> Only once would you have X write a PR, then have X approve and merge it to realize the absurdity of what you just did.
I get the idea. I'll still throw out that having a single X go through the full workflow could still be useful in that there's an audit log, undo features (reverting a PR), notifications what have you. It's not equivalent to "human writes ticket, code deployed live" for that reason
Anyone know the VP who referenced the paper? Doesn't seem to be mentioned. My best guess is Gore.
Living VPs
Joe Biden — VP 2009–2017 (became President in 2021; after that he’s called a former VP and former president)
Not likely the one referenced after 2017 because he became president in 2021, so later citations would likely call him a former president instead of former VP.
> When looking specifically at bootstrapped (self-funded) SaaS startups, this is a valid question. There are many profitable startups in the low-end B2B space ($10-$50/mo) that exclusively rely on marketing. These are the perfect lifestyle businesses that the indiehacking community is dreaming of. But they’re very hard to pull off, and leave a lot of money on the table.
Fellow technical co-founder-turned-salesperson. I'd like to add something here.
In previous businesses I relied on marketing, SEO etc.I thought "they're the gift that keep on giving" whereas sales is effort in value out. Not only is that wrong, but SEO / ads take time. For an early-stage company / product where iteration is key, sales is the fastest way to get signal.
Imagine using web conversions as the driver for iteration. It takes at least a week to kick off some campaign, months to build up, and months to have interpretable data. Plus no one's going to just tell you "no"! With sales, you can send 100 emails and in one night get some real signal. You might even get an inkling of "that's not going to work" or "ok I'm interested". In a compounding feedback loop, that is often the difference between a company that pops off and one that fizzles
This important devil's advocate perspective reminds me of Chesterton's Fence [0].
I used to run a dev shop and had the opportunity to work with companies of all shapes and sizes. The startups often discovered Chesterton's Fence by declaring they didn't need this or that (meetings, accountability measures, etc), only to learn the hard way why they existed.
And meetings, beauracracy, et al are rightfully criticized for being inefficient and fostering mediocrity. But I think I'd agree with the author that it's glib to say meetings are dumb, no need for hierarchy without understanding their purpose
Interesting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.
It's instead a way to stitch together longer sequences of DNA. Still very cool