3 Skills You Need as a 21st Century Manager
HBR article on cross cultural management, discussing how our place of work has changed dramatically and 3 skills to excel.
T2D3 – the other formula for building a Saas Unicorn.
On 3rd January I shared how ‘1% of Salesforce market share can potentially create a Unicorn’ concept floated by Tomasz Tunguz. Here is another one. This is by Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures. He outlines a 7 phase of GTM success strategy for SAAS companies – and backs it up with data from companies like Marketo, NetSuite, Omniture, Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow and WorkDay.
Why startups fail? “No market need” is the primary reason
A recent report – analyzed and published by CBInsights -( @Anand Sanwal, Founder – CEO, grew his daily newsletter to half a million subscribers simply by providing extremely high value, every day*). In this post mortem which is a follow up of an earlier analysis into the data of startup death, found that 70% of tech companies failed within 20 months of raising, on an average, $1.3mn. For hardware startups the demise rate is 97% (chances of becoming a Unicorn, on the other hand, is 1%).
AI and its merger with Bio-tech – be worried.
It is not AI that you need to worry about. It is the coming merger of AI and Bio-tech.
Right now the data simply provides our action based information to large corporations and governments, what we like, where we do, what we buy, so on and so forth. But we still have the sanctuary of our body and mind. With the merging of AI and Bio-tech this information reach of the external agencies will be inside us and they will know things about us that we didn’t know ourselves.
Our understanding of millennials * seem to be out of whack.
I am listening to this fascinating book – Inventing Ourselves, The secret life of the Teenage Brain by Sarah – Jayne Blakemore.
Sleep. Seriously. It is one of the most important aspects of our life
Mathew Walker, a neuroscientist and Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging lab and Sleep scientist at Google makes a definitive case for Sleeping right and why you should care. In his 2018 much acclaimed book ‘Why We Sleep : Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams’ (Tomasz Tunguz lists it amongst his 10 favorite books in 2018) he presents facts and painstakingly covers multiple studies to offer a compelling case to pay attention and urgently fix your sleeping issues.
Universal Basic Income by 2030’s, billion-fold expansion of human intelligence, medical nanorobots to wipe out every disease.
Listening to Ray Kurzweil is always fascinating. For those of you who have not heard his intimate chat with Chris Anderson, curator of TED, in the The TED interview podcast.
Attention Residue is killing our ability to do meaningful work. Multitasking is a myth.
Prof Sophie Leroy, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, conducted two experiments where she found that people are less productive when they are multitasking or switching between tasks. In her 2009 research paper published as “Why is it so hard to do my work?…” : her abstract states : “…people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.”
What I learnt from Rand on VC funding
I am a big fan of Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and now Sparktoro, not only for what he built at Moz but primarily because of his openness in sharing his experiences and learnings. His recent book, “Lost and Founder” is a great read and an example of candidness, warts and all. Very few books bring that to the table.
Your apps know where you were last night!
If you are using apps for weather, news or local information ( finding petrol station or ATM) the data is available to anyone willing to pay a price and then analyse your daily habits, over days, accurate location recorded as frequently as every 15-20 minutes providing a detailed snapshot of everything you do.
