The sad fact is that the people best suited to thrive in a context where relationships are transactional and mostly dependent on continued usefulness to both parties - are sociopaths/machiavellian types.
And these are precisely the people who are most okay with shouting from the rooftop that their company is the best in the world - then doing so from a different company 2-3 years later.
It's good for mental health to understand that. These people do not have better jobs or work for better companies on average - they just say they do because it's better for their career and have no shame or accountability in doing so publicly.
The financial environment now is very different than even 2-3 years ago. Mortgages went from 3%->7%. Bonds/Treasuries actually pay a decent return. The most speculative investments are no longer running hot because they have to compete with returns elsewhere.
So 1. people around here tend to be in the speculative investment bubble and it is worse there than most other places right now and 2. any time there is change like this (esp. when it happens fast) - there are winners and losers and 3. Since 2007/2008 everyone has been trying to be the next Burry or Taleb and call the bubble.
I ran sales for a start up and as much as I hated these types of questionnaires - it was a huge competitive advantage to have someone who knows their stuff (a founder who wrote most of our code) complete them fast and get them back.
It's competitive out there. Using an advantage to your company's benefit as a founder is your job - not work that is beneath you. Fill it out and bring some money in.
I write down a bunch of very small 5-15 minute subtasks that I want to do - being very specific and including the estimated time to accomplish into a 1hr block.
Then I put on Brain.fm for 1hr.
That's it. Works really well for me. Rinse and repeat (I typically only have to do 2-3 one hour blocks per week for super annoying administrative tasks that I've been putting off)
I think it has nothing to do with the decline (which is mostly a result of an all-time insane bubble in P/E ratios and VC investment with lowest interest rates ever) but it will have everything to do with the lack of rebound from this decline.
Nassim Taleb has advice to follow something called "the barbell approach" where 90% of your money is super safe (all stock market index funds/t-bonds/etc.) and 10% of your money is in some super speculative asset.
I don't think it's bad advice if you're willing to commit to the speculative asset over a long time horizon and you don't have unrealistic expectations.
It's cheaper to let OpenAI figure all the stuff out first - then pour your war chest of money to n+1 their model instead of doing all the work of experimenting/failing/correcting course yourself.
Give it a year and they'll all have competing and better models.
As part of CI/CD: Depending on complexity - basic functional tests against the specific endpoint or end-to-end test of API functions (using mocks when APIs aren't available).
Once deployed to pre-prod: Monitor just like prod - end-to-end functional tests w/routing rules to mocks when a certain microservices is unavailable.
* College degree is just a proxy for people in dead end jobs. This could easily say "Men without yachts..." "Men without country club memberships..." "Men without genius IQs..." etc. "People with dead end jobs dropping out of work" would be a better title.
* This makes sense because these jobs are indeed more dead end than ever. You've been competing with offshoring/globalization for the last 30 years. Now you're also competing with AI/Automation.
* The status threat is also amplified as of late because earnings/wealth is increasingly the only status. It wasn't long ago that being physically strong held status in society. Or having a strong social network. We're pretty close to wealth-is-all-that-matters for social status now. The highest status people in society are dominated by social awkward, physically weak people with high earnings. Lots of this has to do with a decrease in violence (bar fights used to be common - now they're rare and end in court).
* Finally, status has adopted a capitalist winner-take-all dynamics thanks to dating apps and social media. It's now feast or famine in the dating world. Top 1% of men are getting like 50% of the attention from women on apps and even in the real world - women are less available because the guy at the bar is competing with the guy on bumble.
There is an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza tries to get more time in front of a woman he's interested in by leaving his hat in her apartment thinking that even though she doesn't like him - just listening to him talk over and over will eventually win her over.
There is truth in this. We're wired to connect with those within our proximity.
The way I sell against top tier names is to use attunement to my advantage. Sure the other company has a huge name - but they're not like you and will never be like you; instead they'll expect you to be like them. Are you ready for your organization to make a shift like that? What would that mean for you?
Us on the other hand - we're also a similar sized company, we also have do not have monopoly pricing power, we also don't have a war chest of money to invest in some flashing thing...and we've built a product for companies like us.
...
