new2this

I have a Substack where I was tracking stock trades guiding by an ML model I built. Life got in the way, so I stopped maintaining it and trading with it, but the app is still running on AWS.

So technically, I'm losing money on my newsletter.

The ML model was pretty profitable when I was running it though.

I've built a few sales team for early stage startups, and invariably the question comes up: "Inbound sales is working. Will outbound sales work?"

The successful experiments I've seen look like this: hire 2 SDRs at the time, focus them exclusively on outbound, then measure their results to identify the CAC. Then, you can make a call if that CAC is something you want to scale.

The failed experiments look like this: the founder doesn't want to invest too heavily in something that might not pay off, so we hire 1 SDR and they have to commit 50% of their time to following up on low quality Marketing leads.

It's not so much about the number itself, but more about the experiment design that will give you clear results

Great example of Betteridge's law of headlines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

The reason that email is different than Reddit or Twitter is because you're interrupting the person's day. That means that if you're asking for something from them, people will disregard it. Try offering something valuable instead.

Your call to action should be along the lines of "we're working on solving X problem for people like you, and I'd love to show you what we've built so far. Maybe you'll find it useful".

If you do this, then schedule a 30 minute call where you have a 10-15 minute demo rehearsed that goes over the problem, and why your product exists. After your demo, you can open up into more discovery about their challenges or what they would want to see in your product.

I've built sales teams at startups, and it's a very different outreach process than my current BigCo- your process is more about education and being opinionated.

Email me if you want to chat more.

Listen to his podcast (Against the Rules) from today and you can hear his take on the trial.

I also recommend his interview of Matt Levine (5 episodes ago) to get a good TLDR of the book. Here's my TLDR on the book after finishing it, which mirrors Levine's closely: Michael Lewis sees that Sam thinks he's above the rules and acted with wild disregard for risk because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. It was all illegal and will land him in jail for a long time. But, he did it because he thinks he's the smartest man who ever lived and has the best intentions, not because he sees himself as a crook.

It's a minor nuance, but an important one. It speaks more to the ego of founders and children of privilege, than to a criminal conspiracy. The articles you've read don't like that nuance, and call Lewis soft.

>What happened there ??? The guy who calls out a lot of fraud, now can't see it?

He calls it Fraud many times in his book and in his podcast. He just doesn't call it theft.

You should spend some time with sales leaders to better understand what's needed from a CRM.

I took a look at your CRM product and understand that your long term goal is a great ecosystem...however, your UI is missing the point of a modern CRM.

A CRM used to be account/contact/opportunity tracking. Now, sales teams use CRM as the de facto customer-focused data warehouse (because no one in sales actually knows how to query a data warehouse). These days I rarely use salesforce for anything besides looking up data that was written there by another sales tool via the API. The product focus should be on developing a great analytics solution for salespeople, not an online Rolodex.

I used to work at Salesforce and have deployed it at multiple startups as the founding head of sales. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more; I'm looking forward to the day that Salesforce is replaced by something that better fits the modern sales process.

I've been learning to code for the past year. StackOverflow was hugely important in the beginning. I haven't used it in probably 2 months because ChatGPT does an excellent job of not only answering my questions, but also allowing me to ask follow up questions like "what does that specific line of code do?"

Hey HN,

This is a side project I've been working on for a few months as a way to learn Python. I'll call this the MVP stage, so please let me know what you think.

The central allegation is that Tether would print coins for themselves that were not backed by USD and then buy BTC. Thus, artificially propping up BTC in a price range where they could then quickly sell, pocket profits, and stor the money to back the Tether they just printed.

>This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.

Mountain climbing is superfluous by this logic- why would you bother climbing a mountain when you could just take a helicopter to the top? Or even more accessible: why would hike to a lookout when there's a road to take you to the same spot?

There is still joy and value in doing things the hard way, even if an easier way exists.

I remember some stat that the loudest voices are the 8% on either end of the political spectrum. I couldn't find where I heard that, but Pew has some data that mirrors that.

I think that 20% is coming from this:

"The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%"[1]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

Direct interview link, no commentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyoGdwVIwWw

>What's your assumption based on?

Anecdotal. Seeing restaurants that no longer do sit down and only do delivery, plus the creation of the ghost kitchen market. I also have no data, so I can't really defend this point. Just an observation.

>How is it different? They run an unprofitable business that rips off everyone involved and is subsidized by investors who were suckered into thinking this is a real business.

The point I was making is that the food delivery marketplace is a real business that delivers real value, just a sucky one with unclear value. Your comment seems to outline that you think it's built on hype and sucking in future money to pay past investors.

The fact that Lyft can, at times, be profitable disproves your point.

>I also think Standard Oil shouldn't exist. In fact, so did the US government in a landmark antitrust case that you may have heard of.

Agreed, but "should/shouldn't exist" wasn't the argument. The initial argument was "if you use this strategy, you're not a real business" which I think is false.

Distasteful, destructive, and something that should be illegal- sure.

Ponzi scheme, doomed to fail, not a real business tactic- no.

>Build a real business. If you can't be profitable without eliminating all the competition by undercutting them then jacking up prices, then you shouldn't exist

This was a major part of the playbook of Standard Oil; I would consider them a real business.

>The business model of these so-called unicorns is effectively a Ponzi scheme

"Ponzi scheme" has been thrown around flippantly lately, and I think your comment is perfect example of that.

I think it's a safe assumption that significantly more people order food from local restaurants than they did before DoorDash existed. So they did create a real market with a real product. It's not a 'box' that SBF would be proud of.

>but the sooner gig companies like Uber and DoorDash collapse, the better.

This I agree with, but for different reasons. These apps price their services artificially low by charging high fees to restaurants, underpaying drivers (forcing them to live on tips), and by- at times- subsidizing prices with investor money to keep them artificially low.

Overall, I think it's a crappy business model that doesn't deliver much value. But that's just my opinion.

This description matches my experience interacting with multiple COO's at startups of varying size. Most CEO's I know look outwards and to the future, the COO ensures the company executes against the path the CEO has set

The role responsibilities are nebulous and change based on the company, but can generally be described as "whatever is necessary for the business to run". That could mean they focus on running Sales, Marketing, Support, Customer Success, but they could also oversee Operations and in some cases Product.

Clickbait title. Tether is only vaguely mentioned and there is nothing related to Tether operations- only to an employee at Tether.

While this article covers an interesting topic, the title is clearly an attempt to bandwagon on the "Tether is next" narrative while contributing nothing substantial to the conversation

His company is already based in the Bahamas, how much further could he fly?

>Tell me which retail brokerages lost their customers assets because they gambled them away?

Banks are required to keep a percentage of deposits in risk free assets as part of the Basel Accord[1].

Banks were marking risky assets such as Super Senior tranches of CDO's as risk free when, guess what, they were actually super risky. When the value of those tranches dropped, the banks lost tons of value and all of the sudden couldn't cover their debts because they were gambling with what should have been cash.

So to answer your question: all of the banks (who were dealing in CDO's) did this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III#US_version_of_the_Ba...

"Fools Gold" does a great job of documenting this contagion effect (among other things) during the 2008 crash. Highly recommend

This comment seems to be focused on the viability of any individual crypto, but that _shouldn't_ matter for the value of a company like FTX.

FTX has value because it has customers, growth, and most importantly: revenue.

If any one crypto goes bust then it shouldn't hurt FTX in the long run, unless they were leveraging that crypto to make unscrupulous bets. That very well could be happening via Alemeda.

So you may be right that this is destined to come crashing down, but it doesn't seem like the facts are proven yet