The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is facing backlash for denouncing "zombie ideas" such as "social responsibility" in his manifesto.

Criticism of "social responsibility"

Marc Andreessen's manifesto sparked a debate within the tech industry about the need for regulating technology and AI.

Debate over technology regulation

The article highlights the conflicting goals of the venture capital ecosystem, where the primary focus is on generating profits for investors, even though the industry aims to build a better world.

Conflict of interest in venture capital ecosystem

Some investors argue that the March bank run at Silicon Valley Bank, which they blame on VCs urging founders to withdraw deposits, demonstrates the need for regulators to control investors to avoid moral hazard.

Call for regulation and control from investors

Ideas extracted with AI. Looks short & cool

Marc Andreessen's critique of "zombie ideas" such as "social responsibility" has sparked outcries from investors and tech ethicists.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

business

Business

Marc Andreessen is getting raked over the coals for calling social responsibility the 'enemy'

<ul><li>More than 80% of billionaires were born poor.</li><li>Genetics play a role, but it is out of our control.</li></ul>Successful people understand themselves & the world better. Because most of them learn all the time. They have better ideas, because they have lots more ideas.

The Source of Success

This book is not about changing who you are, but becoming the best version of yourself. The Mindset of Success provides a clearly structured set of tools to change the way you think, act and perform, pushing you beyond good management to great leadership. After 14 years of researching leaders around the world, Jo Owen has found that the best and most successful leaders have something more powerful than just skill. They act differently because they think differently. This book will help you unlock your true potential, showing you how to acquire the seven key mindsets that lead to success, whilst making the most of your existing talent and focusing on your natural strengths. This is the second edition of the bestselling The Mindset of Success and it has been updated with new cutting-edge research, targeted business advice and guidance on how your mindset must change as you move through your career. From spies to sports, education to entrepreneurship, business to beyond, Jo Owen's original research and interviews will show you how outstanding leaders think and behave differently from the merely good. This is the mindset difference and, once you have it, you have an advantage which lasts for a lifetime and will work for you time and time again. Using this unique book to develop your right mindset will enable you to open up new career possibilities and achieve far more than you could have imagined.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

This book is not about changing who you are, but becoming the best version of yourself. The Mindset of Success provides a clearly structured set of tools to change the way you think, act and perform, pushing you beyond good management to great leadership. After 14 years of researching leaders around the world, Jo Owen has found that the best and most successful leaders have something more powerful than just skill. They act differently because they think differently. This book will help you unlock your true potential, showing you how to acquire the seven key mindsets that lead to success, whilst making the most of your existing talent and focusing on your natural strengths. This is the second edition of the bestselling The Mindset of Success and it has been updated with new cutting-edge research, targeted business advice and guidance on how your mindset must change as you move through your career. From spies to sports, education to entrepreneurship, business to beyond, Jo Owen's original research and interviews will show you how outstanding leaders think and behave differently from the merely good. This is the mindset difference and, once you have it, you have an advantage which lasts for a lifetime and will work for you time and time again. Using this unique book to develop your right mindset will enable you to open up new career possibilities and achieve far more than you could have imagined.

Jo Owen

The Mindset of Success

You should only invest in virality if you are confident that virality will be your primary growth engine for your product. As opposed to (1) performance marketing, (2) content, or (3) sales.Most companies find the vast majority of their growth from just one of those four growth engines, and until you’ve scaled your core engine, time spent optimizing a secondary or tertiary engine is rarely time well spent.

Should You Invest In Virality?

<ul><li>Your product is better with friends or colleagues (e.g. Snapchat, Slack)</li><li>The product is innately fun or rewarding to share (e.g. travel photos, homes for sale, incidents nearby)</li><li>Your product is remarkable — something worth remarking about.</li></ul>

Virality is a natural fit for your product if:

<ul><li>You generate revenue directly from new users (e.g. purchasing a product, subscribing to a service), which you can then use to fund more marketing</li><li>Customers are not naturally going to be looking for your product, and thus you have to come to them (e.g. a new DTC brand)</li></ul>

Performance Marketing is a natural fit for your product if:

<ul><li>Your users naturally generate public content (e.g. reviews or answers to questions) when using your product, which you can use to attract new users</li><li>You have a lot of unique data (e.g. restaurants in Seattle, plumbers in Phoenix), which you can turn into rich auto-generated pages</li></ul>

Content is a natural fit for your product if:

<ul><li>Customers have high average order values and high LTV</li><li>Your product requires hand-holding to be successful with</li></ul>

Sales is a natural fit for your product:

Virality is simply growth that stems from your existing users. Each user brings in on average more than one additional user (directly or indirectly) and thus creates exponential growth.

