Gbenga

A curious mind with a love for learning, doing, and adventures

[Gbenga @XAlphaPrim]

The world is your oyster if you think it is!

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Everyone wants to have enough money to tell people to fuck off.
Nobody wants enough people to tell them to fuck off in order to get it.

[Gbenga @XAlphaPrim]

Embedded network effects and virality

[Sharran Srivatsaa @sharran]

The most underrated advantage in business is speed. Speed is king. If you have time to do something, do it right now.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

What people think sales is:
- Convince someone to buy

What it actually is:
- Ask questions
- Repeat the prospect’s own words back to them
- Let them talk themselves into buying

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

BREAKING: SpaceX CFO says AI will create unprecedented demand for Starlink.

“Whether it’s humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, or connection points everywhere, there’s going to be a lot more data. You’re going to need that connectivity. It’s going to need to always be on. Delivering that from space in a very high-bandwidth way is going to be incredibly compelling.

“Starship is going to enable our next generation of direct-to-cell and direct-to-device, while giving us the capability to put a whole constellation of satellites up for orbital compute. All of that is driven by Starship, which is why it’s such a catalyst for our company.”

[Digi @digiii]

the audacity to believe in yourself delusionally with no physical evidence is literally the entire cheat code

[Yaman @yamanzdh]

We did $500k in revenue within 2 months after realizing that customers don't want an AI platform.

None of our clients have seen our platform, nor do they care to.

They just want their problems solved quickly and to a high standard (doesn't matter if it's with AI or literally paper).

We built internal agents for regulatory work, and delivered them as a service for 10x the price…

Just own the outcome.

[Geekay @gkbalogs]

The product is not the business.

I probably watched every single episode of Shark Tank for the first 10 or 11 seasons, and one phrase that stayed with me is: a product is not the business.

I have told the story of how, in the last 15+ years, I’ve had more than 50 staff leave my business and try to replicate what we do, usually with the simple thinking: “I can do this too, after all, na we dey do all the work… is it not just juice, parfaits & salads?”

Unsurprisingly, most fizzled out before they got started. Not because they couldn’t replicate the product, but because they didn’t understand the business of building a business. A great product alone does not make a great business.

Of course, your product matters, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Can you deliver the same quality and experience every single time, across different people, locations, and over many years?

Your real advantage is the ability to build, and keep building, long after the excitement of the original idea is gone. Here are some critical questions you should spend time asking:

- How do I distribute this product at scale, while maintaining quality?
- How do I systemise operations so the business runs consistently?
- How do I build a high-performance culture where people take ownership and standards don’t drop?
- How do I keep my brand top of mind in a crowded market?
- How do I acquire customers predictably and keep them coming back?
- How do I manage my finances properly so I don’t run out of money?

This, my friend, is where the real work is.

People can copy your product, underprice you, hire your people, and even copy the look and feel of your brand. But replicating years of hard-built systems, culture, customer trust, operational discipline, distribution, brand equity, and accumulated learning is a completely different matter.

A good idea may get you started, but your ability to build a business around it is what keeps the lights on.

#BuildingSoFresh
#BusinessLessons
Day 11/30

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

Elon Musk was right when he said, "Go Get your fucking confidence back. Without it, you will fail miserably no matter how skilled or smart you are."

[a16z @a16z]

Travis Kalanick says a leader's job is to find the line between order and chaos:

"On one side is order. You have lots of rules, lots of structure, lots of process, and eventually lots of bureaucracy."

"If you go to the other side of the line, which is chaos, lack of rules, lack of process, lack of structure... you also get to a place where you're going slow and people are bummed."

"That line between order and chaos is innovation at speed and at scale, and the job of every leader is to find that line. And it's not in two dimensions. It's like in eighty dimensions."

"Go back to launch at Uber... There's a bunch of 23-year-olds launching cities... Nothing would actually launch until it got to a pricing call... It could be eight, ten hours of pricing calls before we launched London."

"I never solved the same problem twice. Once we solved it, it became part of the playbook, and eventually we get to city 20 and that pricing call takes five minutes. I stopped going to them."

"So now I've got one rule, which is that pricing call. The fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos. If you didn't have that one rule, you now have 23-year-olds running around doing crazy shit."

@travisk w/ @davidsenra

[Lazy IT Guy @lazy_IT_guy]

Our CFO noticed we spend $65K a month on a proprietary cybersecurity platform called Sentinel Protocol.

She scheduled a meeting with me to discuss our enterprise software expenditures.

She wanted to know why our licensing fees had increased by 15% year over year.

I told her Sentinel Protocol is the only thing standing between our corporate data and a highly coordinated North Korean ransomware syndicate.

I explained that it uses a polymorphic encryption manifold to dynamically scrub our inbound packets.

She asked if she could get a Zoom meeting with their customer success team to discuss a volume discount.

