Out now! Built to Grow: A Handbook for High-Performance Sales Teams, by Stephanie Friedman: press.stripe.com/built-to-gr… I love all of the books in our catalogue, but I particularly love the turpentine collection: High Growth Handbook, An Elegant Puzzle, Scaling People, and now, Built to Grow! Building a sales function—especially today—is more of an art than a science. Stephanie has more than 20 years of experience building 100+ person sales teams, and advising some of the fastest-growing companies in the world on how to do the same. I hope you love it as much as we do.

Coming soon (tomorrow!) — BUILT TO GROW, our field guide to creating excellent sales orgs, by the inimitable @she_travels. I have a bunch of these taking up way too much space in our storage rooms. Would love to make some house calls this week to SF startups who are building their sales teams. Email me (in bio!). And let me know if you’re a @stripe user!

This is such a gift to the world. All of @stewartbrand’s work: writing, festival shenanigans, & 50,000(!) photos, dating back to the 50s: stewartbrand.org/ (Where else could you find Marshall McLuhan, Brian Eno, and Marlon Brando in one place!?)

For one day only - Stripe Press at Hanbury Hall, just between Brick Lane and Spitalfields!

Are you a founder or sales leader at an early stage company that is starting to build out its sales org (or a VC working with early stage cos?) Would love to hear from you: stripepress@stripe.com! (Not required, but would particularly love to get folks in NYC, SF, & LDN)

Xerox headquarters was so upset about what I wrote about Xerox PARC in the scurrilous Rolling Stone that they forbade me from reprinting the piece in my book. I said no to that. Well, they pleaded, don't name us. Okay, I said. In the book, I refer to their company as the Shy Corporation.

i first read the Nomad letters when i was 17, and they changed my life. this is an embarrassing admission to make about a collection of hedge fund letters that primarily circulated as a stolen pdf in value-investor circles, and have now become enough of a meme to enjoy a second life of their own. but on the occasion of their republication in beautiful form by Tammy and the team at Stripe Press, i thought it was worth reflecting briefly on the impact these letters had on me. Sleep and Zakaria’s fundamental truth (truke?) is often, and incorrectly, remembered as “scale matters.” everyone knew this when Sleep was writing. the real insight was that scale is most powerful when its benefits are surrendered directly to the consumer. the thing i remember most from Sleep is his wonderfully strange “robustness ratio,” which measured the amount the customer saved against the value retained by shareholders. value escaping the firm to the consumer, rather than being captured by it, was the metric of a great business. a great business is a lossy one. this places Sleep in an interesting position opposite the other greatest anglo-investor of his generation, Chris Hohn. Nomad and TCI look similar from a distance: concentrated portfolios, long holding periods, indifference to benchmarks and, eventually, the conversion of their private fortunes into large philanthropic efforts. they differ not merely in the fact that Hohn decided to continue (and even convert to Hinduism so that he could manage his portfolio in the next life, as reported in the FT), but in that their ideal businesses are exact mirror images. Hohn loves an irreversible asset that can extract a tax on its customer. in Hohn’s world, if a company possesses pricing power, it should, and must, exercise it. rather Sleep’s ideal company possesses pricing power and repeatedly and consciously declines to use it. the emergence and now total dominance of the labs makes this distinction newly urgent and would, on its own, be occasion enough to republish the work, quite apart from how beautiful and important the letters are. our instinctive response to a discontinuity in technology is to invest at the frontier. Sleep’s letters are at least some reason for caution. technical leadership can be copied or simply made irrelevant by the next advance, and capital floods towards visible scarcity just before technology eviscerates that very same scarcity. god knows Sleep was never hostile to technology. he made more money on Amazon than almost anyone else. but, at least in my reading, he was skeptical of technical novelty as a moat in its own right. what mattered to him was whether that technological step had been converted into a self reinforcing relationship in which the customer privatized the gain. in Nick’s frame, and he's welcome to correct me (although my sense is requiring him to lift a hand off of the wheel of a f450 in the hills of northumberland at this point would be a step too far) the enduring AI business may therefore be the one that passes declining costs on most aggressively, not one that preserves scarcity, bombs its own customers margins and tries to eat as much of the application layer as possible. i find it increasingly useful to use the pair trade between totemic-hohn, and totemic-sleep actions as a frame in which to view the actions of the frontier. my guess is, in the fullness of time, or at the very least in this life (hohn is welcome to prove me wrong in the next), that Sleep might have won this bout. very glad to see these letters in print.

Finally someone caught it 🤭🤭