I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you donāt have to.
This is the 32nd edition ofĀ Best 3 Podcasts of the Week š„š„š„,Ā featuring Cartoon Avatars, Lennyās Podcast, and My First Million.
What you need to know
šØāš¼ Why sales should be mandatory
ā³ Discard most of your due dates
š® The history and future of AI
BONUS segment
š©āš« Always start with your narrative
šØāš¼ Why sales should be mandatory
š„ Third place (3 min read vs 1 hour 41 mins listening)
Our perception and reality is often way out of sync.Ā If I asked āDo you listen to your customers?ā, I bet youād instinctively say yes. If I followed up with āWhen was the last time you sat on a sales call or shadowed a customer service rep?ā, thereās a good chance youād say never.
Sales should act as your never ending feedback loop. It should power your business with revenue and insights. Logan Bartlett, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, sat down with Mark Cuban to discuss the importance of sales and how your business is in trouble if the CEO doesnāt sell.
What they say
All CEOs need to sell
When I invest in very technical oriented founders, they view sales in the same way that the go to market heads view engineering - as black magic. They see it as an art form they donāt understand.
One of the things we spend a lot of time on is saying everyone sells. You got me to give you money. You sold me on your vision. You can sell.Ā
If youāve got people to believe in what youāre doing, sales is a slightly different form of that. You donāt have to sell forever but it does inform your ability to build product and different features.
Logan Bartlett
Avoid home run hiring
If you donāt know how to sell your product, then you canāt really set the vision. If you canāt set the vision, then itās hard to hire your first employees and get them aligned with what youāre trying to accomplish.
If you canāt do any of those things, you see companies trying to do home run hiring. Because the CEO canāt do sales, they try to do home run hiring where they go out and look for a new head of sales or a new head of marketing.
Whoever they hire, no matter who it is, theyāll think this person is amazing. The home run hire is always a fallacy.
Mark Cuban
What I say
Why it matters:Ā Home run hiring causes the worst hiring decisions at startups. The reason being is pretty simple. If you donāt know what great looks like for a role, this will lead to mediocracy at best or being taken advantage of at worst.
You have to lean into your network and get experts to perform the technical interview or at the very least review a candidateās assessment. Without doing so is analogous to your Mom reviewing a developerās code repository and saying theyāre amazing.
Between the lines:Ā Sales can be scary. For most people, the prospect of being told no is so intimidating theyād prefer not to try. Instead, we should view sales through a different lens. Sales is an opportunity to learn about your customerās biggest pain points. More than half of the job is listening.
You want everyone in your company to know your customer inside out. So why is sales not used as a tool to onboard new hires and retrain teams? Thought exercise: shadow your sales team and write down your learnings. If you find it useful, the rest of the company would as well.
Create an onboarding program where people shadow sales or customer service for a day. Theyāll better understand your customer, the problems youāre solving, and your overall business.
ā³ Discard most of your due dates
š„ Second place (3 min read vs 53 mins listening)
I love startups.Ā A big reason is the lack of planning more than a year out. Things always change. You cannot reliably plan what happens more than 6 months out. Janna Bastow created the Now, Next, Later framework and brought a refreshing take to due dates on Lennyās Podcast.
What they say
Stop thinking of your roadmap as a plan
Your roadmap is not designed to be your plan. I think about it as a prototype for your strategy.
A prototype is a way of checking your assumptions. Youāre laying out your assumptions and checking that youāre on the right path.Ā
Janna Bastow
The Now, Next, Later frameworkĀ
We came up with a 3 column roadmap. Now, Next, Later. It took away the concept of a timeline at the top.
The problem with a timeline is that everything underneath is assigned a due date. But, the further out you plan, the more youāre making it up.
People loved it. They knew whatās happening now, whatās happening next and whatās happening later.
I can add a due date, but I donāt have to. I can be less and less granular about that as I go forward. It means we donāt penalize ourself by not having a date on everything.
Janna Bastow
What I say
Why it matters:Ā Near term deadlines are helpful. Time constraints empower you to say no and help you to accept that good enough is fine.
Long term deadlines are harmful, particularly those that are granular. If dates are set far into the future or if theyāre based on multiple dependencies, theyāll most likely communicate false expectations and set you up for failure.
If a project is 6+ months long, itās important to set an ideal completion date. However, itās prudent to avoid any guarantees because things almost always go wrong and delays invariably happen.
Between the lines:Ā Case in point, we recently redesigned the Medicspot websiteĀ and migrated to a new CMS. At the outset, our agency presented us with a 4 stage plan:
Discovery & Strategy: 02/03 ā 18/03/2022
Voice & Content: 04/03 ā 01/04/2022
Brand & Design: 07/03 ā 15/04/2022
Development: 18/04 ā 12/06/2022
Good practice would have been to set an ideal completion date but only commit to due dates in the near term (stages 1 and 2). As always, there were delays. By the time development had started, we were already 3 weeks late. The false expectations made resourcing much harder at the tail end of the project. Honest and realistic expectations would have saved time and money for all parties involved.
