What he means by levers is what drives the pricing of your product. He uses the example with Enterprise B2B SaaS.
The 4 levers:
The number of seats: How many licenses the team is willing to buy.
Upfront: How quickly is the customer willing to pay. Will it be at one go, every month or quarterly.
Length of commitment: How long he is committing to use the product for a minimum of one, two or three years.
Closer: How many days from the first conversation the client pays.
Enterprise Sales are long commitments. Everything starts with trust. But at the same time sales cycle, volume, commitment from customers define the path of your company.
Why is it so difficult not to move beyond transactional relationships in our life? We are all humans and deserve some love, empathy, and respect. Why is class, race or money has to take preference over humanity?
A taxi driver, waiter or your co-worker is as human as you are. How difficult it is to treat them all with respect? Are they all not trying to make a living?
When you are working in a team, the first thing you have to do is to let youngsters be independent. There should not be a blocker or a god-like figure under the shadow of whom they are living.
This hierarchy and living under the shadow of someone is a big blocker for the growth of youngsters and the organization.
It should be told to the youngsters that they are part of a team and not under the shadow of anyone. They are independent to question, give their feedback.
This whole culture of designation is screwing up the independence and free-thinking for the organization.
I liked reading the moonshot game by Rahul Chandra. It is his journey, a collection of entries through his days of starting Helion Ventures to closing it.
I have my personal 5 takeaways:
Decisions: A lot many decisions in the VC world are collectively taken and still work on the guts instinct.
Pedigree: In getting funded, your college plays a huge role. A simple filter. That is being one reason why they passed on investing OYO.
Capital: Rahul talks about why taxi4sure had to be acquired by Ola. Why letsbuy had to be sold to Flipkart. When Tiger invests in your competitor, you have to be very worried{circa 2011}
Camps: In the book, Rahul talks about how early days there were a group of VC funds investing together.
Growth: There is no time for building a company if there is no growth. One reason why Redbus was sold.
You will have to read the book for more. This book while being a personal journey of Rahul, has many learnings for us all.
Our human mind dislikes letting it go. A lot of it has to do with sunk cost. Our capital, emotional attachment to the cause, relationship et all.
I keep reading and motivational speakers and social media marketers championing: Don’t Quit. What they don’t tell you is the opportunity cost.
Our sunk cost takes over our opportunity cost. We get blinded by we can do it, it will work. Our rationality goes for the toss, we are only getting closer to death and trying to work on a product, relationship which has no future.
Smart folks know when to leave and let go things. The only permanence in our life is the very nature of impermanence.
I was reading Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work.
The common pattern and learning were:
People left their brains on autopilot.
Some went for long walks.
Some started day with a cup of coffee, tea or music.
Some had lots of cigars
Others like Jung built their own house in the jungle where they would do their work at peace.
Once you develop this habit, a daily ritual the brain stops getting distracted. You get into your world where you are super productive. Cal Newport calls it Deep Work and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it Flow.
To be productive, you have to stick to a daily routine and over some time, everything starts happening on its own.
To make use of this precious time of your life, you need to find your ritual and stick to it for a long period aka dispose of it to Type 2 brain.
During the time of reading the book, I created some rituals for myself. I am following some of it, while some will still take time to take on to autopilot. Our life is a continuously evolving journey.