I told her I'd set it up immediately.

The problem is that Sentinel Protocol doesn't exist.

It's an LLC I registered in Delaware 4 years ago.

I'm Sentinel Protocol.

My entire cybersecurity platform is just a batch script I wrote in 2018 that restarts our routers every Sunday at 3 AM.

The script took me 14 minutes to write.

I realized very early in my career that executives will never question a line item if you use the word quantum or heuristic.

But now the CFO wanted to speak to the vendor.

I went on Fiverr and hired a struggling voice actor from Chicago for $45.

I told him his character was a high-powered Silicon Valley tech bro who just drank 3 Celsius energy drinks.

I wrote him a 4-page script composed entirely of weaponized IT buzzwords.

He showed up to the Zoom call wearing a Patagonia fleece vest and introduced himself as the VP of Customer Success.

He was absolutely phenomenal.

When the CFO asked about lowering the cost, he scoffed.

He told her that downgrading our service tier would expose our legacy endpoints to asynchronous tunneling attacks.

He leaned into the webcam and asked if she was prepared to explain a catastrophic data breach to the shareholders.

She apologized for questioning the infrastructure.

Before the call ended, my Fiverr actor successfully up-sold her on a $12K biometric redundancy package.

I don't even know what a biometric redundancy package is.

I tipped the actor $100 and told him I'd need him again next quarter.

The CFO sent me an email thanking me for managing such a crucial vendor relationship.

I just used the new budget increase to buy a pontoon boat.

[Digi @digiii]

I'm in love with this quote:

"The entire point of life is to take chances on dreams that seem crazy to most, but feel like destiny to you."

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“There is no secret trick. You have to feel the discomfort and still move forward.”

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.

[Digi @digiii]

The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it.

[Carles Reina @Carles_Reina]

If I had to restart @ElevenLabs GTM from scratch, these are the things that I would change 🖊️

- Hire quicker. I was alone selling for the first 9 months because I believed we didn't have PMF. Main reasons: the AI tourist external mantra of 2023, and the uphill battle convincing everyone to hire more GTM (Sales development, Sales, Customer Success) because we were still mostly PLG / self-service. The hiring constraint lasted until earlier this year when we boosted our team to meet demand.

- Build an enablement team earlier. Sales enablement has such an important role in an org, and we mostly think about it when we hire a lot of people. The reality is that we need Enablement earlier due to the speed of product iteration.

- Open more markets. The results from Uber v Lyft operating models played a key role in deciding to open markets early, but I would triple down on it if we were to start over.

- Have more big bets. Similar to VCs, you only need 1 big bet to work in order to generate Alpha. We could have executed more big bets if we had had a single person owning & iterating on them. Former successful founder profile with drive and speed.

- Be more vocal about product ROI & our success. People buy from people, and companies buy based on success & ROI. In AI, we've all been slow showing ROI. This should be the key number when you start a conversation.

- Hire senior sellers. In startups, we've been told that culture is everything and someone with +25y experience may struggle to fit in. This is bullshit. The experience, connections and drive +25y sellers bring is crazy. We have a bunch today, but I would hire many more earlier.

- Reduce cash commissions and replace them with more equity. Cash is king, but Equity is queen. Queens also rule countries, so why not make Equity the dominant one in GTM?

- Open more offices. We are a remote-first company, but our customers are everywhere, and employees want to meet each other. I would open more offices to be embedded in markets quicker.

- Fun brand. Brand perception is 33% of the work. Building a fun brand adds quickly.

- Outbounds outbounds outbounds. We waited too long to migrate to an Outbound organisation. I would do it from day 1 now.

- Pipeline construction with more whales. The ideal pipeline needs to have a combo of segments to reduce risk, improve results and provide liquidity. We waited too long to pitch & bring whales.

- Not all deals are good deals. We, sellers, want to close a lot of ARR, but it is important to split early on between good vs bad deals.

Thank you to Tomasz Gmur for asking how I would do GTM again!

[Nicolas Dessaigne @dessaigne]

I met a founder last week who was drowning, and his instinct was to hire more engineers. But the bottleneck wasn't building the product, it was getting it live at customers. Onboarding the deals they'd already signed was backed up for months.

The fix wasn't more engineers writing code. It was fewer of them writing code and more of them sitting inside the customer making the thing actually work.

A lot of startups don't die because they can't build anymore. They die because they can't deploy.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

The most underrated trait for a happy life: decisiveness.

Our intuition is that it’s best to keep our options open. But as long as you try to keep every door open, you’ll never be able to walk through the one that matters.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

How to Earn a Billion Dollars: https://t.co/WeWBUkKym6

[Gbenga @XAlphaPrim]

"Public markets are no longer satisfied by the mention of AI on consumer software earnings calls. Equity research analysts increasingly want evidence of revenue attribution, margin expansion and customer retention."