9/12/2020 - Saying YES in the Enterprise
+ Stories of Grit rom Peloton, Shopify and Roam Research
Thank you everybody for all the amazing feedback last week, and I'm glad that some folks enjoy all my eclectic collection of links. Now, back to playing curator 😇
Say NO to Enterprise Features or take the Path to Extensibility?
This train of thought started with this great post from @StaySaaSy — on why you must try to avoid saying NO to features when selling to Enterprises. This topic is pretty fascinating because in product development, there is so much debate and discussion about prioritization, simplicity, and cutting features in a consumer context. However, in an enterprise context, the counter logic often prevails! (Note that we are talking true enterprise and multi-million $$ deals)
Saying YES opens the doors to closing larger customers, logos you need to build respect and credibility and paves the way for other enterprises to trust you. In most enterprise sales, products are really complex to evaluate and judge, and most enterprises rely on the judgment of their peers to invite a vendor into the evaluation process or sometimes sell the vendor internally to the stakeholders. Being able to deliver a nuance on a particular functionality can sometimes make a lot of difference in winning those reference logos in a new category or that last push in replacing a legacy player.
Over time, sometimes these features end up being used only by a small subset of customers. Can you kill the feature, as you would do in a consumer product? Unfortunately, you may not have that luxury! Sometimes that customer is really strategic in a new category and can't migrate off from a custom workflow due to internal politics, or maybe sometimes this feature is applicable to only your top customer, who happens to be 15% of your revenues. That unused feature has become a cash cow that has opened up the doors to a multi-million dollar deal and very high retention down the line since the same customer can’t easily find another vendor to build this unique workflow.
The challenge product development teams deal with is how to maintain and continue to innovate upon all of this added complexity. This is where the creative solutions come in and end up being a constant evolution into higher abstraction and extensibility of the core platform. Can you over-time migrate this out so that the customer can build using their own APIs? Can you get an ISV partner to build for you? Can you provide an ability for the customer to inject their highly-custom business logic into your platform, or build an integration with that legacy solution that nobody can find programmers for through a marketplace? All different ways to say YES when you really want to say NO.
Some of the greatest companies started turning more and more extensible and became platforms when they said YES - what is salesforce today but a highly extensible database - with extensibility in pretty much every way possible? However, note that the counter-argument is equally applicable. Like Ray Dalio said in his book, ‘Principles’, Timing is everything!
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and PaaS
Gartner published their MQ for Cloud Infrastructure — while the usual suspects are all still there, its interesting to note that the positioning hasn't changed since I published the blog post earlier in the year about the $3 Tn Cloud Wars.
AWS is the leader, but pricing is confusing, and so many services don't gel well together (see viral video above!)
GCP is amazing at data science, but people are doubting Google's commitment to the cloud (even after Thomas Kurien)
IBM plays the story of multi-cloud esp with OpenShift but still a small niche player
Microsoft Azure is growing rapidly, but there are questions about its resilience and availability
Despite Zoom, Oracle is still an early entrant, and surprisingly is not a big player in DB-PaaS
India's Coronavirus Battle
Between apocalyptic haze and feeling like we are living in Blade Runner 2049, seeing India's COVID numbers shoot up has been truly concerning. The feedback on the ground seems like the world is back to normal, but the cases are shooting up like there's no tomorrow.
Raghuram Rajan's Wake up Call post on LinkedIn
While an opposition party's views always have to be taken with a grain of salt — there's definitely something we can do than 'Bhagwan Bharose'
Stories of Grit from Physics, Peloton, Shopify, and Roam Research
What an amazing story of grit, persistence, and bouncing back. Myriam Sarachik is truly badass. I'd never heard of her before - but this article is less about Physics but more about human tenacity and why inclusiveness is so critical in today's world!
Continuing on the same theme, BVP’s original investment memo on Shopify was fascinating. So, interesting to see how “lucky” BVP got since they were willing to take a bet on a Canadian startup when nobody else in the valley wanted to go there — and amazing perseverance by the founders. So true — amazing startups can come out of anywhere.
In a similar vein, is the story of Peloton's John Foley who was rejected by everybody - I was talking to a founder who could be rejected by yet another VC today, and I sent this article to him. I think the message resonated 🙂
Conor-White Sullivan of Roam Research talks about rejection from YC because the notes app category landed straight in “Trash”
Elsewhere in the World
Continuing on the theme of Shopify, given that Micro-SaaS is the flavor of the world, this article on building a Shopify Micro-SaaS company was really interesting to read. Fascinating how its a microcosm of building a real product... and how the author talks about doing customer research through autocomplete!
Three Marriages and a Funeral: Lord & Taylor is finally going out of business. While it’s easy to blame it on e-commerce and the pandemic, nobody can fix 40 years of bad decision making.
Will we end up bifurcation in the world of chip manufacturing. One that's China aligned and one that's not?
Ben Evans had another great post arguing that Amazon's core retail business is starting to get really profitable!
Somebody generated Taleb aphorisms using GPT-3, I would truly buy these as being from Taleb. I was also digging around on how to get my hands on it, but other than the waitlist seems like there aren't many options.
For something so critical, our Emergency alert infrastructure is a hot mess.
Singapore's developmental model is the world's envy. But there was a lot of historical whitewashing and character composition that led to Lee Kuan Yew emerging as the main protagonist.
I wish somebody could go rewrite IKEA's e-commerce stack.
Great treatise on history, a subject I hated as a kid but have come to love now.
