what was happening in parts of the world I don't often hear about.

I wanted to know what founders in China were thinking about growth or what Japanese companies were learning about talent. Because I'm a founder trying to build Do Radio into a proper business.

And the more I looked into it, the more interesting I found it.

Eventually it was one of the things I most looked forward to reading each week.

That was when I thought: maybe other people would want this too?

Have You Heard of Xiaomi?

The whole thing really started with a friend of mine.

He runs a company. He reads the business pages. He is, and I say this with genuine affection, not stupid.

One day he told me about an interview he'd read with Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi.

What amazed him wasn’t the interview.

It was the fact that he’d never heard of Xiaomi.

This is one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Phones, cars, televisions, wearables, robot vacuum cleaners, pretty much anything with a battery.

And somehow it had passed him by.

That stuck with me.

Because the information was all there. Interviews. Speeches. Podcasts. Shareholder letters. Founder stories.

He just wasn’t seeing any of it.

And once he'd said that, I started seeing the same pattern everywhere.

The English-speaking business world is very good at covering foreign companies when they raise a huge amount of money, list on a stock exchange, collapse spectacularly or arrive here and start stealing market share.

But most of the interesting stuff happens before that.

The decisions. The mistakes. The strategies. The lessons.

And most of it stays in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish.

You Can’t Search for Something You Don’t Know Exists

At this point you might reasonably say: isn’t this what AI is for?

Yes.

If my friend had wanted to know about Xiaomi, he could have asked ChatGPT everything about it.

But he didn’t.

Because he didn’t know to ask.

That’s the bit I find interesting.

You can’t search for the founder you’ve never heard of.
You can’t ask about the business model you don’t know exists.
You can’t investigate an idea that has never even entered your field of vision.

AI has made answers incredibly cheap.

Discovery is still hard.

And I think discovery is where a lot of the value now sits.

The Closed Loop

Most of us consume business information from a surprisingly small pool.

We read the same books. Listen to the same podcasts. Follow the same founders. Hear the same stories about Airbnb, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Stripe and whoever else is having a good quarter.

There’s nothing wrong with those stories.

The problem is everyone else knows them too.

If you and your competitors are reading the same things and asking the same AI models the same questions, where does the genuinely different thinking come from?

I wanted a third option.

Something outside the loop.

So I Built a Newsdesk

I’m not a China expert. Or a Japan expert. Or a Korea expert.

I’m an interviewer.

That’s what I do.

I find interesting people, ask them questions, and try to actually listen to them.

I've also spent time in private equity, founded companies, made plenty of expensive mistakes, and learned through my Do Radio show, Tomorrow’s World, that the best story is often not the one staring you in the face.

So I built a newsdesk.

I use AI researchers to gather material from six regions: China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Latin America.

Then I do the human bit.

I read it. Compare it. Question it. Throw most of it away.

Because I don’t want more information.

I want better information.

The Sixth Desk

I’ve called it The Sixth Desk.

Each week, I take one question that matters to founders and leaders and look at it through all six desks.

One question. Six perspectives.

The best bits are where they disagree.

Not all of it is relevant to you. You don't even have to agree with any of it.

That’s not the point. The point is to see something you weren’t seeing before.

What You Get

Every Friday, there’s one issue.

About ten minutes to read.

Then once a month I do a deeper piece on one founder or company. The first is Xiaomi (obviously), on 10 October.

Every quote and claim links back to its source wherever possible.

That matters to me. Because I know how easy it is for AI to create plausible bullshit. I want you to be able to check what I’m telling you.

Why I’m Doing It

I can't stop thinking about my good friend and his Xiaomi story.

A smart person. Running a company. Reading business news.

And still completely unaware of an enormous company and the thinking behind it.

That’s the problem I want to solve.

I don’t want more information. I want different information.

Something that makes me stop and think:

I didn’t know that.
I’d never looked at it that way.
Maybe I should?

That’s why I built The Sixth Desk.

For myself first.

And now, maybe, for you.

Until next time,

Jon “The Newsroom” Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

The first Monthly Deep Dive is on Xiaomi and lands on 10 October.

If you want to understand how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to remain almost invisible to a smart British founder, you can join me at thesixthdesk.com.