Michael Tannenbaum is not only the CFO of Brex the new credit card in the block, but also heads its marketing. A rare if not odd combination. How did that come about? Well as he joined Brex, “I started running it right away because we needed someone to, and I had seen success in marketing at SoFi.” he told host Tara Larson in this immensely educative episode of Inside Intercom Podcast. The episode is a great listen at 32 mins.
Apparently Albert Einstein famously said “the person who has not made his great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do so.”
Albert-László Barabási is a Physicist, the author of the book ‘The Formula’ and a pioneer in network science. In this very interesting TED talk he disagrees and unravels the inner workings that drive success irrespective or your sphere of work and unveils the connection between age and success.
Albert Laszio got interested in the network effect on success and started with some very accurate predictions of ‘the success of an artist if you give me the first five exhibits that he or she had in their career.’ Although our understanding is that success is intrinsically linked to performance but the truth is ‘ ..performance is what you do: how fast you run, what kind of paintings you paint,’ while ‘..success is about what the community notices from what you did, ..how does it reward you for it? In other terms, your performance is about you, but your success is about all of us.”
All in all it is a fascinating take on input and output. Well Success is not an output but a perception of what the output is worth assigned by the rest of us.
Where I learnt it #219
What can we learn from people who succeed later in life? https://ideas.ted.com/what-can-we-learn-from-people-who-succeed-later-in-life/
The most discussed topic in any saas gathering is Funding. While you would like to think that it should be the product, it is not. “Have you raised?” “Are you raising?” “Pre seen? Series A? Angel? Syndicate?” – you get the drift.
According to CB Insights there are 361 Unicorns in the world. A recent report in Strategy + Business reveals China has about 200 startups less than 10 years old and have valuations of 1B or more. 70% of them are preparing to go global.
Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University Rome in Italy and his friends have created the first mathematical model that can accurately reproduce the patterns that innovations follow.
When I was attending the BMC course at Mars Discovery District one in my cohort referred to The Mom Test. This book on customer discovery by Rob Fitzpatrick asks entrepreneurs to doggedly pursue the truth. Even if it says your idea sucks. If you are concerned about feelings and a fragile ego, talk to your Mom.
We all need to have these – Difficult Conversations. Most of us avoid it till the point it cannot be avoided anymore. And we all know the delay hurts the organisation and relationships. Joel Garfinkle, an executive leadership coach wrote in this piece in Harvard Business Review and it provides simple framework that will help with those otherwise dreaded moments.
What is the right price? Are you charging too high leading to fiction in conversion, long sales cycles thereby reducing the revenue velocity? You need to closely examine if the extra per deal is worth it in terms of the friction it adds to the sales process.
I have been a fan of Guy Raz and How I Built this from NPR. I look forward to its episodes and have heard some truly fascinating stories of grit, determinations and growth. This is where I heard the Whole Foods Story from John Mackey ( remember the multibillion dollar Amazon acquisition?), of Jerry Murrell of Five Guys and a Burger, Melanie Perkins of Canva and today James Dyson and his vacuum cleaner story.
I came across this 2015 article in Mashable by Seth Fiegerman on why and how Google jumped into the Social bandwagon, created a non starter and sort of Me-too product, copying Facebook and lost the plot. It is a back story of how Vic Gundotra, then close to Larry page, built up a threat frenzy within where apparently none existed (at this point FB was valued at 14B and Google 200Bn – not any more). Although the security lapses gave the immediate reason for Google to decide on shutting down G+ the broader issues, primarily of non adoption, and blowback for coercion ( remember when you had to have a G+ account to sign into other Google services?) hastened the end.
