flâneur

Belinda Mo

8 followers · 5 following · 1200 views

on the atlas — 42

highlights — 32

  • The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function.
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • . In one sense, technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation. Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • some will require contracts, while others will prefer self-service purchasing
    Selling to Founders and SMBs
  • Many Enterprise companies start by selling into smaller customers because they think they’ll move faster and get more customers closed by Demo Day, even if it’s the wrong customer type. This is NOT good and proves nothing about your business model to investors or to your own team.
    Selling to Founders and SMBs
  • Define the process a customer will take to make a decision to purchase. By understanding how other similar companies sell, you can give the customer the path they will use to determine if you product is a good fit. For example: you can start with a signed LOI (with pricing) and then a paid pilot that automatically converts into an annual contract. Or, another example: you skip the LOI and you go straight to a paid contract. (There are many versions of this — figure out which one makes the most sense for your business.)
    Sales Cycle
  • Keeping track of ASC helps you get better at projecting revenue and forecasting for yourself and investors. We recommend having at least 10 deals closed in order to properly have enough of a sample size to report on an average sales cycle.
    Sales Cycle
  • According to a 2020 study by Hubspot, the average SaaS B2B Enterprise sales cycle length is 83 days. What this means is that, especially in the lead up to Demo Day, Enterprise companies need to quickly figure out if you estimate your sales cycle will be long (if you’re selling into government entities, or Fortune 500s, for example). In these rare circumstances where these are your ONLY possible customers, you should consider either focusing on driving LOI’s, or building a meaningful and large pipeline that you can report on to investors.
    Sales Cycle
  • When kicking off a relationship with new customers (after they have signed your contract or paid you for your services/product), especially if they’re one of your first, you want to make sure things go smoothly. There are three crucial things that must be done at this stage: 1) setting the tone for a great partnership (keyword – partnership) and relationship, 2) setting mutual expectations and goals, 3) setting cadences for whether you want to meet again – and how often.
    Onboarding a new enterprise customer
  • A presentation by Yuri Sagalov, former YC Visiting Partner & YC alum, on how to structure B2B and Enterprise pilots. He covers proof of concept (PoC), free pilot / paid pilot, objection handling, and success criteria.
    How to Run Pilots
  • Often when fundraising, founders will describe LOIs in short form using language like "we have a $1M LOI from Pfizer". So, it's helpful to have hard numbers in your LOI so you can use that sort of language.
    LOI Template
  • Once again note: This tool is only useful if your contract value will be $100k or more and if the company signing the LOI is highly profitable and very well known (their logo is recognizable by investors, they are a public company, etc). You should not collect LOIs for small dollar amounts or from pre-product market fit startups.
    Letters of Intent (LOI)
  • If your company is selling a product to large enterprises who make $100m+ in revenue (not startups!) and your product costs $100k per year or more, a letter of intent (LOI), can be a helpful tool for proving demand for your product, particularly to investors. Understand that LOIs are far worse than signing a customer up for a pilot or a paid contract.
    Letters of Intent (LOI)
  • If you spend all of your time talking to more junior employees within the company you’re selling to, and you never meet the KDM, it may turn out that all of the budget you expect isn’t even realistic. As a result, it’s almost always necessary to speak directly with a KDM at least once before you go to the contract stage, because you don’t want to go through a whole sales process just to find out at the end that the company actually doesn’t have the budget you or the junior person thought they had.
    Sales Pipeline
  • Remember that each stakeholder may have a different goal when considering buying your product. The more junior stakeholder may think your product makes their job easier, whereas a more senior one may like your product because it saves them budget
    Sales Pipeline
  • Vanta recommends getting a SOC 2 audit as early as possible because it will push your startup to think critically about security practices at an early stage and it will result in more closed deals and shortened sales cycles.
    Security Reviews
  • Your sales pipeline tells you: The overall number of deals in your pipeline The size of each deal The stage of each deal Once you have multiple sellers: the owner for each deal (the person in your company responsible for getting that deal to close) Weighted value of your pipeline (and of each stage)
    Sales Pipeline
