Hah, that's not going to help, they're not going to read any individual response. They're going to feed the entire thing into the AI slop machine and ask it to generate them a summary. It's a slop human centipede.
13,002 karma · joined October 8, 2008
I've done so much startup stuff I'm equally bad at all of it.
I currently work coaching Founders globally from a base in Singapore: https://coaching.figuringshitout.com/
I formerly was a 3x Founder and have worked in Engineering, Design, Product & Growth.
I also have a background in Computer Vision (designed a single camera 3D tracking algorithm), Augmented Reality (Designed a AR prototype for FEMA to manage disaster response workers), Tabletop/Touch Computing (Studied how people's collaborative behaviors change when put under time pressure), HCI (Studied it for 4 years), Interaction Design (ditto) and am well read in Psychology (esp. Social Psych), Economics, & other random trivia.
I also cook... a lot.
* are many times the size of the occupants, greatly constricting throughput.
* are many times heavier than humans, requiring vastly more energy to move.
* travel at speeds and weights that are danger to humans, thus requiring strictly segregated spaces.
* are only used less than 5% of the day, requiring places to store them when unused.
* require extremely wide turning radiuses when traveling at speed (there’s a viral photo showing the entire historical city of Florence fit inside a single US cloverleaf interchange)
Not only have none of these flaws been fixed, many of them have gotten worse with advancing technology because they’re baked into the nature of cars.
Anyone at the invention of automobiles with sufficient foresight could have seen the intersecting incentives that cars would wreak, same as how many of the future impacts of LLMs are foreseeable today, independent of technical progress.
* How do I get promoted?
* How do I get a raise?
* How do I not get fired?
Beyond those common desires are a constellation of more personalized that is specific for each salesperson and the cohort they target (I'm somewhat of an idealist in that I believe people are quite often strongly driven by meaningful non-capitalist, non-realist desires).
In any case, when you're working in enterprise sales, what you have to realize is that, regardless of what the desire is, what your corporate champion is "buying" is a way for them to achieve their goals and only incidentally what is good for the company, where your product is merely a proxy to accomplishing this.
Of course, companies also know this and anyone who has owned a P&L immediately recognizes that the sum of all things everyone wants far exceeds the resources of the balance sheet, thus, some selection process needs to be put in place to allocate scarce resources.
Your corporate champion is ideally far more aligned with you against the company than they are with the company against you and your job is to figure out how to win this selection battle together.
The core insight though, is that people are actually astonishingly bad at performing on this and it's actually quite easy for an outside sales person to become a subject matter expert for 3 core reasons:
1. Any employee usually only ever has a sample size of 1 whereas you have a broader peek into how this has happened across a range of companies industry wide.
2. Any employee, only a minor part of their job involves interfacing with outside parts of the firm responsible for allocating resources whereas you treat this as a core competency.
3. For any person, it's always easier to advise a 3rd party on what to do than to practice the same actions yourself.
What this means though, is that, as an enterprise salesperson, you should understand that your core value comes from developing subject matter expertise in how to help people in your industry get promotions, get raises and avoid getting fired and the product you're representing at the moment is merely the avenue through which you enable that to happen.
The best salespeople I've ever met always share a common core value that they deeply care about making sure everyone around them is getting rich with the faith that some of that money eventually reflects onto them but that's not what drives them. That's why so many immigrants and children of immigrants make such great salespeople, they've seen the material difference wealth has made on their circumstances and they want to spread that opportunity to others.
This is what I advise Founders who start Enterprise focused businesses. Fundamentally, you should be thinking about how do I get someone to VP/Director/Line Manager/Tech Lead 2/3/5 years earlier than if my product doesn't exist and how do you breathe this passion day in day out.
You have to understand that
a) There is no "objective" standard by which a manager can be evaluated as good or bad
b) You are not in a position to determine whether your manager is "good" or "bad", only whether they are a good or bad fit for you. The person who determines whether your manager is good or bad is your skip.
Good managers are the ones that get retained and considered for promotion, bad managers are the ones who are slated for demotion or firing. It doesn't matter if a manager does things counter to every management best practice, if they consistently get promoted, they're a "good" manager. If you don't like that, you should consider working for a company where this doesn't typically happen.
How you deal with a manager that is not a good fit for you is to determine how much political capital they have within the organization. If they're there to do the job the company wants them to do but you simply don't fit into the larger objectives, then you need to accept that for what it is and understand that the purpose of a system is what it does.
However, if you understand that they don't have as much political power as they would seem to let on, then you have a lot more room to maneuver. It's possible to work with the skip to transfer you to a different team because the skip values retaining you more than they value keeping that manager happy. It's also possible though risky to help build the case for the skip that this manager was not the right fit and should be helped to find a different position, possibly at another firm which would be more suited to their skills. Skips don't have visibility into the day to day workings of a manager so understanding what a skip needs to build their case and how you can be an ally in the documentation can be a valuable function you can serve.
