A recent analysis of 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications found that distributed teams are less likely to have a breakthrough discovery than their on-site counterparts. They found that collaboration for remote teams was more likely to happen at later stages where technical tasks are more discreet rather than earlier during the ideation stage. The authors believe that this means remote teams fail to benefit from the shared knowledge of the team and therefore have less new, disruptive ideas.

Read Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.

See also:

• Remote work creates fewer weak ties which is important for chance encounters and sharing knowledge
• Working in person matters at the beginning of a project
• Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity

Here’s how to write permanent notes based on How to Take Smart Notes.

1. Write out the main idea succinctly and in your own words
2. Look for connections between this note and other notes
3. Ask questions about your understanding of the note:
   • What does this mean?
   • Why is it important?
   • What is missing?
   • What question does this raise?
   • What would disprove it?
   • What other possibilities could there be? If the same or similar note exists, how is it different? (Write a note about the difference).
4. Write a list of related notes and summarize the connection in a sentence (I try to link to the note inline or in a section “See Also”)
5. Review existing areas of inquiry and link them to the index of that note (structure note about a topic or question)

See also:

• Writing is thinking and linking the information is the difference between rote memorization and knowledge creation
• Writing down ideas can be the difference between emulation and replication because human knowledge is meme replication
• Writing notes and linking them together is accretive

If your investments are good only because of future optimism, you will have surprises in the downside case. If your investments are good without optimism required then you will be surprised in the upside case.

One way to avoid being surprised by the downside case is to avoid losers rather than pick winners. However, it might be just as important to protect against the downside by enjoying every bit of the upside.

From Howard Marks at Oaktree.

See also:

• Venture capital is different, you can only lose 1x your money but missing out on fund-returning gains is the real loss
• Startup investing is investing in options
• Consensus macro forecasts provide no value
• Investment strategies that only work in a bull market
• Skepticism and optimism in markets
• Zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)

Worrying about being sick seems to increase your risk of death. A recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that people with hypochondriasis (a psychiatric disorder characterized by a pre-occupation about having a serious illness) have an increased risk of death compared to those who do not have hypochondriasis.

See also:

• Everything arises in consciousness
• Stress and anxiety are cumulative

A business can get kicked off of their PEO or unable to use a PEO if even a single employee “overutilizes” insurance benefits. When it comes to health insurance this can mean one person has a severe illness or medical condition.

Why is that?

Since PEOs are an underwriting business that pools together multiple businesses to negotiate better rates from insurance carriers, a business within a pool can effectively raise the premiums of everyone else. PEOs make money by marking up insurance premiums so if premiums go up, they lose margin proportionally.

See also:

• PEOs offer better healthcare for small businesses…as long as employees don’t actually need it
• PEOs taking care of everything is a myth
• PEO was made up to dress up the image of employee-leasing

Most runaway successes we hear about often have some mythology of the moment the founding team unlocked exponential growth. Examples include Slack, Facebook, and HubSpot. The only problem is, most of these growth stories are not actually exponential but closer to “an initial period of quadratic growth followed by linear growth”.

In The myth of exponential hypergrowth from A Smart Bear, the author argues that this distinction is important because we need better mental models for how to achieve high growth. To do that, consider successful products and marketing campaigns follow an elephant curve (steap rise, followed by a drawn out decline) and the idea is to stack these over time. Only then can you create multiple activities that sustain high growth.

See also:

• The initial part of the elephant compounds, but compounding is unintuitive because the initial curve feels flat
• Stripe’s business applies an interesting strategy for growing with the elephant curve of startups
• The elephant curve also exhibits a power law in that most of the growth happens at the head of the curve

In business strategy you’ll often hear a competitive advantage described as a moat, but most moats are more like a long bridge. The moat is the thing that prevents others from easily replicating another business. A long bridge takes a time build and is effectively a moat if it’s impractical to catch up or simply makes it a schlep.

In a sense, generative AI is a bridge shortening technology opening up many businesses to greater competition. Of course, replication does not a business make, but what happens when a motivated group of smart people uses better tools to build a competitive offering in a short-bridge amount of time?

