SaaStr: “Startups that are scaling are spending about: 15% of Revenue on Sales — and 18% for higher growth start-ups, 10% of Revenue on Marketing (and trending up), 7% on Customer Success (trending down).”
Elizabeth Reid: “Human curiosity is boundless. People have a lot of questions. A three-year-old will go: “Why, why, why, why, why?” But, as an adult, you don’t assume the person you ask the question knows the answer. You don’t know if you have enough time. You don’t know if it’s worth the effort. And so you don’t ask those questions. But if you lower the [barrier] to asking the question, then people just come. They have a lot more questions and they ask anything these days.”
FT: “In [Andy] Grove’s view, government plays a vital role in developing a robust national infrastructure, funding basic research and making the US a beacon for immigrants. He also believed it was vital for the country to maintain a thriving manufacturing base.
Sendhil Mullainathan: “People imagine that AI is going to automate things, but they don’t appreciate that automation is just one path. There’s nothing intrinsic about machine learning or AI that puts us on that path. The other path is really the path of augmentation. For me, bicycles for the mind describe that. Whether we end up building things that replace us, or things that enhance our capacities, that is something that we can influence. But I am feeling as much urgency as everyone else: If we keep going down the automation path, it’s going to be very hard to walk back and start changing things…One of the most useful things augmentation can do is it can help us with the things that we’re not as good at, to leave room for the things we are excellent at. Behavioral economics has helped identify those blind spots.”
Vlad Tenev: “I think news, entertainment, financial services, sports to some degree… these are all merging over time, and they’re part of our collective consciousness. I think retail investing is a big part of that. A big, enduring trend is power and capabilities that were formerly reserved for institutions going to the individual level.”
