Can academics build products?

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Last week I posted on LinkedIn a question: What tricks do you know to sell products more efficiently?

Some cool comments were:

a) Never say that you are better than a competitor - companies have already done their due diligence

b) B2B Software selling, it's 70% side-by-side solution architecture, 20% empathising, and 10% team character. If you reached into the point of the funnel that you have a call/meting, you don't have to "sell".

c) Don't freeze or stutter on the cost question.

You can read more comments here and if we are not connected on Linkedin, we should.

Let jump to the top five things that happened last 7 days.

1/ Today Facebook will be announcing its Metaverse plans. But wait wait wait. If you haven't seen Facebook's official metaverse musical about employees you are missing out. It is sooo cringeworthy and internet is going nuts about the video.

2/ In my latest pitch deck review, I talk about academics trying to build products and Startups. The video has already created very heated discussions as my point of view is

building stuff > talking about stuff

In this video I talk about why it might hurt your chances raising money if you have taken money for your Startup from a government (or the European union) or why it might be negative if you have any scientific papers about your product.

Click here to see this epic video!

3/ Having said that, Ryan Petersen put the glasses on every single Operations researcher/scientist in LA and universities got offended.

Here's what happened:

The port of LA/Long Beach is at a standstill. That means shipments are not making their way around California, the US and even the whole world. It is a gridlock, an operational mayhem. What Ryan did? He rented a boat and inspected the operations as close as he could. He identified the easiest thing to fix that would solve 90% of the issue and posted his solution on Twitter.

"When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you."

Then people start improving on the idea and shared it with the Mayor of Long Beach, Robert Garcia. And OMG, it was actually implemented! AND IT WORKS.

4/ A crypto collective - a DAO - bought from the Department of Justice Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for $4M. Let me break it down for you.

Wu-Tang Clan's unreleased album was bought by a hedge fund manager that went to jail for fraud for seven years. Department of Justice got custody of the album. And this is where things become interesting.

A group of people have formed a DAO to buy collectible NFTs. The name of the DAO is PleasrDAO and they have bought some very interesting NFTs in the past. Long story short, they went to DOJ and said that we want to buy that album for $4M and ... boom! They are now the only people on the planet that have heard this album and have the rights.

5/ The first trillion is always the hardest. Elon Musk is on his way to become the first trillionaire.

That’s it for today. See you next week.

-- Jon V (as in Victory)

- Thu 28 October 2021