🙋🏾‍♀️ In 2011, I was hired into my first junior role in tech @Groupon

👩🏾‍💻 By 2020, I was headhunted into a VP role in a global tech company @Brandwatch

🤖 I achieved this progression in less than a decade, without ANY coding skills

🔮 How did I do it?

*a thread*

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.

Here’s a SPAC thread covering some basics for new followers. I will pin this to my profile if you want to share to anyone interested in SPACs.

SPAC timelines consist of these stages:
IPO – SPAC raises cash and begins trading as a unit. The cash is placed in Trust.
Searching phase – After IPO, the SPAC management team looks for a company to merge with. This is typically 24 months but can be shorter depending on the SPAC

LOI/Rumor – A letter of intent is announced publicly or Bloomberg/Reuters etc. breaks news of a rumor that a SPAC is close to a deal with a target.

The LOI/rumor stage does not always happen, most go straight to a definitive agreement. Rumors should only be considered to have value if from a trusted news source, internet rumblings are pure speculation. During this stage, a deal can still fall apart and not be signed.

Definitive agreement (DA) – deal officially inked. The SPAC begins filing paperwork with the SEC to have the merger approved to take the target company public. This process typically takes 4+ months after the DA is announced.

I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)

First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?

Fintech firms will become digital layers around central banks, just like banks were physical layers

Central banks will create plug and play digital infrastructure (e.g. UPI, Aadhar) on which fintech products are built

Central banks will enable fintechs to replace banks