Happy birthday 🎉- Employee vs. founder 🤟- Mindfulness & innovation 🧘🏽♂️- Silicon Valley, this is the end 🎬- Signing dinosaurs in SaaS B2B 🦖- Sleep well 😴
Compound writing is an essential ingredient for learning
Episode #52. Zero to one!
The Timestamp is now 1 year old. After starting as part of pro-business under Clind, this newsletter is now more of a side project published every Sunday.
The goal of this newsletter is to entertain a public routine to write regularly and share key learnings from meaningful articles, books, or podcasts. Topics we cover relate to learning and growing as a person. Our favorite sources come from the tech community but not only.
You are more than 2000 readers who receive The Timestamp with an open rate averaging 30% with a record high at 36% (for our 2022 Predictions -Covid and Politics free- you can still access here).
I take the opportunity to say hi to my fellow writers who have helped tremendously build The Timestamp during this first year.
If you also share a personal objective for learning continuously, you can subscribe to The Timestamp (the paid subscription will give you access to a community of learners in Slack for sharing reading recommendations and key takeaways).
For this 1 year anniversary, I would like to take the opportunity to share 3 takeaways that are worth reading again. I think you really enjoyed them… don’t miss out twice!
Takeaways #4 and #5 are brand new about signing mega-deals in SaaS and about sleeping well.
#1. How different is an employee vs. a founder?
Employees vs. Founders from the newsletter of The Family published on March 28, 2021. Written by Balthazar.
Founders have no job description.
❌ Cannot quit > Silicon Valley hate quitters,
🔟 year commitment,
💯 Are fully responsible,
⚠️ Carry a high emotional burden > founders are often lonely.
Do not expect employees to commit like a founder:
Consider treating late cofounders with a fair equity split as they are making a commitment to the next 10 years.
If founders ask employees to be like founders > they will most probably burn out because the risk horizon is very different for a founder (long term) than for the employee (short term).
#2. Innovation & Mindfulness Zones
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Why we have ‘mindfulness zones’ from an article published in CNBC Make it on November 5, 2019. Takeaways from Christian Riedi.
HBR Analytic Services report: five key tenants of building an innovative business:
1. Speed,
2. Data-driven decision making,
3. Commitment to innovation from the top leaders,
4. Relentless focus on the customer,
5. An entrepreneurial culture.
"Results suggest that the mere presence of one's smartphone may reduce available cognitive capacity and impair cognitive functioning, even when consumers are successful at remaining focused on the task at hand," according to the study
The “beginner’s mind” is a philosophy that comes from the Zen Buddhist term, “shoshin,” and refers to keeping the openness and lack of judgment about a topic even as you become more knowledgeable about it,
Because Salesforce (💲135bn in market capitalization) thrives on innovation and that innovation needs a beginner’s mind, the company has developed mindfulness zones for its employees.
#3. Is it the end of Silicon Valley?
The end of Silicon Valley as we know it from an article written by Tim O’Reilly on his blog and published on March 11, 2021.
« Big platforms must understand their social responsibility to create more value than they capture, focus their algorithmic systems on improving human welfare. » 🔭 « Prediction: There will be more climate billionaires created in the next two decades than in the internet boom. » And most of them will be based outside of the 🇺🇸
The next « Silicon Valley » will be expert in machine learning, medicine, biology, and materials science.
❌ Silicon Valley is not necessarily good in regulated markets (Theranos kind of proved it)
❌ Social media giants have become experts in saying « What we invented was not what we hoped for. »
❌ The winner takes all model that Silicon Valley encouraged is not appropriate in health or green innovation.
High profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk & Peter Thiel leaving California 👉Resolving the most pressing issues on earth like climate change is very different than building consumer Internet or social media giants.
#4. How to prospect and sign mega deals in SaaS B2B?
From this article in French 🇫🇷 Comment prospecter et signer des mega deals en SaaS B2B published in Tribes on February 26, 2022. Written by Thibault Renouf.
We talk about ‘Sales led growth’ when you have an important ACV (Annual Contract Value) vs. ‘Product led growth’ when ACV is small.
Interestingly, in smaller countries like France, there are no real dinosaurs or whales hunters (ACV above respectively 1Meuro & 10Meuro). While in the US 🇺🇸, we can take as referenceVeeva, Workday, or Palantir.
France is more about hunting smaller animals like mice, rabbits, and deers (100, 1000, 10000euro ACV). French corporates still prefer trusting large US vendors to smaller European startups. Interestingly, US corporates are ready to select and trust an outsider and less known vendor to acquire a competitive advantage.
The well-known ‘Spray and Pray’ marketing playbook in SMB SaaS cannot be applied to mega deals where targeted -and highly personalized- account-based marketing (aka ABM) is way more effective.
Key metrics you should look at when dealing with mega deals are:
Have a gross churn <8% and a negative net churn,
Customer acquisition costs < ACV (means that break-even is in year 2)
Testing a ‘land & expand’ sales strategy signing smaller initial contracts and upselling. This may even mean that the 1st deal involves no contract at all (just a purchase order).
#5. Sleep well
Key takeaways of a podcast episode from The Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish Matthew Walker: The power of sleep published on the FS blog on February 22, 2022.
We are not equal in terms of sleep needs but 7 to 9 hours will fit the needs of a vast majority. Different stages of sleep (first half vs second part of the night) have different functions and are equally important.
A very few portions of the population are genetically set to be fine with 5 to 6 hours of sleep. Some people are resilient to periods of time where they can sleep 6h but their concentration capability, mood, the immune system will most likely suffer from this lack of sleep.
Maybe the snooze button exists on your clock because society is used to lack of sleep. If you still want to sleep when your alarm rings, it is a sign that your sleep need is not met.
People tend to not sleep enough during the workweek (below 7h) and suffer from social ‘jet lag’. Then weekends are set to catch up sleep time in a ‘sleep bulimia’ mode. This is absolutely not ideal.
Beware of the cognitive association you may create if you are used to staying awake (watching TV or your iPhone or reading) while lying in your bed. It sends the signal to your brain that your bed is not a place for sleeping.
You noticed that this newsletter is mostly free. You can make us super happy just by sharing it with a teammate, a friend, or a family relative. Clicking on ❤️ will do as well of course. That would be lovely for wishing us a happy birthday 🎉
See you next Sunday!