What is “virality”, anyway? 

<ol><li>Word-of-mouth virality: Hearing about it from friends or colleagues</li><li>Invitation virality: Being actively invited by friends or colleagues</li><li>Experiential virality: Seeing the product in action</li></ol>

What are the different types of virality?

<ol><li>Increasing sharing rate: More word-of-mouth, invitations, or experiential serendipity</li><li>Increasing conversion rate: Getting new users through your funnel at a higher rate</li><li>Increasing engaged users: Getting more users, and re-engage existing users</li></ol>

How do you increase your product’s virality?

Q: Is it possible to increase the virality of my product? If so, how?

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

product

Product & Design

How to increase virality

Competition is so fierce that you have to create something remarkable in order to succeed. Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. The opposite of remarkable is very good.

“We contacted the 100 designers and artists we admired most and instead asked if we could interview them for a blog on productivity in the creative world. Nearly all of them said yes. After asking a series of questions over email, we offered to construct a portfolio on their behalf on Behance, alongside the blog post. Nobody declined. This initiative yielded a v1 of Behance that was jam-packed with projects, each from 100 top creatives, built the way we wanted. This manual labor was the most important thing we ever did. It solved our chicken-or-egg problem.”

How Behance Convinced Top Designers To Show Portofolios

Behance’s idea for solving chicken-or-egg problem was great

Lessons from Pinterest, Netflix, Tinder, Dropbox, DoorDash, Robinhood, Amazon, WhatsApp, and dozens of today’s most successful consumer businesses

startup

Startups

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 3: Craft your pitch

<ol><li>Tell the audience what you’re going to say</li><li>Say it to your audience</li><li>Then tell them what you’ve said</li></ol>

3 Parts For Telling Something To An Audience

This popular advice allows speakers to hammer their points with repetition, but I wonder how many members of the audience will remain awake. Do you know who originated this tripartite template? I have seen it credited to the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie.

At the end you have to review what you have already said. Here you may properly do what some wrongly recommend doing in the introduction-repeat your points frequently so as to make them easily understood. What you should do in your introduction is to state your subject, in order that the point to be judged may be quite plain; in the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by which your case has been proved.

At The End 

Radio expert John Horn says the continuing popularity of several stale and long-familiar comedy programs reminds him of the political spell-binder who gave this frank explanation for his success: “First I tells ’em what I’m gonna tell ’em. Then I tells ’em. Then I tells ’em what I told ’em.”

A friend presented me the concept and it made me curious

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

communication

Communication

Tell ’Em What You’re Going To Tell ’Em

What does that look like in the context of the user journey? For a ride-sharing app with a simple user journey, it might look like this:Aha moments are emotional and impactful, creating a powerful impression that keeps users coming back for more. Ideally, your aha moment should happen the first time users try your product—usually during onboarding .The aha moment is a moment of sudden insight or discovery. In software, it’s the pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it.

What is an Aha moment

That moment things click—when a user realizes that they can truly benefit from your app—is their aha moment. Sometimes users actively realize this moment, while others experience it more subconsciously. Either way, the aha moment is the switch that turns an evaluating user into an activated user. It also often separates the users who stick around from those who churn.

Why Aha moment is important

<ol><li>Start with data you already have—in particular, your user analytics and user feedback</li><li>Supplement with user feedback</li><li>Learn from churned users</li></ol>

How to find your product's aha moment

Knowing which actions or events in your product trigger aha moments allows you to create more tailored onboarding experiences for different types of users.For example, Duolingo asks the user to choose if he's new to the language or if he knows some.