See also:

• The book 7 Powers shows that building large durable business has more to it than building
• Time is still the hardest to replicate advantage since advantages accrue to the leader and incumbants have been the leader for much longer
• Maybe managerial capitalism is the true moat destroying technology?

Sometimes the person that reaches out for a demo is not the decision maker. They may be a user of the product with a vested interest in solving the problem. They may be gathering information for others.

If your sales process typically involves multiple parties, some who you haven’t met yet, send a follow-up email that is easy to forward to the other people involved in the decision. This equips them with what they need to represent your product internally (at least initially) because you already wrote up what they need.

See also:

• Make it easy to say yes to making an introduction
• How to write a sales narrative
• Founder-led sales

If you do something more than once, write down the steps taken to complete the task. Chances are, if you have to do something twice, you’ll need to repeat it more times later.

Having a rule that everyone at the company writes things down when repeated has several advantages. The knowledge needed to perform the task or process doesn’t need to be rediscovered by the next person. Documentation is automation and opens up the possibility to fully automate it with software.

From The Great CEO Within.

See also:

• Automation reduces marginal cost of nonautomated tasks
• A list of tasks describes multi-party processes poorly

A simple way to deliver effective feedback to an employee is the use the like/wish framework. Say the specific actions you liked about their employees performance and then say which specific actions you wish they would have done differently (emphasis on specific actions!). This leads to productive conversations about how to adjust performance and clear up any misunderstandings.

From The Great CEO Within.

By far the best installation and running experience for using a large language model locally is llamafile. The entire model, weights, and a server are packaged into a single binary that can be run across multiple runtime environments.

It turns a complicated set of steps for compiling, fine tuning, and running into a single download and command sh -c ./path/to/llamafile.

This is ideal if you just want to try out a model to see how it performs. For me, it was interesting to see that my Macbook M1 laptop can get ~11 tokens per second out of the box and the llava model is good enough for basic tasks.

I hope they make more models available to try!

See also:

• This might make it easier for personal infrastructure applications where you want to avoid sending sensitive data over the wire but can provide the context for an LLM application locally
• Convenience is king, even for developers that might be used to yak shaving

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted something from a file and want to recover it using git you can search the full history for a string.

This will return any commit that includes the string in the diff:

git log -i -p -S "my search term here"

I’ve used this several times now to recover some previous code and prose I had written many commits ago.

See also

• This is especially useful not that I use git as the backend for org-roam mobile
• Working Copy is surprisingly useful for bringing git workflows to iOS

When building systems that require monitoring and alerting, a false alarm should be treated as a bug. If it’s not resolved quickly, it diminishes the usefulness of the alerts and trains responders to ignore it. When alerts are ignored, the potential for an actual incident increases along with the severity due to time to detection.

Thinking about false alarms as bugs is a handy idiom for defining the problem and the solution in a way that is easy teams to understand.

From my collegue, Eric Berglund.

See also:

• Analgous to “there is no software maintenance”, there are no false alarms
• Closing the gap between previous technical decisions and the current quality bar
• Talk then code

Being able to lead a project that coordinate multiple people, teams, and organizations is critical for career development. At a certain point, the limiting factor in one’s career is not skill, but the ability to do project management sufficiently well.

Project management gets a bad rap in software development. It’s associated with pushy, uninformed people that press deadlines.

However, the ability to manage a project well is a size-of-the-pie increasing activity regardless of role.

Not only can one contribute work individually but coordinate the work of many other people towards a common goal. Few things that are valuable can be done individually, no matter how skilled someone is.

See also:

• Running a pre-mortem is a way to identify risks before launch
• Collaborate at the contractual boundaries let’s people work together without stepping on toes and slowing things down
• How to do great work

Questions naturally arise when writing. Since writing is thinking, when we turn over an idea in our head, we can’t help spotting things we don’t understand or finding a topic we want to learn more about.

If you are in the practice of writing regularly, it’s the act of writing that makes you live curiously. Cultivating a practice of writing is therefore an act of cultivating curiosity.

From More people should write.

