Daniel Kaplan’s Post

David Mandell is a thoughtful, insightful leader. The oft-talked about, rarely unpacked toll of founding and leading a high growth company 👉🏻 unpacked.

The Apple/Epic beef is tragic (for both companies). Let's count the ways. 1. AAA games are (finally!!) strategic to Apple's go-to-market Apple wants to iterate on Apple Silicon until gamers can't tell the difference between games running on a Playstation and a MacBook, iPhone Pro, Apple TV, and iPad. It also needs a growing library of compelling, immersive experiences for the Vision Pro. AAA game studios like CD PROJEKT RED are using Epic's Unreal Engine to build the next entries in their popular franchises (The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077). Deep software / hardware support for Epic Games's Unreal Engine would make it cheaper and faster to bring games of that caliber to Apple's entire ecosystem devices... AND offer a path to "spin-offs" specifically designed for the Vision Pro. The Apple/Epic beef makes that level of support unlikely. 2. Apple (finally!) has the beginnings of a compelling value prop to AAA game studios: * Port your titles to Apple Silicon using our DirectX converter * Deliver them across Apple's entire device ecosystem without rewriting a ton of code. But the perception of Apple as a rent-seeking "gatekeeper" hostile to major developers' business models complicates the story. The Apple/Epic beef just reinforces this perception. 3. Epic and Tim Sweeney have a huge vision for immersive gaming and 3D worlds. The Apple Vision is the best hardware to make it so. While the VR / metaverse hype cycle has definitely crashed, immersive gaming and 3D worlds remain highly promising use cases for spatial computers. The Vision Pro has the most powerful hardware and compelling user interface in the category. And Apple has every advantage in hardware and software necessary to keep it that way... Epic's "metaverse" vision would get a huge boost from a positive, mutually-aligned relationship with Apple. What's the opposite of a positive, mutually-aligned relationship with Apple? Beef.

The Hero’s Journey is a fractal. It applies to GTM in many self-similar ways. Sales roles facing automation? That's a biggie: Multiple startups are seeking to automate the SDR/BDR role. But automating qualification, outreach, and follow up is just step one. These SDR workflows are a "thin-edge" that opens the door to automating AE-level tasks. Over the next 2-5 years, one or more of these startups may succeed. This doesn't have to be a fearful reality. Here, the “Hero’s Journey” is for sales people who may need to evolve their self-conception from a specialized role to a new kind of generalist. Sales rep, marketing leader, product designer, solutions architect, even product builder…An AI-facilitated renaissance human. The world of work as AI evolves is the “unknown world.” And AI itself may be the “helpful stranger” encouraging the leap. This hero's journey is only one of the topics Aseem Asthana and I begin to explore in this video conversation. * AI's transformative impact on sales roles and go-to-market  * The "fractal" nature of the hero's journey narrative * AI as the "mysterious stranger" that encourages the journey into the unknown world AND AI as the "unknown world" itself. https://lnkd.in/eXik-2ih

Apple's go-to-market strategy is a fractal. This repeating pattern is central to Apple's perennial ability to set the terms of every category it enters. How it unfolds in 3 acts: 𝐀𝐜𝐭 𝟏: 𝐒𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐚𝐫 1. Blend existing Apple tech and new tech into a breakthrough design that sets new aesthetic and technical standards in the category. 2. Combine a narrative about Apple’s unique strengths and a demonstration of the breakthrough capabilities to market this product to its natural early adopters: The Devotees at The Temple Apple 3. Leverage tech, design principles, and ecosystem advantages from existing product lines to support the new product. 𝐀𝐜𝐭 𝟐: 𝐆𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 1. Incentivize a third party ecosystem to expand the range of use cases for the core product 2. Iterate for 2-3 product generations. 3. Launch the mainstream-ready flagship device with the 4th version.  4. Expand the product line into a family of devices at price points for a range of consumer and professional segments. 5. Deepen integrations between the new product line and existing product lines. 6. Only after all this, start marketing more intensively to mainstream markets. 7. Take calculated risks with new technologies, materials, and design concepts to differentiate the product from its growing raft of competitors. 𝐀𝐜𝐭 𝟑: 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐞 1. Apply innovations developed for the new product line across existing product lines. 3. Adapt tech, manufacturing processes, and design concepts to develop new product lines and services. 4. Build these services across product lines so the whole device ecosystem offers more value in sets. 4. Do it again. Run once, this GTM may not look at that distinct. It's kinda/sorta Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm But run again and again? Over nearly three decades? Across 7 major product lines and a growing set of services? And two CEOs with radically different temperaments? the company scales from ~10K - 164K employees? That's a fractal. This fractal GTM is why Apple is positioned to define the terms of Spatial Computing and play a pivotal role in consumer AI.

