Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s the plan:

• Tech News Takes — super-short analysis and commentary

• Strategy Tools — strategy nuggets (for business and life)

• F/T Shoutouts — sharing launches, tech events, and other reads

GM is Ditching Robotaxis

Plus: Rockstar’s Red Dead news, and a Facebook facelift

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

GM still skittish about robotaxis

• What’s up: GM is re-committing to self-driving... sort of. Last week, the company told TechCrunch it was aggressively pushing to release a Level 3 (hands off the wheel, eyes off the road) experience in GM vehicles. They would be following Mercedes, who has the only consumer-owned cars with L3 systems today. And this week at an investor day, the only new thing executives said about Cruise – the robotaxi unit – was that it was only expected to lose up to $2B this year.

• So what: This seems like a nail in the coffin for Cruise. Remember the accident in San Francisco last year? Well the company fired a bunch of people, cancelled further tests, and seemed to back way off. They probably see L3 systems in consumer cars as an easier, less-risky stepping stone (and they’re right). But the lower risk lowers the reward. By ceding their head start, they might get left behind.

Rockstar is squeezing more out of existing IP

• What’s up: Rockstar is releasing the Red Dead Redemption series on PCs. The series has only been available on consoles since the first game came out in 2010. But despite that, Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling games of all time. The series will be available on Steam, the Rockstar Store, and the Epic Games Stores at the end of October.

• So what: It’s been a tough few years for the gaming industry. They’ve seen ~25K folks laid off, and game development costs are still up nearly 2x in the last 4 years. Re-releasing existing titles seems like a great, cost-effective idea. You can reach a new generation of gamers (14 years since the first release is a long-time), embracing the growing segment of PC gamers.

A Facebook Facelift

• What’s up: This week, Meta announced a redesigned Facebook site to try to draw in more Gen-Z users. One new feature is a “Local” tab for geographically relevant marketplace items, groups, and events. And the redesign also adds an “Explore” tab that’s basically a Pinterest copycat.

• So what: For a statistically lonely generation willing to meet people online, the Local tab seems like a good idea. It also builds on groups and marketplaces – which have stayed popular despite Facebook’s age. The Explore tab (aka Pinterest copycat) is trickier. ByteDance has their own Pinterest copycat “Lemon8”, so Meta seems to be playing defense, which is fine. But I’m surprised they’re attaching it to Facebook rather than creating a new standalone app. Maybe Threads being standalone (and harder to grow than expected) has discouraged them.

🛠️ Strategy Tools 🛠️

Ready, Fire, Aim

Today’s strategy tip is about knowing when to ship.

Let’s revisit the GM self-driving story we covered earlier, this time going a bit deeper with the Build-Measure-Learn framework from Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup.

Here’s the gist of the framework:

• Build – create the minimum viable product to test the idea

• Measure – get customers to use it, and track how the idea performs

• Learn – analyze and reflect to determine if this is the right idea-ish or totally off

And Ries explains that companies should loop through these steps to iterate their product as quickly as possible.

But following that advice can be risky.

So rather than a tight cycle, you might see things stretch out, moving from Plan A to Plan B.

Companies following Plan A have tight cycles and ship products early. They trust their users to help with the R&D of measuring and learning (think Android).

Companies following Plan B have longer cycles and ship products slowly. They’re optimizers who protect their users from the rough edges of R&D (think iPhone).

In abandoning their Cruise robotaxi’s and instead focusing on advanced driver assistance systems (the L3 story from the beginning of today’s post), GM is moving from Plan A to Plan B.

I don’t blame them for the decision, but I don’t think it’s the best strategy. On the crest of a self-driving wave, sticking to Plan A would have helped them learn more and faster, potentially dominating their incumbent competitors for years. Now, they’ll still have a chance to battle it out delivering incremental improvements, but the R&D will move more slowly and the competition will be more intense.

🌲 F/T Shoutouts 🌲

• Self-driving trucks – I really enjoyed the interview of Chris Urmson – the co-founder of the self-driving truck company Aurora – on the Pivot Podcast this week. Great insights into the relative difficulty, and relative economic value, of self-driving trucks vs. cars. Link is here, and interview starts at ~42:40.

• Fun gaming graph – Visual Capitalist is amazing. You might have seen it before, but this crazy graph popped up again during some gaming research this week.

  

• Interesting thread from Threads – About the startup strategy of taking an internal, homegrown system and productizing it as a new startup. Seems obvious now that it’s been pointed out, and I see it everywhere (even beehiiv, the platform helping me send you these emails, was spun out of The Morning Brew!). Link here to the thread.

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