Warren Buffett took early retirement at 26 from his teaching job and invested his retirement fund of $174,000 in his own investment business. A billionaire by age 46, (current net worth $83B) his insightful Letters to Shareholders carried unforgettable wisdoms and have become an annual must read for the investing and business community since 1977.
In my post on sales on 14th Feb I wrote about the Buyer study conducted by Steve W Martin. Steve teaches at the Marshall Business School, author of the Heavy Hitter series, advised companies like Google, IBM and PayPal and an expert in *Sales Linguistics.
I read this very appealing piece by Benjamin Hardy and he argues that most productive work gets done first thing in the morning. Block off your first 3 hours or so for distraction free, focused deep work. In fact Robin Sharma, whom Hardy quotes, talks about the 90/90/1 rule which translates to 90 days of focused 90 minute work on the most important project you have on hand – ‘your willpower is highest first thing in the morning, your energy is highest first thing in the morning, and your mental focus is highest first thing in the morning.’
In a recent TrustRadius report on the growing Vertical SAAS market they pointed to an article by Brian Feinstein of Bessemer Venture Partners which pegs growth of Vertical SAAS market between 2010 and 2016 at 3X – from 50B to 150B. He ought to know. Bessemer has a large Vertical SaaS portfolio across education, real estate, construction, healthcare et all.
In a report CBInsights analyzed 1100 startups (that raised seed rounds in 2008-2010) to answer exactly that question. Post seed funding 67% startups stall at some point, fail to raise or exit (unless they become self sustaining but unattractive for investors).
Will you disrupt or be be disrupted? This is an often repeated refrain. After Clayton Christensen published his series of books starting with ‘The Innovators dilemma’ the story of simplified solutions upending complex expensive ones are common lore. Who has not discussed the long march of simple over complex – PC over mainframes, Korean over Japanese over American cars, E-Trade over Schwab over Merrill Lynch. Skype and other VOIP services over phone co’s. Square over Visa and Mastercard, Smartphone camera’s over Digital cameras over Kodak and Nikon.
CSO insights report that in 2016 only 45.8% of forecasted deals closed as predicted. The recent survey of over 270,912 closed won opportunities (making up over $18.1 B in closed revenue ) by InsideSales shows the story continues quite, well, predictably.
Paul Oyer, a labour economist, is deeply interested in the Gig economy and has been analyzing the development from multiple perspectives. He researched income differences between bit workers and full time employees and consulted Upwork the largest freelance website. He also became a Uber certified driver since he ‘didn’t have any skills to sell as a freelancer’ and to better understand how similar platforms work.
The ability to make any use of personal data collected will be severely restricted in a similar manner as it is already in place in European Union through the General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR is one of the most comprehensive data protection laws in the world today. CCPA is considered to be one of the most significant legislative privacy laws in the US.
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argued in their book ‘Abundance’ that exponential technologies are generating an abundance of everything. We can access world’s information, take unlimited photos and stream videos at near zero cost. Soon we will have abundance of water, energy and most commodities that function within the business models built around the principle of ‘scarcity’.
