Last week Jason M. Lemkin pointed to Marc Benioff’s TechCrunch Disrupt interview where he told his starting up story – how he went up and down Sandhill Road and no one was interested in his vision of cloud and how no one without exception offered him any money. Its his friends in US and Japan who stood by him and help him build Sales Force which is now 100Bn in market cap.
Have you ever wondered who instructs a Uber driver or a Postmate or Deliveroo worker what to do next, which route to take and how he is being rated. Right. It is algorithm. Self training AI.
What is buyer enablement? A discussion hosted by Product Marketing Community featuring Michele Buckley (Research Director, Gartner) Tim Riesterer (Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions) and Fred Studer (then CMO, FinancialForce, now CMO TIBCO) dived deep into the subject and here are the highlights :
We all are distracted at work. To push complex work at hand to a later time span – a digital age procrastination. Nir Eyal wrote a whole book to help manage distractions on and in this article he underlines 4 steps that could potentially reduce distractions and points to “Bricker’s work using acceptance and commitment therapy in smoking cessation programs “
There has been a lot of advice to the contrary. While I understand that as a philosophy – to focus on your customer and not your competitor – on the ground it makes a lot of tactical sense to know what the competitors are up to and how the ecosystem is reacting to their moves.
I sat through a session organised by TiE,Bangalore of Francisco Santolo the founder of Scalabl – Argentina based Academy of Entrepreneurship and innovation, during his recent trip to the city. He had some radical views and an endearing personality making him instantly likeable. His core message was – the current VC funded startup ecosystem is broken. And in this article in Medium he explains why. It is useful to look at alternate thought processes from time to time to ensure you are doing what is right for your dream and not what is expected in the current discourse of building a startup. If you follow my posts you will know I do agree with a lot of this line of thinking and have followed and written about Rand Fishkin and others who have contrarian views to the current discourse.
In technology, failures were the stepping stones for all success.The thousands of prototypes Edison built for the electric bulb to NASA building its lunar module where the engineering philosophy was “There are no random anomalies”. In this Fast Company article Charles Fishman writes about two such amongst 1400 documented failures during development – one related to the the iconic triangle windows shattering and the high pressure helium tank bursting. The second was one of the solved puzzles while the first with the window glass, remains part of 22 that were never solved.
Logan Strain collated 4 Sales Research Studies and their findings for the Inside Sales Blog. All of us who are trying to enhance sales effectivity will do well to take a look at the studies and deep dive into the data. It will help move away from gut to data driven sales planning.
I found this interesting article by David Mercer of smepals.com in AllBusiness. He shares 5 lessons he learnt in his entrepreneurial journey and they made a comprehensive list of learnings.
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.
