So Salesforce is the grandperson of SaaS software

The first to hit $100B in market cap
The first to do $10B+ in ARR (and only so far)

And yet, in many ways we know >less< about Salesforce that we used to

It's not just a CRM anymore

5 Interesting Learnings:

#1. 73% of Salesforce’s customers come from the installed base. Let that sink in.

This is why in the end, Net Revenue Retention is the #1 most important metric in SaaS.

This also means that Salesforce could basically still hit 73% of its plan with 0 new customers.

Put differently, their 2017 customers have, as a cohort, grown 2.1x

#2. Salesforce’s upsell is split about 50/50 between new seats and new products.

In the early days, you’ll probably only have new seats to sell.

But eventually, you’ll probably need a second or third product to sell. We talked about this re: Veeva, Twilio and more here:

#3. The more products you sell, really, the more problems you solve — the more you make.

This is something a bit non-obvious. Salesforce’s customers that buy > 1 product overall, spend a stunning 10x more.

2. '𝐢 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠'

In the spring, Katsuki gets accepted into the bioengineering program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His friends insisted they opened the admissions letter, just in case he got waitlisted—then they all screamed, because

he’d been accepted.

Just like he knew he would be.

Personalized letter from the dean of students. Excess financial aid. Honors.

He smiled, even if it hurt a little, knowing he’d be leaving them soon. Hanta had applied there as well, and although his standardized test scores

weren’t great, he still had a shot since he scores really well in STEM courses. Other than him, everyone else planned to stick around Musutafu.

Eij wanted to join the armed services. Denki wanted to be a dental hygienist. Mina would go to the community college, and figure shit

out when she got there.

Ochako planned to leave the country, take a gap year and travel around a bit. Tsu—who is now dating Mina—was also on a full-ride to the University of Tokyo, on a pre-med track.

And then there was Deku.

The dumbass couldn’t pick a direction if you handed him a map and a compass.

Hizashi wants him to join the military; and as much as Katsuki hates the bastard of a man, he can’t deny that it may be Deku’s best option. If he doesn’t pick a school or come up with a plan,

Questions are a disruptive technology. A thread. 1/

We see the most recent wave of disruptive technologies. E-commerce. Smart phones. Ride-sharing. Blockchain. We are often blind to the disruptive technologies and techniques that have been with us for a long, long time, but are still disruptive and disrupting. /2

Ancient but still disruptive tech: music, migration, out-marriage, ink, questions. /3

Questions change lives. They bring people together, tear them apart. They open doors. And minds. They are the seed of adventure. They acknowledge the chaos inside and around us. They are a transfer of power, trusting that the power will come back in time, improved. /4

What is a question? We use them so frequently, so thoughtlessly. It is easy to overlook their strangeness, and the nature of their power. /5

Great report by @satariano on a fake network that @Graphika_NYC (and others) found in December.

Twitter accounts with GAN faces, boosting Huawei, boosted by Huawei execs, and attacking Belgium's 5G policies.

Not enough evidence to prove who ran them.

We found this network when it was boosted by Spamouflage, a pro-China operation.

Independently, @mvanhulten of @TI_EU and @ArbiterOfTweets of @Knack found it with different methods.

It's not a friendly environment for fake campaigns,

This was the first account we found.

"Alexandre, PhD", apparently a CEO.

But no surname, no indication of what he's a CEO of, and a GAN-generated profile pic.

Alexandre's had a bit of an obsession with Belgium and #5G recently.

Especially, Belgium's security limitations on 5G providers, which are reportedly mainly about Huawei and ZTE.

Alexandre didn't like the Belgian approach much.

The account was created in 2017. It only started tweeting in early December, 2020, but its first posts were retweets of tweets from November 2017-18.

They were meant to be about VR, as in virtual reality. Oddly, one was actually about Victorian Railways in Australia. Awkward.

YouTube’s ad business is officially bigger than Netflix.

YouTube ads at ~$35B run-rate vs Netflix at ~$31B run-rate

🧵 Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, Mitre Corporation y Mayo Clinic, anunciaron el jueves q estan desarrollando estándares tecnológicos para permitir obtener y compartir registros de vacunación a través un “pasaporte de

When we say that "an algorithm is biased" we usually mean, "biased people made an algorithm." This explains why so much machine learning prediction turns into phrenology.

1/

Researchers with phrenological delusions ask machines to find statistical correlates of personalities or emotions, and machines dutifully provides them. It's high-stakes, machine-human collaborative apophenia, detecting patterns where none

Regrettably, this junk science gets published in respected journals. In 2017, @nature published a study by Stanford's Michal Kosinski claiming that machine learning could detect the facial correlates of homosexuality, creating an alleged AI gaydar.

3/

Unsurprisingly, Kosinski's study spectacularly failed to replicate. But as is so often the case, the blockbuster finding gets all the press, the careful replication work that calls it into doubt is roundly

Kosinski hasn't given up on AI phrenology. His lab's latest paper (published by Nature...again!) claims that he can detect political affiliation from social media

New scam happening in your name @amazonIN.

I had a product delivered today to my home, for which I had placed an order on Sunday.

