Five links: How to sell; the EV transition; Populist hypocrisy; Bayesian reasoning; Corporate culture driving employment decisions
A collection of five interesting links
This is a new series on this Substack: a collection of five interesting links that I have come across recently. I maintain a collection of interesting links in Notion, and I plan to occasionally dump links, along with some commentary about them, in future posts.
I had read this essay a while back, and recently came upon it again. It’s a great primer on how to sell, especially in the context of tech startups. I see too many tech startups whose employees think that anyone and everyone is a potential customer. But good sales processes require that you focus your efforts on qualified prospects, i.e, buyers for whom your product or service solves a problem. Selling tampons to men is a sucker’s bet. You will quickly go bankrupt if you try to sell pet food to someone who doesn’t own pets.
Salient quote:
Your job is not to “sell”, your job is qualification.
Qualification means asking the correct set of questions to determine if the prospect is a good fit for your product or not. Once your startup has product-market fit, you will have a good sense of what these “qualification questions” are.
This advice, by the way, does not just apply to tech startups. Anyone involved in selling anything to anyone needs to first determine whether the person to whom she is speaking is a qualified buyer. No sense trying to sell Yankees gear to a Red Sox fan.
The Staggering Scale of the EV Transition
Everything is electrifying these days: cars, stoves, etc. This is being done in the name of climate change. But little attention is paid to whether our current electrical grid is up to the task of significantly increased demand, or, if it is not, how it can be changed to serve this increased demand. This link provides an overview of a book written by “risk ecologist” Robert N. Charette.
Interesting quote from this piece:
Throughout his research and reporting, Bob focused on the EV transition “at scale”: what needs to happen in order for electric vehicles to displace internal combustion engine vehicles and have a measurable impact on climate change by midcentury? Quite a lot, it turns out. Humans must change two foundational sectors of modern civilization—energy and transportation—to achieve the targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These simultaneous global overhauls will involve trillions of dollars in investments, tens of millions of workers, millions of new EVs, tens of thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines to carry electricity from countless new wind and solar farms, and dozens of new battery plants and mines to feed them. Then there are lifestyle compromises that most people living in developed countries will have to make.
The Cost Disease of the Populist Sector
Daniel Drezner observes the hypocrisy at the center of populist politics:
The story of Clarence Thomas and his super-wealthy and super-generous friends is a parable of political hypocrisy. But it is also about much more than that. It is also about what happens when holier-than-thou political elites mix with richer-than-thou benefactors.
But let’s start with the hypocrisy! It is worth remembering that the populist surge in 2016 was driven in no small part by the perception that the governing elites of this country were playing by a different set of rules than everyone else. For example, politicians on both the right and the left made a lot of hay about how the Clinton Foundation received a lot of funding from dubious sources at the same time that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. Add in Clinton’s unwillingness to adhere to email protocols, and one can understand how a narrative quickly took hold in 2016 that the country needed to check its corrupt governing elites.
This is the essence of the populist political style: “Populists articulate their agenda as one that is opposed to corrupt elites trying to frustrate the wants of the common man. They therefore oppose any checks and balances on the ability of a populist leader to govern, characterizing such constraints as elite manipulation of the system.”
I don’t really like the phrase “mental liquidity,” but it’s used in this essay to make a great point. Those who are able to update their beliefs when confronted with new information fare best. A different, and more accurate, way to put it would be that such people are Bayesian.
Quoting from the piece:
Beliefs take effort and investment, and it hurts to realize that there may be limited ROI on your hard-fought convictions. For a lot of things in life—particularly, politics, investing, and relationships—people don’t necessarily want the truth; they want certainty. Changing your mind is hard because it’s an admission that the certainty you once thought you held was an illlusion. The path of least resistance is to cling to beliefs for dear life.
This essay is based on another essay, by Nadia Asparouhova, about how corporate cultures vary as a function of the kind of talent the company requires. Nadia’s essay is well worth reading, but Dror Poleg explains this concept well:
Twenty years ago, Google was very much a Creative company that “reinvented the wheel.” In recent years, its primary focus has been to milk and industrialize the inventions of its founders and early employees. Meanwhile, OpenAI has a small number of employees who are reinventing the wheel as we speak. This does not mean that Google is not trying to innovate, but its main focus and primary “production function” is very much Industrial rather than Creative.
It is very hard for most people, especially those who have spent their careers in tech startups, to understand how risk-averse large companies become over time. Nadia’s theory about how corporate cultures inform the qualities companies select for in their employment practices aptly explains this observation. Arnold Kling also recently wrote about this.