Privacy or data?
I was not aware of Cliqz, the initiative from Europe to build a new search engine and browser from scratch headed by Jean-Paul Schmetz (and not riding on Google or Bing or Yandex for example).
Sales in Early days: Founder is the key
There is no question that in the pre product market fit days the Founder has to do the selling, however the problem is much more complex than we give credit for. I found this series of articles by Martin Casado, General Partner at A16Z, which is absolute gold. Do you remember prepping for questions like “why is your solution better than everyone else?” or building the competitive quadrant pitch decks? Martin writes – “founders fill it in with a comparative set that’s often populated with so-called competitors that aren’t likely to be included in an actual sales bake-off ….so what you’re really positioning against is the status quo.”
13 Steps to Sales Nirvana
When you look for ideas to increase productivity you find a lot of instructions, some contradictory. Most not very easy to follow through. Andrew Quinn listed 13 ideas you can implement right away. As a sales professional or as a founder tasked with sales, remember a 1% improvement every day can compound to a huge change by EOY.
Is SaaS selling software?
Dharmesh Shah knows a thing or two about SaaS. And it takes a lot of wisdom to distill complex ideas into simple truths. I found a 2017 post by him recently where he talks about what is the secret to SAAS success. And it is so simple that once you get it straightened in your mind your entire go to market strategy could follow from there.
10K ARR today = 800k Enterprise value in 3 years
That’s the math that David Cummings wrote about in his post of November 23rd. It is quite simple. If you have $1m of new recurring revenue you are likely looking at a 800k gross margin. Invest half in Marketing and half in hiring two sales people. They will add $1m in new recurring revenue. Rinse and repeat.
The inversion of the Internet
How many times do you routinely prove that you are human? Retyping texts, matching photos of motorcycles and traffic lights. Ot some such ridiculous things? Have you wondered why? Because most of the Internet we encounter today is Fake.
Content Marketing – are you paying attention?
SEMRush hosted their maiden marketing show in Bangalore which was surprisingly well attended despite being a fully paid event. The very first presentation was by Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing on The State of Content Marketing Report 2019.
Letter from two founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from their executive roles at Alphabet the parent company of Google. Like their now legendary letter to prospective shareholders in their S-1 filing in 2004, this one is worth a read for all founders.
The Chatbot story till now
2016 saw rise of the Chatbots that would solve practically everything. Millions were invested by VC’s and all tech majors announced their own plans. However it has turned out to be a much harder problem than envisaged. Google admitted that 70% of its bot assisted conversations needed human support. Microsoft has to roll back ‘Tay’ its Twitter bot.
Startup CEO pay/package
Sammy Abdullah Co-Founder of Blossom Street Ventures wrote this overview of Startup CEO salaries which is educative as well as indicative of some trends. He painstakingly gathered and analyzed data as disclosed by companies while filing for their IPO’s and this is what it revealed:
