Ut oh. I've said the quiet part out loud again.
European founders lose their bearings when they expand to the US and hire their first few employees, typically salespeople.
"These people are gods," is how one founder told me he felt early in the expansion process.
“All hands” word root is, I think, naval in origin, as in deckhand, i.e., sailor. Think: all hands on deck. While deckhand likely ties back to actual hands, this is, at most, an indirect reference to actual hands. The defense rests.
But what's going on is simple.
Americans are taught to inflate, hype, take credit, embellish, real push their career claims to the limit.
Europeans are taught the opposite.
So when a European might be inflating an American CV as they woulud a European one, they should be
And they aren't. The person you think built the telecom vertical at BigCo from $0 to $100M was actually just a fair-to-middling NJ territory rep who's really good at spinning their resume.
One-step GTM strategy test. If the call-to-action button all over your website says "book demo," you're sales-led. If it's "try now," then you're product led. Thanks, I'm here all week.
Don Valentine describes his meeting with Solomon Brothers while raising the $5M Sequoia I fund. It didn't go well. buff.ly/3B6ndH8 -- Just one fav excerpt from this 75-page interview with him.
This launch video is a disaster.
Starts with colors, components, and battery life strategy before ... uh ... explaining what it is. At nearly 1m they're still talking about battery life. Features first. They tell me it's a Qualcom Snapdragron chipset at 1:18 and the
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It's a perfect storm.
What happens when a culture of understated achievement meets one of overstated accomplishment?
"These people are gods" is what happens
