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Does it matter that pen and paper dominate? How much of the business's expenses are overhead?


I worked in scheduling and timekeeping industry for a little bit, when pen and paper is mentioned you think "oh it's just notes written, and some other things" but in reality it's literally whole departments storing everything in daily/weekly sheets/binders and it's like 20 people's job to keep it all in order and keep the ship running for next week.

When someone asks what the plan is for next week, the answer is normally, it needs to be written out, or I'll have to find this for you etc.


Yeah, my first job at a startup was at an oil and gas saas that ingested unstructured data into a standardized db for smaller operators.*

"How much money did we make yesterday?" was a nontrivial question that required a several people a couple of days to compile manually before our software.

--- * Would probably make a killing today; this was over a decade ago and the extraction was 98% regex and custom if statements




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