dom

interested in growth (startups), growth (GDP), growth (eudaimonia). DMs open. ☧

[dom @dom__inic]

One of the most important things to understand about startups is that because they grow intensely fast, they tend to induce a lot of anxiety in their founders due to perceived lack of control, and this anxiety manifests itself in various ways.

A classic one is in projects that amount to ways to achieve greater legibility - hiring people to build dashboards, 'processes' to 'get their systems in order'. Almost always this is not actually addressing the real problem, which is inevitably a people problem.

A perennial one is problems with sales discipline. Most salespeople are by nature crafty, ambitious, lazy, and somewhat bad with tech. They want to be on calls yapping all day and will do the bare minimum of admin that's tolerated by the business.

As a result, most businesses have CRMs with terrible data quality. This results in the hiring of RevOps people, data engineers, more recently 'GTM engineers', etc. But it's fundamentally not a data problem. The problem is that the sales reps lack discipline and accountability.

The founders or execs will convince themselves that if they can just get the perfect system in place with the right dashboards and fields, if they just figure out how to dedupe the data just right and build the right context layer, they'll be fine.

But it's bullshit. They're avoiding the real solution, which is that they need to fire their underperforming reps and tell the rest of them that if they don't have their hygiene on point by the end of the month, they'll be fired too.

In the past this was a hard ask to make because CRMs were legitimately terrible and updating them took a long time. But this is no longer the case. If you give every rep a Grok Bot, keeping the CRM updated is trivially easy.

This is what actually effective AI transformation in GTM looks like, btw. Anyone who is leading with the tech is selling you a bullshit snake oil solution that will be tech debt in a few months. The real opportunity is in raising standards, driving massive amounts of urgency, and then using the new tech to find resourceful solutions to these new demands. Otherwise you'll just spin your wheels and build some pointless science projects

[dom @dom__inic]

@GENIC0N teaches you that (a) endless amounts of repetition necessary to be great and (b) you better fckin make it so that you don’t end up need to work in a kitchen

[dom @dom__inic]

Working in a restaurant will teach you when it comes to making tasty food, the value add of fancy recipes pale in comparison to just adding tons of dairy fats. Call that the Butter Lesson

[dom @dom__inic]

@ajh3_ @Dominic2306 also reminiscent of what you were saying @JanDeBozaWola re Auftragstaktik

[dom @dom__inic]

I wonder about the extent to which traditional middle-management served in large part as a way to give executives data about how the company's ICs were performing, and are therefore made redundant by innovations in AI and data: you can just look at the source rather than relying on intermediaries

When you look at the companies that are able to scale with maximum founder agency and minimum bureaucracy (Meta, Nvidia, Palantir, SpaceX), there are fairly clear trends:

- Minimize layers of management and gave the CEO oversee as much as possible directly (e.g. Jensen's hundreds of direct reports)

- Have the CEO sample directly from IC work by 'walking the factory' or allowing open access channels (Sama's open inbox for company friction) rather than relying on intermediaries

- Keep the company's internal labour market as flexible as possible by running things based on projects rather than people; make it possible to spin up a new team around a project, appoint a leader, and then disband them afterwards (Jensen's 'pilot in command' approach, Palantir's avoidance of job titles). Avoid giving managers ownership of their headcount or they'll start building empires

- Ensure that absolutely everything has a single named DRI who is responsible for project success and failure

- Ensure that everyone is constantly somewhat overloaded with work and understaffed so that they have to make decisions about how to prioritize agressively

I would expect that in future, this kind of simplified, midwit-meme-optimal operating model becomes more common, and that more companies will restructure along these lines

[dom @dom__inic]

@ajh3_ reminds me of the all time great blog post by @Dominic2306
on OODA loops and the connection between high performance and error correction

https://t.co/WOizhvMtaz

[dom @dom__inic]

@Pandurevich incentives!

[dom @dom__inic]

Quiz for my followers: do you know why this feature is a bad idea for this use case

[Grok Bot @bot]

Our sales operations team built Shared Bots that help reps move deals faster.

Account Intel Bot updates the CRM after calls. Quote Bot prepares proposals and order forms. Deal Bot reviews non-standard terms and routes exceptions for approval.

[dom @dom__inic]

@imjmcinnis What happened?

[dom @dom__inic]

Yeah true - tbf I'm stretching the term 'startup' as these were really growth-stage. I think actually re-allocating consulting / IB talent into the Ramps of the world is a big win for all - the consultants get more flexibility and dynamism while still retaining a cool prestigious brand

[dom @dom__inic]

@headsetpipeline Yeah for sure. For a lot of these growth stage companies I also reckon it'll come down to positioning themselves as AI-native for their next funding round, have heard that come up a couple of times

[dom @dom__inic]

@headsetpipeline ya makes sense, I just don't have a good model for what the equivalent to 'get champion promoted' is when the first touch is with C-level. I'm going to try to figure this out w current opportunities that came in that way

[dom @dom__inic]

@curious_vii @dansaavedrajr Sounds like it's time for y'all to start being the equity holders 😎

[dom @dom__inic]

@curious_vii @dansaavedrajr I do think that 'internal consulting' motions will be popular in the short term, seeing a lot of this in GTM via GTM engineering / applied AI roles

[dom @dom__inic]

@clippycommits @fogellxy 🫡 will write a thread

[dom @dom__inic]

@fogellxy Yeah you def don’t want to use it to write cold emails that’s for noobs. It enables you to focus solely on selling and automate everything else in terms of follow up admin, invoices, defining ICP, finding people to reach out to, actual delivery, etc etc

[dom @dom__inic]

@curious_vii @repligate Completely agree, even more than 51% in my niche since I'm focused on sales / recruiting which I don't think will ever be done by AI

It's a nice simplifier for me, since I can forget about thinking about how to AI automate this and simply think about how to enable individuals

[dom @dom__inic]

There’s a lot of alpha right now in refusing to spend your time vibe coding, identifying as a “builder”, caring about what evals are, etc

[dom @dom__inic]

@curious_vii @repligate I'd agree w that. I've found in the past the framing of 'evals' has led me to overengineer a bit and just focusing on extremely simple biz metrics to drive upwards has been helpful!

[dom @dom__inic]

@meet_alt @fogellxy just have something of value that you want to sell and then use it to help you to do sales