I support new technology products; my focus is early customers & early revenue. I help startup teams generate leads & close deals. [email protected]
Silicon Valley
Joined March 2008
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skmurphy retweeted
I'm ex-MSFT so all these layoffs and buyouts are hitting real people I care about it. But...
Microsoft is deep in developer products. Languages, IDEs, architectures, platforms, their certificate ecosystem, all this stuff looks like it might be in jeopardy with AI.
I don't know the details, but it does seem like MSFT business is going to be massively altered in the next few years, especially their relationship with developers. This might be their biggest business shift since they abandoned mobile and went all-in on cloud computing 12 years ago.
BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg.
Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible.
This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce.
"I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."
Leo Tolstoy "What is Art?" (1932) Chapter 14: "Truths fatal to preconceived views not readily recognized" (Aylmer Maude translation)
I think entrepreneurs must often abandon not only common wisdom but also aspects of their own hard-won perspective to recognize a new niche. Exploiting a niche will often involve inverting an established rule of thumb, typically by wasting what was formerly scarce or expensive but is now suddenly plentiful and cheap.
"Like the young trees in the wintertime,
I'll learn how to bend."
Carole King and Toni Stern in It's Going To Take Some Time This Time
Finding your niche is rarely a single, clean, smooth effort; it's more like halting steps in a dark maze whose dead ends require frequent backtracking. Many entrepreneur success stories leave out the confusion that gave way to slowly dawning comprehension. In part because it's painful to remember confusion and difficult to explain it in hindsight. Also because, over time, the successful steps and final results are more memorable.
skmurphy retweeted
I am living through my third “reset” in Silicon Valley. Reputations are built in hard times, not the easy times. If you shake a hand, sign your name - stand strong, or your word is no good. Otherwise you are a transient that only wanted the easy take. And you should move on.
"Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen. Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life. To be be a good loser is to learn how to win."
Carl Sandburg
"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced — Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it."
John Keats
This is what makes entrepreneurship so hard (along with many other callings), you must have empathy for your customer's situation and needs.
This reminds me of a quote I curated in March 2019 (skmurphy.com/blog/2019/03/30…)
"What cannot be taught always teaches the greatest lesson."
Drew Byrne
Words on a page or in a talk like pivot, lost sale, or shutdown feel very different in real life.
skmurphy retweeted
A color revolution only works once a people stop believing the constitutional order belongs to them. That is the miscalculation here: Americans may despise the custodians at times, but they’ll never surrender the deed.
skmurphy retweeted
Systems thinking and design systems go hand in hand… but there’s a lot more to the story.
A design system is bigger than a component library.
But the useful part is that nobody has to debate that button again.
The same principle applies to far more than UI.
One clear ICP means one sales deck, one go-to-market plan, and one set of places to show up.
One reliable customer feedback loop means the team isn't reinventing how it learns all the time.
These are all small decisions, and small decisions get discounted because they look small in isolation.
But when the decision becomes a standard, it compounds through every person and every workflow that follows.
That's what I mean by "one decision that makes a thousand."
The best systems remove work people never needed to be doing in the first place.
In Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore defines a market by four characteristics:
1. a set of actual or potential customers
2. for a given set of products or services
3. who have a common set of needs or wants, and
4. who reference each other when making a buy decision.
skmurphy retweeted
If you're a company worried about AI agents making mistakes, wait until I tell you about your human employees.
skmurphy retweeted
🎬 "Home"
Minnesota is more than a place on a map.
Our money, our elections, our flag.
Our home. Minnesota.
Learn more at TadJude.com
skmurphy retweeted
Disproof by counterexample:
A good rule of history: if you find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you're wrong. Every time, in every era, whatever the issue.
xitter.cf/i/trending/21121889132…
"The right time to approach a technical problem is when it’s barely possible to solve it; when it's hard, filled with unknowns, but not impossible. The best case is when you find something that’s unlikely or even seems irrelevant to other people, but you see value in it and put in the hard work to make it happen. Hard and non-obvious (at first) is where value lies. Obvious and easy is where low-margin crowds are. look for something worthwhile that is barely possible. Don’t confuse prior difficulty with present value or the ability to make something with a reason for making it."
Sam Schillace in "If It's Easy It's Not Worth Much"
I like this approach for finding a niche. The key phrase is "look for something worthwhile that is barely possible." Build on your own expertise and experience, even if the problem seems irrelevant to others. To verify "worthwhile," you should have strong evidence, or at least a strong intuition, that solving it will allow you to deliver value to a niche market. There are a couple of caveats:
1. Not every solution to a hard problem provides value to your customer or your employer: you should try to connect the dots to the new value the solution will enable. This may mean lower cost, faster cycle time, new revenue, or lower risk or higher process reliability.
2. It's wonderful when you unlock new possibilities, but you should have at least one practice or process that will be improved or obsoleted by what you have accomplished. If you tell people, "Now you can do X." They may tell you they have no interest in X.