Around 1.30 P.M., I received a call from +91 98743 95024 saying Amazon has selected 10 winners out of the people who have ordered this product

And I can choose between 5 options as a gift (including an iPhone 11 and a Sony LED TV). I knew straight away that this was a scam but played along.

The scammer then told me that since the cost of the gift I have chosen (iPhone) is quite high, I would need to buy something else

as well worth INR 5000 or more to ensure that I would not refuse the gift once it was delivered to me (as if you can find people like that!)

At this point, I was beyond sure that it was a scam but was also intrigued so I played along further.

The scammer then "transferred the

call to a senior" person to guide me with the rest of the process.

The "senior" then asked me for the color of the phone I want and asked me to add both the phone and the item worth INR 5000 to cart. I told him I have done that (I hadn't).

Then the scammer asked me how I would

like to pay. Upon me saying credit card, he said that if I pay by credit card, I would have to "divulge my details". When asked what details, he dodged that question and said UPI or bank transfer was "easier".

Just to play along, I said let's go ahead with UPI

Scary but Artificial intelligence...😊😊

Ordering a Pizza in 2021
CALLER:
Is this Pizza Delight?
GOOGLE:
No sir, it's Google Pizza.
CALLER:
I must have dialed a wrong number. Sorry.
GOOGLE:
No sir, Google bought Pizza Delight last month.

CALLER:
OK. I would like to order a pizza.
GOOGLE:
Do you want your usual, sir?
CALLER:
My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE:
According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.
CALLER:
OK! That’s what I want ...

GOOGLE:
May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?
CALLER:
What? I detest vegetable!
GOOGLE:
Your cholesterol is not good, sir.
CALLER:
How the hell do you know!

GOOGLE:
Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.
CALLER:
Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza! I already take medication for my cholesterol.

I have some thoughts re: the responses that @GameMinimalist got yesterday when he expressed his discomfort with history-based conflict games, their Euro-centric nature, and imperialist overtones/undertones. 1/

There are many people who are uncomfortable with wargames (the term I'm going to use as shorthand for "games that attempt to engage seriously with, or to model, some aspect of history in some way"). And that's okay. 2/

If someone is expressing that discomfort, I personally think the first and in some cases only thing one can or should do is *acknowledge* that. Listen to them and their concerns. 3/

If they're misinformed - a lot of folks seem to think that wargames are about gore and violence and bloodlust, that they act as a pressure release for dark impulses, which simply isn't true. I mean, converting numbers to an odds ratio isn't exactly drenched in viscera -- 4/

go ahead and correct that misinformation, while understanding that they might still be uncomfortable with it, and it's perfectly valid for that to be the case.

This reminds me of my grandfather. 5/

At the #AAS237 conference yesterday I went to a panel discussion on the effect of large constellations of satellites on astronomy from the ground. The thousands of satellites @spacex and others want to launch are a serious problem. 1/n

The launch of so many satellites might change the appearance of the night sky for ever and the trails they leave in astronomers' cameras and the potential for interference with radio telescopes are serious problems 2/n

Those problems are particularly acute for those searching for near-Earth or threatening asteroids, for example, though any large survey of the sky is affected. 3/n

It was good to see @spacex, Amazon's Kuiper project and @oneweb present, and to hear that the latter have dropped their plans from more than 40,000 satellites to 'only' 6372. All the speakers were positive about working together. 4/n

@OneWeb And a lot has been done. All three companies talked about making sure their satellites were fainter than 7th magnitude soon after launch, which would make them invisible to the naked eye and avoid the worst problems for large surveys 5/n

Polkadot is complicated as hell! This 24-tweet thread is a beginner's guide to @Polkadot $DOT and @KusamaNetwork $KSM in simple English.

What is Polkadot? Kusama? Parachains? Crowdloan and Parachain slot auction?

Comment with other questions and share if you learn something ⤵️

What is Polkadot?

@Polkadot is a platform on which blockchain networks are built and connected into one unified network. These connected chains, called parachains, form a living organism of networks all in sync and secure. This forms the foundation on which Web3 will be built.

Dr. Gavin Wood, @gavofyork, founded @Polkadot after inventing the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language for #Ethereum as the co-founder and CTO. Ethereum wasn't going to scale, and thus, Polkadot was born in 2017.

Blockchains built for Polkadot use a dev framework called Substrate (@substrate_io), the easiest and most advanced blockchain-building framework for coders.

Think of it as drag-and-drop blockchain consensus, or even easier, like Music EQ with dials up & down on certain features.

Ethereum is a one-size-fits-all chain. This doesn't work at scale.

Dev teams use @Polkadot's Substrate framework to build custom chains for a specific use/vertical, such as @AcalaNetwork for DeFi, @PhalaNetwork for Privacy, @chainlink for Oracles, or @hydra_dx for liquidity.

BILL GATES:

-HS Diploma
-Stole idea for Microsoft
-Mom worked for IBM (look up what they did in WW2)
-Dad worked for Planned Parenthood
-Sanger family ties
-400,000 Paralyzed in India
-Caused Polio outbreak after it had been irradiated
-Openly talks about the need to depopulate