Personalize your user's journey to “aha!“

Signup forms, multiple tabs, installs, tutorial videos—the more work you make a user put in before they hit their “aha,” the less likely it is that they’ll stick around for it. If you can get users to their aha moment before requiring them to enter credit card info, agree to Terms of Service, or even log in—do it! That moment of activation will work in your favor—don’t gate your aha moment if you don’t have to.Take a look at how Airbnb gives you access to all their listings before asking you for any information.

How to get users to aha faster

Use tooltips to point users where you want them to go, leading them directly to your aha moment with a step-by-step breakdown of what to do. Instead of telling users what to do via a boring guide or video, tooltips show users exactly how to get to their goals. When new users don’t have to figure things out on their own, they’re more likely to reach “aha.”

Tooltips

Great ideas on how to start with the aha moment. Spoiler alert: Add it in onboarding

In this comprehensive guide, we'll cover how to define, design, personalize, and optimize your own product's aha moment.

The aha moment guide: How to find, optimize, and design for your product

An expert’s job is often to simplify complicated concepts so that other people, with less knowledge, can understand. So for Statisticians, Scientists, and all kinds of professionals, the value to the audience when you speak is defined by your ability to simplify, sometimes hugely complex things, so that your audience can use your knowledge in their lives.Expertise is of neutral value unless you are able to communicate what you know to decision-makers, colleagues and senior technical leaders in a way that they can use.

Understand your audience

It’s these definitions that set the baseline for understanding the application of your expertise. Don’t ever assume that everyone knows what ‘mortality assumptions’ means in actuarial accounting; or that ‘visual storytelling’ is anything other than marketing nonsense. If you don’t explain what it is, they can’t tell why it’s important.

Define your terms

Describe how your concept fits into a particular category or how it can be broken down into parts that can be described more easily; this is useful in showing your reader how your concept fits into a big picture, how it can be divided, and how it’s a key tool that will help you in explaining complex issues, and the audience to understand.

Classify and divide your concept into ‘chunks’

An analogy involves explaining an unfamiliar concept in terms of a familiar one.For example analogy between a computer firewall and a bank, you could say that (honest and unarmed) people don’t just go directly into a bank and remove cash. They might go to the counter clerk and identify themselves; the clerk then will make sure they have money in their account and give them the money they require. Similarly, a firewall ensures that people who want information and access to an IT network are trusted to have that access.

Illustrate with examples

Working on a system that will help describe complex concepts

🏃‍♂️ Adding ideas about complex concepts

How to explain complex concepts

Most people (especially engineers) underestimate the importance of sales because it's hard to accept that customers will not come just because they build cool stuff.Engineers are biased to think that way. But it's only a delusion to think that distribution will flow magically without considering a proper distribution system.

People underrate the importance of sales

In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or fails. They add value by becoming experts at a technical skill that can be evaluated relatively easily.Sales are the opposite: a campaign could be to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. Engineers see this as dishonest.People overestimate the relative difficulty of engineering and science because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What engineers miss out on is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Engineers' view on sales

All salesman are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.Sales work best when hidden. People in sales, marketing, or advertising have a job title that has nothing to do with those things.And there is a reason for all of this: none of us wants to be reminded when we're being sold; the world is secretly driven by sales.

Sales are hidden in plain sight

The engineer's grail is a product great enough that it sells by itself. But anyone who says this either is delusional or is selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).Think about distribution as something essential to the design of the product.Good product + Bad distribution of the product = Bad business

Distribution is part of the product

If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business--no matter how good the product

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly. No matter how strong the product (even if it is the next best product in the world), it must be supported with a strong distribution plan.

Does distribution matter more than the product?

It can vary based on the product's target customers.To have a viable business, the total net profit that the company earns from a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, CLV) should be bigger than the amount spent to acquire the customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC).It starts from consumer products (eg. Snapchat) where CAC is low, CLV is also low, but a big number of possible customers. And it ends with big and complex products (eg. SpaceX, Palantir) where the product is sold to big businesses or the government, CAC is high in order to offer as much credibility as possible.

