The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

Hello friends, I am back! I have been doing a ton of financial research and am very disturbed by what I have learned.

Please enjoy a long (irresponsibly LONG) story about central banking, manufactured crises, George Soros, and the Great Reset.

This thred will be much longer and more dry than my usual, pls bear with me. This one's legit important. The first portion will reference works by Dr. Richard Werner, and the latter George Soros.

Note my views are not indicative of those of people quoted. This post does not constitute investment counsel.

To understand current financial conditions you bare minimum have to go back to WWII. Bretton Woods has just been signed, establishing the IMF and World Bank, and the USD as standard for international settlement.

But we're not talking about US history (yet), we have to look at Japan. Unlike Germany, which had it's economy stripped down and sold off by the victorious Allies, Japan's system remained remarkably intact.

THREAD:

What if I can prove @KLoeffler has direct financial ties to China, doing just a simple open source dive into her recent past?

It’s pretty obvious...follow along:

Some interesting snippets from @MotilalOswalLtd 25th Wealth Creation Study:

(A Short thread)

1. Consumer/Retail is the biggest wealth-creating sector over 25 years.

2. Almost 60 of the top 100 market cap companies in 1995 did not make it to the Wealth Creators list.

3.Corporate profit to GDP at all-time lows + Market cap to GDP close to an all-time high.

4. Permanent change in the long term interest rate band is leading to a change in valuation expectations.

5. Twenty-five stocks for the next twenty-five years. Read the Disclaimer.

Does increase in Inflation & hence interest rates lead to a fall in equity? While theoretically yes, practically the last 20 years of data shows otherwise

Please ‘re-tweet’ 🧵& help us educate more retail investors

#Investing

Lets start with basic, y does inflation ⬆️?
Most feel bcoz of higher demand & lower supply but that’s nt the only factor. Imagine there is a shortage of laptops wrt the demand, but there is no liquidity in the market (people don’t have monies) will the price of laptop ⬆️? No

So, Inflation takes place because the demand supply situation is accompanied by high liquidity, people have the monies to spend and hence the price goes up. Inflation does not take place only because of the demand supply gap (3/n)

Its RBI’s job to keep inflation under check. What role does RBI play? RBI is comfortable keeping Inflation between 2-6% currently. So if Inflation is increasing, how can RBI control it? Can RBI do anything to demand & supply? Nothing (4/n)

So the only tool available with RBI to control inflation is controlling liquidity. If RBI is able to reduce liquidity in the market, less money will chase the goods and hence Inflation can be expected to stabilize. (5/n)

A potential problem is looming, and the media are pursuing a new story that builds on the following chain of reasoning: 1) higher inflation is coming;2) if CBs increase interest rates debts will explode and recession may ensue; 3) CBs are caught in an impossible dilemma 1/12

It´s perhaps too complex for some tweets, but.. Registered inflation this year is bound to be higher than present forecasts, resulting from one-off price spikes and base effects That will not start a sustained high inflation process, but temporary higher inflation is possible 2/

For example, Euro Area inflation increased suddenly from several months at -0.3% to +0.9% in Jan. This jump resulted mostly from several base effects, especially the change to German VAT. Inflation expectations increasing but higher in the US than in the EA 3/

The major one-off base effect will come from oil prices that decreased abysmally in March 2020 and have recovered. Some estimates put US inflation in April reaching 4%! After vaccinations, later in the year, pent-up consumer demand will also increase prices.4/

Despite the increased spending of accumulated savings, the savings rate will remain higher than before Covid for precautionary reasons (Fig 1). No permanent spending spree will materialise. Wages will remain subdued for a while (Fig2). Higher but not high inflation is coming.5/