As generative AI evolves, organizations that select for leaders and staff with active spiritual practices will outperform those don't. Two reasons: 1. Personal identities and "professional roles" are collections of useful fictions, rooted in cyclical patterns deeply ingrained our nervous system. A whole team of people who've broken those patterns and can joyfully shift between multiple roles in any given day will be able to do incredibly creative, world-changing work in a fraction of the time of those entangled in their roles and identities. 2. The ability to perceive reality in "fractal" terms will create massive leverage when AI can automate 50-95% of today's knowledge work. Today's post will look at #1. Comment on this post and I’ll send you #2. Active spiritual practice surfaces and uproots ingrained patterns that obscure our natural joy, ecstasy, and bliss. These same patterns limit our abilities to act at our highest capacity without friction or strain. People far along in breaking those patterns will have less difficulty shifting from "I am an X" (founder/back end engineer/sales leader/product designer, etc) to "I am whatever I need to be in this moment." In practical terms, as generative AI matures, every member of a team can be a CEO, product designer, storyteller, mentor/coach, engineer, senior marketer, strategic sales person, etc). Imagine a whole team where every member of a 100 person team can play any of those roles at "A-level" and switch between each of them fluidly, in an instant...not only without complaint...but joyfully. ...Each of them supported by a network of AI agents that magnify their daily volume of creative output 100-1000%? That's A LOT easier when every single member of a team is engaged in any spiritual practice that works through the layers of their personal identity and attachments to the stories they hold about any given version of themselves...while creating balance and ease in their nervous system. It's nearly impossible otherwise.

Your product's positioning doesn't magically change when you talk about it differently....Or when you design a slide showing your logo relative to other logos in a market category you conveniently invented. This is "framing" not "positioning." Imagine if, long before D-Day, the leaders of Allied Nations started telling everyone they were the "leading armies in France and Germany" and showed maps of their tank divisions moving towards Berlin. Or if Meta started announcing that "Facebook's original app is now the leading social network for video among teenagers and the future of social media is here." ...and made a slide showing OG Facebook ahead of TikTok on an important strategic dimension. It would be nonsense. Positioning is a strategic reality. It consists of: 1. The position you have today. Where your company and product stands in an actual market category relative to every other company and product in that category. (If you have invented something truly new, this can be an emerging category that you get to name. Otherwise: have fun trying to convince the market that your project management software is actually "AI Workflow Automation Enablement") 2. The position you intend (and hope) to develop over the next "XYZ timeframe." Like Apple with the first version of the iPhone. If, in 2007, Steve Jobs said "iPhone is the leading smartphone in the world..." That would be delusional. Instead, Jobs and his team positioned the iPhone kinda like this: "we're gonna leverage our success with the iPod, our unique synthesis of hardware and software, and AT&T's weak position vis-a-vis Verizon to offer a completely new approach to smartphones and telecom business models.. We, instead of the carriers, get complete control over the interface and installed software, and carriers start selling data instead of call minutes. The interface will be so compelling that everyone...including Verizon...will eventually have to play by our rules. Then we'll expand across the market." If, after 4 years taking a break from the tech industry, doing intense spiritual work, volunteering at ashrams, studying esoteric forms of yoga, I said "I'm the go-to product marketing expert for visionary founders whose tech is ready to cross the chasm" I would be conflating positioning and framing... If, on the other hand, I say: I'm blending my product marketing skills in Series A-B B2B startups, my knack for articulating tech, market, and geopolitical trends years ahead of the curve...and mix in the "fractal" point of view I discovered deep inside my consciousness via traditional yoga and intense spiritual practice... And apply all of it to develop a position as the go-to product marketing expert for visionary founders... Then maybe I'd be onto something.

Insightful way to highlight the benefits of a product: contrasting them with LinkedIn ads on LinkedIn. Very meta but not Meta.