The deep learning technologies that serve targeted ads or recommend songs and shows are the same ones that will ‘be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries.
David Brock is a veteran in the B2B selling space and he recently wrote a simple post that I loved. He wrote this with reference to a thread started by James Ski. It’s a few minutes read and will be in the interest of all who are part of the ‘buying – selling’ cycle, to seriously think about this simple truth – buying is about the customer achieving desired outcomes. So it is imperative that selling is primarily focused on that too.
There is this really quick but effective read that I found where Mark Manson the author of Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope wrote about how applying Pareto to your life may throw up some surprising results.
Over 500 companies participated in the 2019 edition of the SAAS Benchmarks study by OpenView Partners, now in its 3rd year.
70% of the companies were under $10mn ARR and ranged from Very small to Midmarket by size. According to the findings top two concerns of founders were
– product execution and go-to-market (GTM) execution.
– 2018 was the best year on record for software IPOs with 17 new public companies raising a collective $5.1B, 2x more than the next highest year. Software companies spend $63.1B on R&D, accounting for one-fifth of all domestic business R&D in the US.
As a startup founder myself I spend a lot of time reading and (writing). One thing I look forward to is listening to Podcasts. Here are 5 I frequent. They push my thoughts Masters of Scale – Hosted by Reid Hoffman it is wonderfully produced and brings in a lot of insights as founders open up like never before.
A lot of what we do online, posting videos, writing blogs or articles has been driven by the desire to garner likes. Now every company is a media company, inbound is your go to market tool driven by original content, in turn driven by likes, click-baits and similar basic appeals – it is time to stop and think.
About a year back Nicolas de Kouchkovsky wrote about the rise of intent data. He described how intent is being captured : “Intent data …encompass signals and data about prospective buyers or businesses actively researching products or services. …, the ability to detect that an unusual number of visitors that can be traced to the same company are educating themselves about network anomaly detection will give you a likely security pain point to start engaging.”
The day after Apple reveals their juicy new iPhones I thought it would be appropriate to point at the elephant in the room. The issue is real. We are all spending enormous time staring at our phone. Lot has been written on the ills of this. I spend 2-3 hours on my phone a day and get a lot of work done using my phone as an extended screen of my laptop. I have no games. But I do get a lot of notifications from apps. These distract me often. This article by Ryan Holiday on Forge addresses this issue head-on.
Today Saastock, the definitive SAAS conference from Dublin (now 6 conferences globally and counting) founded by Alexander Theuma , published a list of the most promising saas companies of 2018. It includes companies from eCommerce marketing, community knowledge management, customer engagement, HRMC – well a wide gamut. Oscar Hackett provided the overview in this succinct piece which included the following companies:
The Startup Genome Report for 2019 was out a few months back and it lists the top 30 destinations where the startup ecosystem is thriving.
