Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
High-Performing Teams, Jack Clark YouTube (reading time: 12 minutes)
Jack Clark is a long-time rugby coach. In this presentation, he gives some fantastic advice on building high performing teams. The lessons are directly applicable to the business world. I really enjoyed the concept of shared values and what that implies.
Getting to Nirvana, or How to Scale your GTM Caroline Clark (reading time: 22 minutes)
This is a fantastic playbook on go to market strategy. Caroline Clark helped scale Atlassian’s GTM and she provides a great framework. The core components are: 1) who is your ideal customer? 2) How are you going to reach them? 3) How are you going to scale?
Stripe: Platform of Platforms Ben Thompson, Stratechery (reading time: 10 minutes)
Stripe made a big announcement this past week with the launch of Stripe Treasury. They are enabling other platforms like Shopify to offer banking services to their customers. Stripe is partnering with big names like Goldman Sachs and Citibank to make it happen. Ben Thompson as usual has a great write up. The ambitions of what Stripe is trying to achieve is astonishing. It really makes me think of just how early we are in the deployment phase of the internet.
Why Salesforce bought Slack Nathan Baschez, Divinations (reading time: 4 minutes)
You probably heard the news of Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack. There’s a been a lot of writing and analysis on the subject. If you a quick and good analysis, Nathan Baschez does the trick. A big reason behind the sale is Microsoft’s competitive pressure. There’s also the power of bundling with Salesforce’s products. The enterprise software wars are in full motion.
Ecommerce as entertainment, the wild future of retail Fast Company (reading time: 5 minutes)
The first thing you need is a great product. That’s absolutely essential. The second skill you need is an ability to tell stories. And you need some operational excellence.
Retail is undergoing some pretty big changes and technology is enabling story telling capabilities. Shopping in itself is becoming another form of entertainment.