Distribution methods

Work for low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral marketing.A laundry detergent company can't afford to pay salespeople to go door-to-door, but instead pays salespeople to talk to grocery chains since one deal might mean 100.000 bottles sold.To reach its end user, this kind of company has to produce television commercials, print coupons and design its product boxes to attract attention.

Marketing and advertising

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. If every new user leads to more than one additional user, it will grow exponentially.This ideal viral loop should be as quick and frictionless as possible.

Viral marketing

At Paypal, they wanted to get the most valuable users first, which were the emigrants who wire money back home, but the transactions were infrequent - didn't work.They needed a segment with a higher velocity of money - they found eBay 'PowerSellers' (the professional vendors who sold goods online through eBay's auction marketplace). Almost 20.000 users. Most had multiple auctions each day, they also bought as much as they sold.Because eBay's solution to the payment was terrible, these merchants were extremely enthusiastic early adopters.

Find the perfect users (market segment)

As an engineer, it was hard to not underestimate the importance of distribution. Most of the time when I was thinking about sales, my brain(thoughts) just decides to skip it.

📚 Reading the chapter "If you build it, will they come?"

Zero to one: If you build it, will they come?

Companies spend countless hours improving their product, tweaking their positioning, and acquiring new customers. Yet most subscription companies spend precious little time thinking about their pricing. Data from 512 companies shows that monetization has nearly 2x the impact of acquisition efforts, and a massive 4x the improvement from time spent acquiring more customers.

Overlooking a core revenue driver

Fixed pricing stays simple: a single product, a fixed set of features, and a fixed price per month.Flat-rate pricing is easier to communicate and easier to sell. Adding valuable features? Raise your rate. Additional products? The fixed price goes on top of your base fixed rate.But while flat-rate subscription pricing might be easy for potential customers to understand, it often means leaving money on the table. Keeping prices low means missing out on additional revenue from larger companies; and vice-versa, smaller companies might be priced out of higher-cost tools.

Fixed / flat-rate pricing model

Allows companies to offer multiple packages with different features and product combinations available at different price points. The number of packages can vary, but most subscription companies offer two or three pricing tiers.Beyond two or three options, however, things start to go downhill—offering <a href="https://www.coglode.com/gem/choice-paradox">too many choices</a> leads to indecision and lower sales. It's easy to try appealing to many customer types with varying budgets by adding more and more tiers, leading to a lack of decision and lost sales.

Tiered pricing model

Per-user pricing is the go-to model for <a href="https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/2018-private-saas-company-survey-part-2/">the majority</a> of subscription companies. Pricing scales evenly along with the number of users — the more users, the more you can charge.Charging for each new user does have downsides, though. It doesn't reflect the true value your product provides — more seats don't necessarily make the product more valuable for users. Charging per seat can also lead to users sharing logins across teams, cutting into your potential revenue.

Per unit/user model

Usage-based pricing is somewhat less common among SaaS businesses— it's mainly used by telecommunications companies and IT services.It makes it easier for small companies to get started with your product while avoiding the high upfront fees charged by some subscription companies. On the other end of the scale, it also accounts for additional costs incurred by heavy users, charging them fairly based on the extra time and resources they're consuming.Charging based on usage does, however, make it much harder to predict revenue, since billing can vary dramatically each month.

Usage model

I came across these ideas while reading growth.design case study for Zapier Upgrade: https://growth.design/case-studies/zapier-upgrade

How do you set your subscription pricing? These are the top four subscription pricing models for 2019.

Subscription Pricing Models

Inflation generally benefits the wealthy who can store their wealth in assets like stocks and bonds which appreciate with inflation.Inflation generally hurts those living paycheck to paycheck who are less able to invest into such assets.

Who does inflation help vs hurt

A thread on Inflation by Ryan Breslow https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1516507981071982599?s=21&t=5heiRnUYP7XV0K3XxUqHlA

Marc Andreessen is getting raked over the coals for calling social responsibility the 'enemy'

The Mindset of Success

How to increase virality

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 3: Craft your pitch

Tell ’Em What You’re Going To Tell ’Em

Sabin Hantu