But ultimately, these are both lower probability scenarios and you should be preparing as a likely contingency for your exit from the company and finding a manager more suited to you.
A documentary about the various conspiracy theories developed around The Shining. The music in the YT video is from the documentary.
People like to think that intelligence is some intrinsic force but it's far better thought of as situational. We are contextually smarter or dumber based on the emotions we're trying to process from a situation and how our motivation reasoning allows us to avoid certain negative emotions.
The subset of people the OP is trying to argue against are people who are otherwise normally intelligent but have an emotional need for AI to be unimportant that they're unable to process so they build a social community of terrible arguments.
The nature of the internet is that visibility is terribly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with popularity so OP thinks this is some large contingent of people when it's instead algorithmically served conflict generators.
Writing against that is also an algorithmic conflict generator, as evidenced by the number of upvotes here. The correct response is to realize that people putting up terrible arguments about AI don't actually care about AI, they're using this issue to process unresolved trauma from other, unrelated areas of their life and taking their ideas literally instead of seriously is a waste and diversion. There are plenty of smart people with far more nuanced views that still disagree with you where they're interested in the content of the argument.
That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.
Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.
None of the claims made in the article are surprising because they’re the natural outgrowth of the hodgepodge of incentives we’ve accreted as what we call “science” over time and you just need to practice over time to be able to place the output of science in the proper context and understand that a “paper” is an artifact of a sociotechnical system with all the entailing complexity that demands.
There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.
eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:
* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?
* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?
* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?
* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".
Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.
The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!
But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!
PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.
In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.
You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.
Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.
There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.
> The more time I spend advising founders, the clearer it gets that 80% of my value is repeating "don't die, don't lie to yourself"
Startups are contrarian, many of the most successful ones are the ones "experts" are convinced are bad. I think in terms of the retrospective, assume we're at the point where the startup has shut down and the post-mortem is done and the reason was because it was a bad idea, how do we get there as fast as possible so there's time to pivot.
1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors?
2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving?
3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem?
4. How do we overcome those blocks?
Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you done, it's what have you learnt. I do not give a shit about anything you've done if it's not in the service of learning.
I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the following questions:
1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the maximum amount of pain?
2. When did you learn each specific thing?
3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing?
4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta?
Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied consistently over a long enough span of time.
Seems to be a piece of content marketing intended to help the two founders land a new role in the US so, in that sense, it does seem pretty strategic and well targeted.
Nowhere is that said.
The benefit of them selling is not for the management to understand, it's for the worker to understand and be able to articulate as it will flow downstream to strategy.
Maybe the management doesn't understand but my point is it's irrelevant. I've been in management situations where I've understood perfectly well and ones where I have zero clue, my requirements for you selling to me remain exactly the same which is I'm using it as a gauge of how much you understand.
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The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.
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Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate autonomously with trust.
It's the guy/gal who you know needs to be informed that the feature they've been painstakingly working on for the last 2 months is scrapped due to a strategic realignment and now they're tasked on working on some non-revenue bullshit to win a turf war and their response is a shrug and brainstorming of how do we play this rather than getting all up in their feelings and require emotional babysitting for the next 2 months.
Negotiation is a grammar. The rules of the grammar, when laid out on the page, sound incredibly basic. But like any grammar, anyone used to "hearing" the grammar, it becomes immediately apparently who has command of the grammar and who is making grammatical mistakes.
But the point of the grammar is not to learn the grammar, the point of the grammar is to make beautiful sentences. How far you choose to go down the path is up to your own avocation but learning the grammar allows you to understand and communicate the beautiful sentences of negotiation.
When in an interview, when you're asked a question about your past experiences, the larger the library you have to draw on, the more likely you are to find an example that's relevant and persuasive. Even questions of the form "How would you deal with [hypothetical scenario]", I encourage applicants, if possible, to answer it in the form of "Oh yeah, that's interesting, we had to deal with a very similar case at [one of my previous jobs], here was my approach towards it".
After each interview, do a "l'esprit de l'escalier" retro, write down all the questions asked, what your answer was at the time and what you would have ideally answered now given the fullness of time to think about it. If there's a significant delta, that's a sign to go back and prepare more until your "real time" performance approaches your retroactive performance.
Assume that X% of companies are interested in you and you pursue Y leads to result in X% * Y offers. A large number of people will receive 0 offers and they'll be long term on the job market until they make a change to either X (job hunting strategy) or Y (pool of roles considered).
A large number of people will receive >1 offers because they're competitive in the marketplace. Only some tiny number of people will receive exactly one offer unless Y is very small.
That many people only receive one offer is more of a sign that they're not strategic in their job hunting approach (which is upstream of them not being strategic in their negotiations) and this is a fixable problem.
The intention of the game is to analyze this and ask why the narrator is so confident and dogmatic and to see a layer underneath, it's not to take the narrator at face value.