I have a Substack where I was tracking stock trades guiding by an ML model I built. Life got in the way, so I stopped maintaining it and trading with it, but the app is still running on AWS.
So technically, I'm losing money on my newsletter.
The ML model was pretty profitable when I was running it though.
I've built a few sales team for early stage startups, and invariably the question comes up: "Inbound sales is working. Will outbound sales work?"
The successful experiments I've seen look like this: hire 2 SDRs at the time, focus them exclusively on outbound, then measure their results to identify the CAC. Then, you can make a call if that CAC is something you want to scale.
The failed experiments look like this: the founder doesn't want to invest too heavily in something that might not pay off, so we hire 1 SDR and they have to commit 50% of their time to following up on low quality Marketing leads.
It's not so much about the number itself, but more about the experiment design that will give you clear results
The reason that email is different than Reddit or Twitter is because you're interrupting the person's day. That means that if you're asking for something from them, people will disregard it. Try offering something valuable instead.
Your call to action should be along the lines of "we're working on solving X problem for people like you, and I'd love to show you what we've built so far. Maybe you'll find it useful".
If you do this, then schedule a 30 minute call where you have a 10-15 minute demo rehearsed that goes over the problem, and why your product exists. After your demo, you can open up into more discovery about their challenges or what they would want to see in your product.
I've built sales teams at startups, and it's a very different outreach process than my current BigCo- your process is more about education and being opinionated.
Listen to his podcast (Against the Rules) from today and you can hear his take on the trial.
I also recommend his interview of Matt Levine (5 episodes ago) to get a good TLDR of the book. Here's my TLDR on the book after finishing it, which mirrors Levine's closely: Michael Lewis sees that Sam thinks he's above the rules and acted with wild disregard for risk because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. It was all illegal and will land him in jail for a long time. But, he did it because he thinks he's the smartest man who ever lived and has the best intentions, not because he sees himself as a crook.
It's a minor nuance, but an important one. It speaks more to the ego of founders and children of privilege, than to a criminal conspiracy. The articles you've read don't like that nuance, and call Lewis soft.
>What happened there ??? The guy who calls out a lot of fraud, now can't see it?
He calls it Fraud many times in his book and in his podcast. He just doesn't call it theft.
You should spend some time with sales leaders to better understand what's needed from a CRM.
I took a look at your CRM product and understand that your long term goal is a great ecosystem...however, your UI is missing the point of a modern CRM.
A CRM used to be account/contact/opportunity tracking. Now, sales teams use CRM as the de facto customer-focused data warehouse (because no one in sales actually knows how to query a data warehouse). These days I rarely use salesforce for anything besides looking up data that was written there by another sales tool via the API. The product focus should be on developing a great analytics solution for salespeople, not an online Rolodex.
I used to work at Salesforce and have deployed it at multiple startups as the founding head of sales. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more; I'm looking forward to the day that Salesforce is replaced by something that better fits the modern sales process.
I've been learning to code for the past year. StackOverflow was hugely important in the beginning. I haven't used it in probably 2 months because ChatGPT does an excellent job of not only answering my questions, but also allowing me to ask follow up questions like "what does that specific line of code do?"
This is a side project I've been working on for a few months as a way to learn Python. I'll call this the MVP stage, so please let me know what you think.
The central allegation is that Tether would print coins for themselves that were not backed by USD and then buy BTC. Thus, artificially propping up BTC in a price range where they could then quickly sell, pocket profits, and stor the money to back the Tether they just printed.
In other words, gaming the system is pretty easy when you're printing/minting the money needed to do it. This is what puts crypto in a league of it's own.
Nope. The Fed does not print money for it's own personal/private use or to directly benefit it's members.
The Fed is incentived to profit from economic growth and increased financial activity --- which theorectically works to everyone's benefit. Individual Fed board members are restricted from personally investing in the financial markets to avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest.
> The Fed does not print money for it's own personal/private use or to directly benefit it's members.
You're referring to the small handful of people on its Board of Governors, but the member banks are private institutions run by private individuals who absolutely have investments.
Any policy changes the Fed makes affects all these private member institutions equally and at the same time.
They can guess but it's not possible for these private institutions to "know" what policy changes the Fed will make because even the Fed doesn't know until they meet and vote. It's not practical for one of these institutions to individually request or receive special treatment or favors from the Fed. There is no one individual at the Fed empowered to grant any such request. Making any such attempt would subject the institution to having it's banking charter revoked.
Compare this to crypto where exchanges can and do grant themselves special treatment and secret monetary favors without any permission or oversight whatsoever.
"No special favors" for member banks is hard to swallow after seeing the fallout in 2008 for everyone except those responsible.
That's not a defense of crypto, it's an acknowledgement our banking system is corrupt. It's nice that it magically always works out for those in the know though.
Agreed. The 2020 CARES Act was ~1/3 of 1 month's rent for the peasants and some innumerable amount of money, yes, printed for a secret list of then-Treasury Secretary Mnuchin's choosing. Plus plenty of good provisions. And in 2008, a more transparent yet still obvious use of "quantitative easing" helped the ultra rich become ultra richer. One can claim it's for all of our benefit.
Crypto has plenty of issues, but these defenses of the corrupt use of the Federal Reserve is pretty silly.
>This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.
Mountain climbing is superfluous by this logic- why would you bother climbing a mountain when you could just take a helicopter to the top? Or even more accessible: why would hike to a lookout when there's a road to take you to the same spot?
There is still joy and value in doing things the hard way, even if an easier way exists.
This is true, and a very good analogy, but I'm not sure it holds up when every form of productivity has shifted from fun+challenging+useful to just fun+challenging.
Maybe this is a mindset we'll get over. The degree to which many of us evaluate ourselves based on our own usefulness seems like it's a bit too much but it's a normal human desire to be useful.
I certainly believe we should work towards a post-scarcity world where no one depends on my coding skills any more than they do my rock climbing skills, but it would be a psychological adjustment if every way I can be useful were now just a fun hobby.
I foresee AI eventually replacing the need for soft skills as well. What happens when we have indistinguishable-from-human androids, or wireheading?
But yes, the shorter(?)-term "all physical and intellectual work can be achieved by AI/machines" leaves us with caring for each other, and that's the most fulfilling task.
This is rather an absurd argument and speaks more to the scarcity of natural resources.
I can only speak for myself, but in a world of universal basic income, I'm perfectly happy to pluck the strings of my guitar, play my piano, go for runs with my dog, play tennis etc. I don't believe there is any greater purpose to existence then what you can create for yourself.
Since my contentment comes from performing the actions themselves, whether or not a artificial intelligence can perform them better than me is simply a meaningless question.
Of course it's an absurd argument but my point is that in a fully automated world in abundance we will have 10 billion tourists.
Also I like to differ between performing and creating. For instance playing the piano might still be worthwhile but creating new music will lose its allure as AI will do it for you, faster and better. Saying that it's the same thing as there has always been someone who is better at creating than you, is a flawed argument. With AI there will be an infinite amount of creators that are better than you. Also AI isn't just competition, it's also your ally but the kind who'll say "step aside and I'll fix this for you."
So technically, I'm losing money on my newsletter.
The ML model was pretty profitable when I was running it though.