Hi Reader -

On February 1, 1980, Apple banned typewriters. Not "discouraged." Not "let's explore alternatives in Q3." Banned.

The memo came from Mike Scott, Apple's president at the time, and it opens with "YOU ALL BETTER READ THIS." In caps. Underlined. The 1980 version of a Slack message with 14 red sirens. Then comes the actual policy:

"Effective Immediately!! No more typewriters are to be purchased, leased etc., etc."

Two exclamation marks. This man was not running a pilot program. The goal was zero typewriters at Apple by January 1, 1981, and he wasn't shy about who was on the hook.

Tucked in the middle is this aside: "(Ken, get rid of the DEC word processor ASAP)." Imagine being Ken. Your company is on its way to a thousand employees, everyone gets the same memo, and you're the only one named in it.

There was a carrot too. Anyone who turned in their typewriter got "Brownie Points," which meant first dibs on the shiny new Apple systems. Give up the old toy, get the new toy first.

That's better change management than most 40-slide "AI transformation roadmaps" I've seen this year, and it fit on one page.

Speaking of people who took the typewriter off the table: we just kicked off Season 2 of Intelligent Artifice, our podcast, with Vivek Girotra, CEO at SurpassMD. He left the CMO track to build an AI-native health brand, and these days he spends about ten hours a day working in Codex or Claude instead of the browser. Check out the episode here.

​

Vivek is offering our readers 20% off their first SurpassMD subscription (any duration, US only). Use code ROCKETSHIP at surpassmd.com.If you fancy yourself doing interesting work with AI and/or growth marketing, hit reply and tell me more about your work. I'd love to explore an episode with you.

Here's what gets me. 46 years later, most teams still have a typewriter on the table. It just comes in two models now.

The first model is easy to spot. It's the spreadsheet someone rebuilds by hand on the first of every month, sighing loudly enough for everyone to hear.

It's "can you export that as a CSV and send it over?"

It's "I'll just do it myself, it's faster." (It was faster. In 2023.)

The second model is sneakier, because it feels like the future.

It's "we're very AI-forward, the whole team uses ChatGPT." It's the shiny third-party tool everyone's posting about this week, the one that's going to "change everything" until next week's tool shows up.

It's typing a sentence into a chat box, getting a pretty good answer back, and feeling like a genius.

I get it. It IS amazing, and I felt like a genius too. (I wrote a whole email about uploading CSVs to ChatGPT and thinking I was clever.)

But look at what's actually happening. You type something in, copy the answer out, and paste it somewhere else. That's a typewriter with a really good autocomplete.

Your workflow didn't change. The AI is sitting next to it, and you're the one carrying things back and forth.

Scott's whole argument fit in one line: "If word processing is so neat, then let's all use it!" Swap in AI and you've got the memo most teams still haven't written.

We wrote ours earlier this year, when we cancelled ChatGPT for our entire team. (Here's why.)

It wasn't a knock on ChatGPT. It's a great product. We just had to take the typewriter off the table, so the easiest thing for anyone on the team to do was build their own workflows. Our version of Brownie Points is a weekly show-and-tell where everyone shows something they built.

(More on that soon. I have opinions.)

But the line I keep coming back to is the last one in Scott's memo:

"We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let's prove it inside before we try and convince our customers."

Prove it inside first. Before you pitch "AI-powered" anything to your customers, or your board, it's worth checking whether your own team still has a typewriter on the table. Mine did, for longer than I'd like to admit.

If you're spending $50k+/month and want a creative team that ships at high velocity and high quality, and has already taken the typewriter off the table, reply "TYPEWRITER" and we'll talk.

Or don't. I'm sure the whole team using ChatGPT counts as an AI strategy.

Later,
Shamanth

PS: Here's the note we sent our team when we made the switch. It has less underlining than Scott's, and slightly fewer exclamation marks. Slightly.

PPS: In case you missed them, the last two brands I took apart: 126 Wispr Flow ads and 100+ Facetune ads. What's working, what's leaving money on the table, and what I'd test next.