Think about that in the context of hiring. No one wants someone to say "well this is how we did it at Twitter/Facebook/Stripe" 10,000 times and undermine + slow down their entire process.
I would emphasize exactly what makes you different and how that experience translates to who you're interviewing with (that is, how you understand their problems better and can address them better) than a dev whose entire view is from a world of basically unlimited cash/growth/speculation. And how you are therefore a much less risky hire for their org.
You're planning on prospecting into one of the most rejection-heavy domains out there with small physical business. These people get dozens of calls per day from companies they've never heard of - many of whom are trying to rip them off - and even the best ones (Groupon, Yelp, google ads, etc.) are basically just rent-seeking. Oh, and most have gatekeepers who don't care the slightest bit about your pitch.
Because of that I'd stay away from all this "smile and dial" advice. You'll have no chance. Go out there and hit the pavement and meet these people at their establishments at off hours. If you catch the owner in there at a good time - do your best to inform them of your products benefits and come up with a really good offer to get started (something that loses you money and time). Free Trial, free month of services, whatever makes sense based on the context of your business. The goal is NOT to make money or build a book of business at this point - it's to get a person happy with your software to sell to later.
If the owner is too busy or whatever - have some stuff printed out for them to read later that you can drop off. Ideally with a small gift (coffee, food, candy, etc.) and come back in a few weeks to see if you catch them at a better time (again with a gift, until they talk).
A solid entry level book would be Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount.
I hate all the comments here so adding my own take (I have a different perspective than many here as I sell software - I don't build it).
A feature or features is what your software does literally.
A company is an ideology around what your company's vision is.
Docusign's features were about e-signing documents. Their vision was/is "to accelerate business and simplify life for companies and people around the world."
Sounds like fluff. But it's actually pretty important to have a vision because it gives your customers/investors/employees direction on the types of products that you can build. Docusign could build and monetize any product that accelerates business or simplifies life. They have e-sign now - but later they can have other stuff. People who purchase Docusign hope/expect they'll roll new features around their company vision and is why they choose Docusign vs. others.
Think of all the things that are Ivermectin-level questionable (cloth masks, 6ft, vaccinated don't spread, 95% effective at preventing illness, airborne, etc.) that have negatively impacted far more people than a few nuts who decided to put all their eggs in the Ivermectin basket.
If you're choosing to go after Joe Rogan and none of the proponents of the other points above, it seems fairly obvious that you're ideologically motivated in your attack.
Yields on investment (the ratio of how much you pay vs. how much future cash flow you get) are as low as they have ever been. Bonds, Treasuries, Stocks, Mortgages, everything. So that makes people think we're in a bubble.
On the other hand - yields have been slowing going down for the last 40 years.
So we're at this weird spot where one of those two patterns has to reverse since yields are zero. Your guess is as good as mine but that's why things seem like they can't continue as they are (they can't).
I read The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Tolstoy (who became very spiritual himself and wrote a bunch of religious texts later in his life) and the Bhagavad Gita (two of his Gandhi's biggest inspirations).
It's part why-has-no-one-picked-up-this-thread when two greats like Tolstoy and Gandhi were exploring this together historical interest and part spiritual exploration for me and has been supremely fulfilling so far.
I haven't grounded it all yet but the abolishment of violence of any kind (including things like revenge and self-defense) seems like the most pure moral code I can find + baking that in to the divinity of the Gita (stripping down who you are in it's purest form and seeing the relation of that you + the cosmos).
The fact that the entire comment section is talking about how sorry they are for the doctor because patients were rude to him and one even punched him - in the background of a story that is talking about a pandemic rushing through his community and killing/torturing so many people - really made me pause.
This is the level of inhuman the unvaccinated have attained from the rest of society.
I'm not particularly happy but I do know that pursing happiness as a goal is a bad idea. It's worth trying to set a different goal (health, career, family, whatever) and pursue that. Once you feel like you're making progress toward something meaningful happiness usually shows up as an ancillary benefit.
And these are precisely the people who are most okay with shouting from the rooftop that their company is the best in the world - then doing so from a different company 2-3 years later.
It's good for mental health to understand that. These people do not have better jobs or work for better companies on average - they just say they do because it's better for their career and have no shame or accountability in doing so publicly.