[From Unsplash]
Good morning,
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel shares an important insight about sales—it's hidden, but it's crucial.
It’s hidden because he writes no one wants to be reminded that we are being sold something. That’s why sales positions are described as anything but. He writes: “People who sell advertising are called ‘account executives.’ People who sell customers work in ‘business development.’ People who sell companies are ‘investment bankers.’ And people who sell themselves are called ‘politicians.’”
This creates a problem for those trying to learn how to build a business.
Thiel writes: “Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans. On Wall Street, a new hire starts as an ‘analyst’ wielding technical expertise, but his goal is to become a dealmaker. A lawyer prides himself on professional credentials, but law firms are led by the rainmakers who bring in big clients. Even university professors, who claim authority from scholarly achievement, are envious of the self-promoters who define their fields. Academic ideas about history or English don’t just sell themselves on their intellectual merits. Even the agenda of fundamental physics and the future path of cancer research are results of persuasion. The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
“The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that ‘it sells itself.’ But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself). The polar opposite business cliche warns that ‘the best product doesn’t always win.’ Economists attribute this to ‘path dependence’: specific historical circumstances independent of objective quality can determine which products enjoy widespread adoption. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean the operating systems we use today and the keyboard layouts on which we type were imposed by mere chance. It’s better to think of distribution as something essential to the design of your product. If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”
Have a great week ahead, and happy selling.
The superapp fascination
Superapps is a theme that has had our attention for a long while—since the time Haresh Chawla first wrote about it on Founding Fuel back in 2020, and why the CEO of every Indian conglomerate wants one.
“Every tech CEO wants a superapp. In the post-Covid world, they want one. Yesterday.
Google Pay is building one, WhatsApp needs one, Amazon is dabbling in it, Jio is putting one together, Flipkart (and Phonepe), and Paytm are the other contenders. And now, the venerable Tata group—not to be left behind in the race for India’s trillion dollar digital economy—wants one. Everyone has the same trophy in their sights: India’s massive internet user base, the second largest in the world,” he had written then.
And in April this year, strategy consultant Harsh Vardhan had done a deep dive to examine Tata Neu, which the Tata group launched as a superapp. Is it really one, is a question he had raised then.
So, when The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that even CEOs in the West have started looking to deploy superapps as part of their arsenal, we looked at it with much interest. Whatever is going on?
“For companies that sell advertising, another powerful force is pushing them toward keeping people inside of increasingly feature-rich superapps: Ad targeting is becoming less effective as Apple, Google and government regulators make it more difficult to track users across apps and websites.
“Apple’s App Tracking Transparency technology, in particular, will deal an estimated $10 billion blow to Meta’s revenue in 2022, the company has said. Google has signaled it will roll out similar changes in its own app store beginning as early as 2024.”
Remember, you heard all about superapps first on Founding Fuel!
Dig deeper
Why are Musk, Spiegel and Dorsey so interested in a superapp? (WSJ)
The race to build a ‘desi’ superapp (Haresh Chawla, Founding Fuel)
Tata Neu: Stripping the hype (Harsh Vardhan, Founding Fuel)
Abe: The original democrat
Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan, was assassinated last week. Tributes to his sagacity have been pouring in from global leaders and PM Narendra Modi described him as a “dear friend”. But to understand why the people of Japan are in a state of shock, an essay written back in 2020 by the author, journalist and book critic Kapil Komireddi is essential reading, given the polarised times we live in now where taking a hardline stance is thought of as a virtue.
“Between 2007, the year Abe vacated the prime minister’s office after serving exactly for a year, and 2012—when Abe staged a spectacular comeback—Japan had seen off five prime ministers in rapid succession. In fact, with the exception of Junichiro Koizumi, no Japanese prime minister had completed the full four-year term since 1987. A debilitating fatalism had seized Japan: a nation that had risen from the ashes of World War II to become the richest economy on earth after the United States was becoming reconciled to the prospect of irretrievable decline.
“Such a posture may have struck some as virtuous. To Abe, it was sacrilegious… His greatest political aspiration was to revoke the clause that shackled Tokyo to pacifism as a form of punishment for the sins of imperial Japan. In a land where singing the national anthem with enthusiasm can be seen as a symptom of hawkishness, Abe approached voters with a pledge to ‘take back Japan’. As a campaigner, he was a populist before the word entered common usage. Once in office, however, he evolved into something altogether different.
“As democracy after democracy fell to populists, Abe, the original populist, travelled in the opposite direction: a rare leader in the democratic world who did not allow partisanship to consume him. Abe did not disavow his conservatism: he aligned it to the challenges before him. The upshot? In the eight years since his return to power in 2012, he presided over the longest period of economic expansion in Japan’s post-war history and the lowest unemployment rate in at least a quarter century. He introduced free preschool and day care for children between the ages of 3 and 5 and created the conditions for the entry of a record number of women into the workforce.”
Dig deeper
The man who restored Japan (The Critic)
PM Modi remembers his dear friend Shinzo Abe (Indian Express)
Critics and artists
(Via WhatsApp)
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
