Chase the Schleps

The best opportunities often hide behind work that looks tedious and unpleasant. Paul Graham has a name for what keeps us away from them: schlep blindness. We don’t consciously reject the hard, unglamorous problems; we just don’t tend to see them. He argues that a company is “defined by the schleps it will undertake,” and that idea is a large part of why I picked the problem I did.

Why construction procurement

Construction runs on documents, and those documents are a mess. Bids arrive in incompatible formats. The expensive risks live in cover letters, exception clauses, and annexes rather than in the priced positions. Teams still compare everything by hand, in spreadsheets, over days.

Few people want that work, so there is much less competition for it than the size of the problem deserves. And the hard part isn’t reading PDFs. It’s making bids comparable in the first place, and keeping every figure traceable back to the document it came from.

I’d rather spend my time on something that looks boring from the outside and turns out to be enormous once you’re inside it.

Referenced: Paul Graham, Schlep Blindness.