TheMaxSource: “Before we define MQLs and SQLs, let’s be clear about what a lead is at its most basic level — because this is where confusion begins. A lead is a person, at a company, who has given you some indication that they exist and have some connection to the problem you solve. That’s it. At the lead stage, you know almost nothing of commercial value. You don’t know if they have budget. You don’t know if they’re the decision-maker. You don’t know if their company is a realistic fit for what you sell. You don’t know if they’re ready to buy now, in six months, or never…The entire purpose of the MQL and SQL framework is to add meaningful qualification between a raw signal and a sales conversation — so that by the time a real human being in sales spends time on a lead, there is genuine evidence that the time is worth spending.”
Technology Review: “I believe we need a fresh approach to machine reasoning—one that draws on AlphaGo’s architecture. AlphaGo maintains a record of what it knows about a given position: the game tree. This data structure contains all the variations, the possible futures, that AlphaGo has considered, each move and position being annotated with judgments made by its neural networks. As its reasoning progresses, AlphaGo updates the game tree and eventually synthesizes the information in it to decide which move to make. Similarly, for general reasoning a system should maintain an epistemic state that represents what the system holds as settled, what it doubts, what it has ruled out, which questions stay open. Reasoning can then be understood as a sequence of moves that change the epistemic state to advance knowledge and reduce uncertainty: deducing consequences, breaking problems.”
NYTimes on Decluttering: “Letting go isn’t hard because the objects themselves are objectively so precious. It’s hard because the brain sees it as changing who we are — and resists that. The same is true for our old ideas and behaviors. But if we take a step back and use our imagination and connection to others to see the problem in a new way, we can more purposefully let go of the things that aren’t serving us without losing the core of who we are.”
Erik Torenberg: “Horowitz Andreessen Academy will be a two-year residential program in San Francisco for 16 to 22 year olds…Students will learn from real-world practitioners and intellectuals; including founders (Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong, Jensen Huang), investors (Elad Gil, Daniel Gross), and professors (Agnes Callard, Tyler Cowen), among hundreds of others. The Academy is the educational experience I wish I had…The goal of the Academy is to identify the right mentors, the correct bottlenecks, and the right introductions, adjusted continuously around one person and their pursuits.” [via Arnold Kling]
