About a month ago I wrote about remote work and quoted Jason Fried. He has been open about his ideas of how we need to look at work differently and sharing his learnings at 37 Signals – now Basecamp, for over two decades.
In the Smarter with Gartner series, Jordan Bryan recently summarized shifted realities vis a vis B2B Buyers. Although popular discourse amongst the leaders in the sales/sales training industry would like to believe otherwise, the Buyer has actually changed. Here are the headlines :
What do Original thinkers look like? Procrastinators, full of doubt and fear and tons of bad ideas.
Why would the Innovation Leader in a top 5 consulting firm sign up with Uber to drive drunk people around at 2am? Ted Graham, now Head of Open Innovation at GM outlines 3 learnings as a UberX driver (while at PWC). Highly regulated industries (like transportation aka Taxi industry or even Accounting) are in for major disruption. Unless disrupted already.
Pricing your SAAS is easy. Just follow the per user/per month formula and build multiple levels based on truncated product or cascading features (higher you pay more you get). According to people who know, SAAS and SAAS pricing it is time to rethink this approach.
CBInsights has put out another interesting infographic that lists all the 310 Unicorns around the world. They sort unicorns into 13 categories, from cyber security to Internet Software Services. The Other category includes companies within real estate, ed tech, renewable energy, aerospace, etc.
According to a recent CBInsights report startups outside US raised more equity dollars than US based startups 2nd year in a row. China – between Beijing and Shanghai – is catching up in terms of number of deals and funds raised. Silicon valley is still way ahead (as a singular location) with over 200 exits above $100mn where Tel Aviv is better performing than London,Boston, NY and LA (it is also a favorite of international investors).
Andy Raskin recently wrote on his experience of a CEO he was working with, negotiating with a senior colleague on the strategic story for the company. The colleague was not aligned with what was being proposed and Andy’s sessions with him did not help at all. He didn’t budge. Next, the CEO has a chat at the end of which this employee turns around completely. It was attributed to a negotiation technique espoused by Chris Voss in his book ’Never Split the Difference’.
“ …the best answers to the enormous problems we are struggling with always starts with asking the right question.”- Clayton Christensen. 25 years back he wrote ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ to instant stardom. Since then he has penned 11 books and numerous articles. Based on his latest book ‘The Prosperity Paradox’ he wrote an article on lessons learned.
In 2015 Brad Feld mooted the idea of the Rule of 40% for SaaS companies. The rule states that “your growth rate + your profit should add up to 40%. So, if you are growing at 20%, you should be generating a profit of 20%. If you are growing at 40%, you should be generating a 0% profit. If you are growing at 50%, you can lose 10%. If you are doing better than the 40% rule, that’s awesome.”
