andyraskin

Could it be that your description of Zuora as a simple USP/single driving change business is actually a testament to the simple way they tell their story? I'm the author of the post, and every business I consult with is, as you say, "complex...addressing multiple trends or with multiple layers of innovation..." That hasn't stopped any of them from crafting a similarly simple story -- starting with a single change. Usually that means either (a) focusing on the most important one; or (b) naming a change that subsumes many of the others. Getting leadership teams to align around one change isn't easy, but I'm getting better at it :)

After I published the post, Zuora released a version of the deck that I assembled from their public slides at https://www.zuora.com/resource/best-sales-deck-ever/. It's not the deck I got from their ex-salesperson, but IMO what you can learn from it is similar enough.

IMO, pointing out the similarity between what Lilly preaches and what was — love it or hate it — a successful strategy in another field (that happens to be politics) is relevant and apolitical.

I've been checking out a few invoicing app alternatives:

* InvoicePlane - self-hosted, open source (PHP). https://invoiceplane.com/

* Invoicely (formerly Invoiceable): http://invoicely.com

* Hiveage: https://www.hiveage.com

I've mainly been using Invoicely (free if you just create invoices and send them as PDFs), but now feeling bad about it because: https://medium.com/@prabhaths/invoicely-a-hiveage-rip-off-b9... I really like free, though, so thinking about switching to InvoicePlane.

This history of the Western Addition (including the Fillmore) — http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Western_Addition:_A_B... — suggests that three factors contributed to the growth of its black community after WWII:

(1) a sudden rise in SF's black population in the aftermath of WWII (from ~5K residents in 1940 to 43.5K in 1950)

(2) the Western Addition's already diverse racial makeup (relative to other neighborhoods at the time)

(3) the internment of Japanese Americans, which removed ~5K residents from the Western Addition virtually overnight.

Cool. I'd love to know how it works (or doesn't) for you.

Recursion is exactly the same (as induction) because it also requires specifying what to do in a base case. I guess I think recursion is a more instructive term than "working backwards" because it speaks to a rigorous programmatic approach.

I was asked to solve this puzzle once during a project management interview. The solution here says "work backwards," but I found that "work recursively" was a more helpful (and instructive) way to think about it.

Full disclosure: I had to look up pou sto also. I guess there are still some downsides to not majoring in the classics.

Wow, thank you for that link. Never saw it before. Perlis really did deliver on his intention to give us a "pou sto to last the student for 40 years, not a handbook for tomorrow’s employment." Every time I've encountered a new language or framework (Java, Ruby, Rails, whatever), I've been grateful to him. He also delivered on his intention to keep us "on the computer early and often." I didn't get much sleep that semester -- now I see that was by design :)

In my opinion, it's fair to consider API-connected services — and maybe even the Web itself (which did not exist when Perlis first said this) — as "computer programs." In that sense, we're all building this cathedral together.

A nice recent counterexample (even though the question mark is in the subhead): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/the-avenger

I particularly like 2 things about this story: 1) They chose the market niche BEFORE designing the product 2) The Craigslist scraper growth hack.

Join the club!