See also:

• How to Take Smart Notes talks about following your curiousity and letting the big questions emerge instead of trying to pick a topic for your thesis upfront
• Learning how to read shows that reading can also help us live more curiously when reading leads to connecting ideas together with existing knowledge rather than just consumption
• Surprise plus memory equals learning and there is no surprise without curiosity
• Curiosity is a technique for dealing with skepticism which helps us get over the obstacles of early work
• Business writing should always answer a key question

It should be repeatable, measurable, and profitable. Every product and business is different. This will focus on a B2B SaaS product.

Why inbound?

• Startup sales win rates decreased
• Running a startup during a recession
• Educating the market is expensive
• Lower ACV products < $20k can’t support outbound sales
  • Rule of thumb for inbound vs outbound sales

Sell the first $500k yourself to figure out what works

• Do founder-led sales
• Founder-led sales helps identify product problems
• § How to make your first sales before launching
• When should you make your first sales hire?

Position the product in the market

• When do you need to do this?
  • You have customers
  • You can identify who your best customers are
• Read Obviously Awesome
• Write it down and use it

Make sure customers don’t churn

• Customer success first then sales
• What does customer success do at a startup?
• Customer success overcomes technical hurdles

Build a playbook

• Making founder-led sales a repeatable process
• What is a sales playbook?
• Materials to support a sales playbook
  • How to make a sales deck (one big template, pull slides from it to customize)
  • 1 pagers
  • Testimonials
  • Media library (screenshots)
• Onboarding playbook

Generate inbound leads

• How to think about go-to-market
• Drive traffic to your website
  • How to do SEO
  • how to do paid ads
    • How to do keyword research
  • PR
  • Social
    • how to use twitter for business
• How to get referrals
• Capture leads Give users a way to get in touch (schedule a meeting) or stay in touch (join an email list)

Convert leads into customers

• Selling to inbound leads
  • Schedule a consultation is the top of the funnel
    • Enterprise businesses expect a consultative sales experience
  • Discovery questions in sales calls should feel consultative
  • Run the sales playbook
  • Run the onboarding playbook
• Self-serve
  • Is your product actually self-serve?
  • How to make a product self-serve?
  • Which customer segments are best for self-serve?

Automate using a CRM to turn prospects into leads, leads into customers, customers into successes

• Set up a CRM
  • How do you set up HubSpot for B2B sales?
    • How should you set up a sales pipeline in HubSpot
    • How to set up post-close processes in HubSpot
    • How to set up support in HubSpot?
    • How to track renewals in HubSpot
    • How to measure the sales funnel in HubSpot
      • Win rate
      • Top sources
      • Churn risk
      • Renewals
• Automate emails to drive prospects to schedule a consultation or sign up
  • Map out all of the customer touch points
  • Make a list of triggers
  • Write a list of N emails as a sequence
• Automate onboarding process - self-serve, sold

Chess players burn a lot of calories at the highest levels of competitive chess tournaments. Chess players can burn up to 6,000 calories in a day by playing a tournament (three times what a normal person burns in a day). A study of 21-year-old grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, found that he burned 560 calories in two hours—roughly what Roger Federer burns in one hour of playing tennis.

It makes sense that intellectually demanding tasks leads to feeling tired at the end of the day!

Read The Chess Grandmaster’s Diet from NPR.

See also:

• Some brain functions might be quantum processes

Before COVID-19, the majority of B2B selling happened in-person and over email and phone calls (61%). After, only 29% of selling is being done that way and sales over video calls increased from 38% to 53%. Also, 70% of B2B buyers say they are willing to make purchases above $50,000 entirely remotely (27% would be willing to make purchases above $500k).

From Gongification of SaaS by Sacra.

See also:

• Being able to make remote work universal includes being able to buy and sell
• Zoom fatigue is still a thing but that doesn’t seem to inhibit sales
• At the same time, startup sales win rates decreased

An overlooked part of understanding information and not merely memorizing it, is to elaborate on the meaning of something you just learned. When taking notes, it’s easy to end up with a detailed list of things without actually understanding the content. Without connecting the ideas with what you already know, you can’t attach the ideas to any scaffolding that would be needed for generating new ideas later (or even recall them).

In How to Take Smart Notes, the author talks about the crucial step of pausing to ask questions of a fact or idea in order to elaborate on it. “What does it mean? What is this similar to? What is the difference between this thing and that thing?”

It’s the connections between ideas that creates meaning, understanding, and new knowledge.