  • holding regular pipeline review meetings. A pipeline review is a brief (30 minutes or less) meeting in which the owner for each deal answers: Is the pipeline information for this deal accurate? What was the last contact we had with this prospect? What is the next step? What is our biggest blocker? Is there anything the rest of the team can do to help us get this prospect to the next stage?
    Sales Pipeline
  • Any Sales CRM you use should allow you to quickly pull a snapshot or summary view — something like this (where the stages are whatever you define them to be). Note that your snapshot / summary should show where everything is at this moment (i.e. what their last touch-point is), and not a summary of where they’ve ever been
    Sales Pipeline
  • You can see this formula example in the image below:
    Sales Pipeline
  • For “Stage”, include whatever stage they’re in based on what your funnel stages look like. For early companies, this may just be Demo, Pricing, and Red-lining. For companies with a more built-out sales process, there will likely be more stages. You should typically mark the stage as whichever was the last conversation you had with them (for example, if you had a discovery call with the prospect and have booked your Demo call with them but it hasn’t happened yet, you can either keep them in Discovery until the Demo happens, or you can move them to Demo once that call has been scheduled – whiche…
    Sales Pipeline
  • You are speaking with someone who is a qualified lead. This means they have a need for your tool, they meet any other minimum criteria that is specific to your sale, and they have the ability to make a decision OR they have the ability to bring in the right people to make a decision (for example, if you’re an accounting platform, you’re speaking with someone in the Finance org and not an Office Manager or summer intern) You’re in active conversations with this customer, meaning you’ve heard from them (whether over email or call) in the past 2-3 weeks and have scheduled a clear next step. They …
    Sales Pipeline
  • Don’t worry about your sales pipeline until either one founder is spending the majority of their time on pitching customers, or until you have your first full-time sales person (SDR, AE, or anyone else).
    Sales Pipeline
  • Often when companies are fundraising or presenting to their team, they will show current revenue as a main metric, and then weighted pipeline as one of their secondary KPIs
    Sales Pipeline
  • The enabling environment was a byproduct of that deeply meaningful effort.
    Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes
  • Crushes can be a window into something we feel we don't have, something we feel we are lacking, something we want someone else to fulfill—some ambition we have for ourselves.
    crushes are often just misplaced ambition - by Isabel
  • Ambition is really just another way of saying that one has "an aspiration to be excellent".
    crushes are often just misplaced ambition - by Isabel
  • In the future, every successful tech company will use their data moats to build some variant of an Artificial General Intelligence.
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • Meanwhile, the average machine learning researcher at FAANG has a 15 year lead-time in raw compute compared to a PhD student, and Google and DeepMind have language models that are probably stronger than GPT-3 on most metrics. There are cases where technological lead on compute is not enough; some researchers left Google because they were unhappy with all the red tape they had to go through to try to launch LLM-based products externally.
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • Even random-ass companies like Grammarly and Slack and Riot Games have a unique data moats for human intelligence
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • We can quibble about what “AGI” means and what time frame it would take for all companies to converge to this, but I suspect that Foundation Models will soon be table stakes for many software products.
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • A few months ago I asked Ilya Sutskever whether it made more sense to start a pure-play AGI research lab (like OpenAI, DeepMind) or to build a profitable technology business that, as a side effect, would generate the data moat needed to build an AGI. In his provocative-yet-prescient fashion, Ilya said to me: “All Roads Lead to Rome - Every Successful (Tech) Company will be an AGI company”.
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • I spent most of my 20s living and working abroad in developing countries – in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, in the conflict-scarred cities of coastal Colombia, and in politically destabilized Eastern Ukraine. I cannot forget the faces of the many talented, curious young people I met, buzzing with creative energy and hope for the future. I saw how much it meant to them to learn English as a second language. The ability to speak English became a portal to a universe of possibilities – to new countries, jobs, ideas, and the Internet. Learning a new language allowed them to access a glo…
    Building a Second Brain: The 10-Year Vision