BONUS segment
š©āš« Always start with your narrative
Iāve stopped sitting down with a PowerPoint and writing my deck.
I now start with my story points. I start with my narrative. I try to figure out what Iām actually trying to say. Then I fit it into the deck.
I used to get stuck in this presentation mode. I tried to make my slides create the narrative instead of having a great narrative and the slides fall in naturally.
Janna Bastow
The best advice is often the simplest. I canāt count how many times Iāve gone straight into presentation mode without writing out my narrative first. Sure, Iād flesh out the story Iām telling with slide titles. But, this is not as cohesive as it would be if you wrote out your narrative in long form copy first.
š® The history and future of AI
š„ First place (4 min read vs 1 hour 12 mins listening)
I canāt stop thinking about AI.Ā Iāve made Benās BitesĀ newsletter a part of my daily routine. Iāve experimented with almost every AI tool that doesnāt require a wait list. It truly is a generational opportunity, so Iām pleased to cover this episode and convert more of you into AI addicts.
Before we begin, hereās a teaser of Interior AI, one of the tools referenced below:
What they say
How we got here
The last 10 years of AI have been what I call left brain AI. The left brain is your analytical brain. Thatās what artificial intelligence has been able to do.
We had big data. We had machine learning. Oh, the computer can play chess? Thatās amazing. It beat the best players in the world.
We have self driving cars where the car is taking in sensor data, camera data, and itās processing it and trying to make decisions like a human being.
Thatās where weāve been but itās also what we expected. That sounds like the type of thing that a super computer should be able to do.
Shaan Puri
Where we are and where weāre goingĀ
Then it changed into a right brain AI. The right brain is your creative brain.
This is where youāve got GPT-3 that generates text. Youāve got DALL-E which is art. Unreal Speech is doing this for audio. Thereās a company called Runway where you describe a video and it creates that scene.
Now youāve got this right brain AI thatās doing creative shit. Creative images, creative text, creative videos.
Itās writing blog posts, itās making paintings, itās making patterns, itās making music, itās making podcasts. Now, itās doing both sides. Thatās the big holy shit moment.
Over the next 10 years the right brain AI is taking over.
Shaan Puri
Everyoneās an interior designer
Pieter Levels created this in a couple of weeks. Itās called Interior AI. It creates a super realistic interior like an interior designer would. Itās really amazing.
What you do is upload a photo or any space. You can say what type of room it is, what type of style you want, like ski chalet, tropical, minimalist, and then you click render my idea.
Itās like āYou donāt like this look? Nope. Push a button and get a new one.ā That would be so much back and forth with a human being.
Youād sit down for design meetings, theyād create a look book, youād give your feedback, then maybe theyād give you a rendering, but that takes time and energy.
Here, you push buttons and immediately get to dream out loud. It cuts so much friction out of the creative process. This is the superpower to give you design taste.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters:Ā Now is the best time to start a business. Iām sure youāve heard that saying before. Normally, thatās said in the context of being in a recession. I mean this in the context of a new paradigm shift happening right in front of our eyes.
Pretty much every software business is vulnerable to an AI upstart. Imagineā¦
A world without Salesforce (a CRM that ingests a lead list, it emails recipients, and sets up meetings for you)
A world without Adobe (a simple tool that lets you create images and videos using text prompts with easy editing)
A world without Google (a search engine that only displays the best answer to your questions)
Between the lines:Ā Thereās a good chance that in 1-2 years this entire newsletter could be written by AI. You could use my archived posts as training data to replicate my writing style, then feed transcripts of podcasts into the AI.
Iām not angry or scared by this prospect. I embrace it. Most jobs will be affected by AI, from interior designers to developers to newsletter writers. The people who thrive will be the ones who embrace AI. Everyone else will be out of a job.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, Iāll feature them here:
Every weekend, fx:macro brings you up to speed on the relevant macro developments: central banks, economic data, sentiment, intermarket analysis. This is the perfect newsletter for traders, investors and everyone interested in what's going on in FX and macro.
Each Monday, Write or Die Tribe sends out a jam packed newsletter with just about everything you need to start your writing week off right. Youāll get access to submission lists, writing prompts, freelance tips, recommended reading, and much more.
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise.Ā Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.
Some good nuggets here... Will check out that MFM ep (taking into account Shaan's super- tech-optimism) and the BB newsletter...
But you also provided a very good example of why trusting an AI tool to just give u "straight" answers (so u don't spend time to read, research and understand context) can be a terrible idea - - the answers to the questions abt Iranian oil and the CIA coup are very simplistic and plain wrong (no mention of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company etc.)
And that's not even considering all the potential bad actors and the d/misinformation-rife world we already live in...