See also:

• Human knowledge is meme replication and good explanations are how we learn
• Connecting notes together is the central idea of Zettelkasten and can help extend our working knowledge to a second brain
• Thinking better thoughts

The prevailing industry of the last century was the industry of atoms—physical infrastructure, extraction of natural resources, and moving things around faster.

The prevailing industry of the next century is the industry of bits—internet infrastructure, extraction of data, and moving around information at the speed of light.

The industry of atoms ended up being governed by the infrastructure of bits. Digitization touched every part of the economy and society to the point where the industry of bits is effectively the industry of atoms.

(I don’t recall where I first heard this idea, maybe it was from patio11).

See also:

• The industry of bits was made possible by a jump to universality in computing, might there be others?
• Capitalism is dead shows us how the industry of bits changed capitalism into feudalism

The essay Capitalism is dead: long live Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, describes how advancements in technology killed what we used to call capitalism and replaced it, unwittingly, with a form of feudalism.

…our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

• Cloud capital killed capitalism (markets and profits)
  • Markets were replaced by online marketplaces that aren’t really markets, they are fiefdoms (Apple takes 40%, Amazon charges sellers 30%)
  • Profits were replaced with cloud rent (servers, SaaS subscriptions, APIs, listing in the marketplace)
• Capital is no longer physical goods, machinery, but digital (cloud capital) and we toil like serfs for a small number of cloud lords that own the fiefdoms
• The latest in cloud capital is to train us to train it to control us (AI, machine learning). We serve it for free by giving it data, content, attention.

See also:

• Feudalism a klein bottle where the further you move away from it (captialism) the closer you end up back to at the center (feudalism)
• Others would argue that universal income is capitalism 2.0
• Managerial capitalism decouples ownership and control
• The problem with capitalism is the fixation on wealth

My hunt for a mobile setup for org-roam continues. LogSeq doesn’t handle org IDs. Plain Org is buggy (syncing with Dropbox, recent file list disappears, copy and paste doesn’t work, etc.). Beorg is too slow after upgrading to iOS 17.

Now I’m trying a git based workflow using Working Copy and Shortcuts. It eliminates sync conflicts with iCloud or Dropbox (or at least, I’m much more capable of resolving these conflicts using git). While not as fully featured as Beorg, it can do the main thing I need to do on mobile—capturing new tasks.

Since all of my notes are in a git repository already, all I need is automation to smooth out the experience. I created a Shortcut using Working Copy’s support for x-callback-url to pull the repo, write text to the end of a file, and prompt me to commit and push (this also works in the share sheet and with Siri). On desktop, using git-auto-commit-mode, every time I save a sync’d file it will push it to the repo.

If I forget to save/sync before switching over to mobile, I can use git to resolve it to avoid data loss. For simple conflicts, it might be able to resolve automatically.

See also:

• If not for using org-id links in org-roam, there would be fancier options to view/edit any note on the go (including in Working Copy)
• In How to Take Smart Notes parlance, this is for capturing “fleeting notes” about projects and ideas to review later
• My personal note taking practice

What is product/market fit?

Pull not push

A common definition of product/market fit is that the business feels “pull” from customers as demand increases, sales are quicker, and adoption is faster. That’s opposed to push, where the business is struggling for sales and has to convince each new customer to use their product. Growth is consistent and linear month over month but at a higher rate.

Low churn

If customers actually need you product for a sustainable period of time, churn rate will be low (less than 3%, see churn benchmarks for B2B companies). If your goal is to build a large durable business, there’s no world in which you have product/market fit with low retention.

Is that it? People don’t expect much from simple ideas.

See also:

• Product/Market Fit: Experience & Data
• The number one job of a startup CEO is finding product market fit
• Product work is a pursuit of facts about the user, market, and their problems

GTM decomposes into the entire business—it all must work in concert to be effective.

• Value proposition is clear and people want this (messaging, pricing, marketing)
• Product delivers on promises (solves target users, low churn)
• Find renewable sources of customers

The overall objective is to increase growth rate. In order to do that, there needs to be a quick feedback loop to figure out what works. When you find something that works, double down. That means there are two modes—experimentation and doubling down.

(This note is a work in progress)