Categories
behaviour future leadership strategy

Beginning of year 2019 post

The holiday period is always a good time to reflect on the year gone by, and to turn our minds to the future.
 
2018

We started in March 2018 with an idea that we had for a while: making debtor experience best it can be while making the collections process as efficient as it can be. 

I won’t dwell too much on 2018, but what another fantastic year for our business! We developed the product and accompanying service and started executing go-to-market, hired the the team and secured a business incubator backing.

We also learnt a lot on the way. However the key lesson for us would be that hyperrealism is a friend.

  • Assuming the product will resonate with the market (if untested) will most likely be proven wrong. On reflection this is obvious.
  • Product-market fit takes time. Assume you are wrong, so test. Don’t pitch to customers. Proof is to have a meaningful commitment: signed order, intro to a decision maker.
  • Message-market fit will come from talking to customers.
  • Deep analytical understanding is only possible with sufficient data being available.
  • Create your data by talking to customers, partners and competitors. Don’t pitch, think of uncomfortable question to ask, listen to answers and try to disprove your own world view.
  • Once you stop hearing new info you probably know enough to develop testable product hypothesis.
  • Product team needs to lave products (not just in your own domain). Actually better to have broader product experience than domain experience.
  • New product requires new thinking applied to proven product design. No need to invent unessential elements of your product. Use best practice for sign up, activation, integrations, security.

2019

Taking leanings from 2018, we are looking at 2019 with clear focus on go-to-market, building a strong team and serving our customers.  

Categories
blockchain crypto future payments security startup trading venture capital

The seven deadly paradoxes of cryptoassets

On one hand cryptoassets are losing value but there are still fat margins to be made by providing trading infrastructure (eg exchanges) for people looking for a bit of fun.

The author of this article is taking a longer term view about crypto: Will people in 2030 buy goods, get mortgages or hold their pension pots in bitcoin, ethereum or ripple rather than central bank issued currencies? I doubt it.  Existing private cryptocurrencies do not seriously threaten traditional monies because they are afflicted by multiple internal contradictions. They are hard to scale, are expensive to store, cumbersome to maintain, tricky for holders to liquidate, almost worthless in theory, and boxed in by their anonymity. And if newer cryptocurrencies ever emerge to solve these problems, that’s additional downside news for the value of existing ones.

Categories
future

What’s discovery

  • Think of a “discovery” as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time.
Categories
future

Ahead

What could be what should be done with all the time that lay ahead of us? from Night Train to Lisbon

Categories
future innovation other startup Uber

Uber of X

Now every idea seems to be around Uber of X or Stripe of Y. Not long ago it was all about Facebook of Z. What’s next?

Categories
code future leadership other short work

Short eats Long for breakfast

As  Sir Arthur Helps, a 19th century aphorist, said: “Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long.”

My equivalent list for today’s managers would be: “Everthing is too long. Business plans, board presentations, management accounts, sales reports, project updates, standup checkins, system’s architecture, code.”

Categories
cloud future innovation other

Virtual Reality HoloLens

At London’s Future Decoded, Nadella frequently referred to HoloLens, the augmented-reality headset the company is deploying in early 2016. “If you change the way you see the world, you change the world that you see,’ he said on stage, pointing to the ‘augmented’ aspect of the headset. It’s clear to see that HoloLens will be a big part of Microsoft’s future offerings to businesses.

Other soundbites included:
– Mobile-first, cloud-first
– Data from exhaust to fuel
– Lagging indicators like revenue, profit vs leading indicators like usage

Categories
future other work

Salesforce end of software

In 1992, “The End of History and the Last Man” book by Francis Fukuyama was published and in 2005 at INSEAD Fukuyama’s ideas were trumpeted as the invariable, unalterable fact ie absolute truth.

In 1999, Salesforce was founded and in 2015 at an enterprise-software-decission-table Salesforce presents invariable, unalterable fact ie absolute truth.

On Monday 15 Sept 2008, I worked for a global settlement house and had to deal with Lehman*, the biggest ever US failure.

*WSJ reported: Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy protection Monday morning and Merrill Lynch had sold itself to Bank of America. By the end of the day, investors had turned their focus to insurance giant AIG, which was tottering, needing to raise billions in capital or face collapse.

Categories
behaviour future other people work

What’s your frame?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana

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Legal Disclaimer
There is a risk of loss in futures, forex and options trading. There is risk of loss trading futures, forex and options online. Please trade with capital you can afford to lose. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future result.”

Categories
decisions future other

New IT

IT is responsible for all tech/dev/R&D/innovation. Right?

But what is the function of IT in a fast-moving data-driven hyper-competition market?

It is no longer mostly CTOs who hold businesses’ purse strings; by 2017 chief marketing officers will spend more on IT than their CIOs, reckons Gartner.

Customers are no longer willing just to buy the latest technology; they want to pay for specific results, for instance for sales increases achieved by using analytics software.