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Both are true. To have a huge success you need a great product that "sells itself" and you need sales and marketing to sell it. Having just a great product wil

by api 7y ago

Both are true. To have a huge success you need a great product that "sells itself" and you need sales and marketing to sell it. Having just a great product will get you so far, but won't break through into the big leagues. Having only sales and marketing but a shit product will get you a flash in the pan.

idoby 7y ago
I wasn't commenting on whether Thiel or Andreessen are right or wrong, I'm just saying the article misrepresents Thiel's view as they appear in Zero to One. Also not sure if Thiel has changed his mind since then. Judging by recent interviews (e.g. with Eric Weinstein), he hasn't.
- nishnik 7y ago
  Yes Thiel writes how sales is important. He gives out a mental model to think how much sales is important for your company, and how much you should invest in it. On a scale from tiktok (viral) to Palantir, you have to increase your sales spendings. He talks how advertising was important for PayPal (by giving some money(sales spending) for referring). And he talks why small/medium sized businesses don't use softwares for day-to-day tasks. Because they lie (in his words) a dead zone of sales, the 1000$ per product.
  - seem_2211 7y ago
    I think of sales & marketing as two sides of the same coin, but the tactics change based on your deal size. Coca-Cola have a field sales team, selling into convenience stores and gas stations and making sure the shelves are full, but that's dwarfed by their enormous marketing budget. It doesn't make sense to have someone making cold calls or doing door to door sales for a $2 bottle of coke. Oracle has a marketing team, and they sponsor certain things to get visibility in the public eye, but almost all of their spend goes into a large team of salespeople. No Facebook ad, or coupon in the mailbox is going to convince a CIO to spend $5m on a new database solution.
StandardFuture 7y ago
> Both are true. Precisely. It seems rather vacuous to claim something as more necessary than something else. Either something is or is not a necessity.
- yesenadam 7y ago
  > It seems rather vacuous to claim something as more necessary than something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs Read that page a moment and I think you might realize degrees of need isn't such a vacuous idea.
  - StandardFuture 7y ago
    That is not a measure of needs. In other words, needs are not being measured against an objective (numerical) metric. That is a proposal for a dependency graph of needs. It is explicit in the name: hierarchy. So no, that theory is not measuring a degree of needs.

by api 7y ago

idoby 7y ago

I wasn't commenting on whether Thiel or Andreessen are right or wrong, I'm just saying the article misrepresents Thiel's view as they appear in Zero to One. Also not sure if Thiel has changed his mind since then. Judging by recent interviews (e.g. with Eric Weinstein), he hasn't.

nishnik 7y ago
Yes Thiel writes how sales is important. He gives out a mental model to think how much sales is important for your company, and how much you should invest in it. On a scale from tiktok (viral) to Palantir, you have to increase your sales spendings. He talks how advertising was important for PayPal (by giving some money(sales spending) for referring). And he talks why small/medium sized businesses don't use softwares for day-to-day tasks. Because they lie (in his words) a dead zone of sales, the 1000$ per product.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  I think of sales & marketing as two sides of the same coin, but the tactics change based on your deal size. Coca-Cola have a field sales team, selling into convenience stores and gas stations and making sure the shelves are full, but that's dwarfed by their enormous marketing budget. It doesn't make sense to have someone making cold calls or doing door to door sales for a $2 bottle of coke. Oracle has a marketing team, and they sponsor certain things to get visibility in the public eye, but almost all of their spend goes into a large team of salespeople. No Facebook ad, or coupon in the mailbox is going to convince a CIO to spend $5m on a new database solution.

StandardFuture 7y ago

> Both are true. Precisely. It seems rather vacuous to claim something as more necessary than something else. Either something is or is not a necessity.

yesenadam 7y ago
> It seems rather vacuous to claim something as more necessary than something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs Read that page a moment and I think you might realize degrees of need isn't such a vacuous idea.
- StandardFuture 7y ago
  That is not a measure of needs. In other words, needs are not being measured against an objective (numerical) metric. That is a proposal for a dependency graph of needs. It is explicit in the name: hierarchy. So no, that theory is not measuring a degree of needs.