After 10 years of working in scale-ups, I've embraced a few concepts for scaling Tech and Product teams.

First, cross-functionalize teams. Product Managers represent the business, Product Designers the consumer, and Engineers build.

I organize teams of 5-10 individuals, following AWS's two pizza teams guidelines, with a Product Trio guiding each.

If more individuals are needed to reach a goal, I group teams under a Product Trio.

With Engineering being the biggest group, Staff/Principal Engineers often support the Trio on cross-team technical decisions.

Product Managers, Engineering Managers, or Engineers in the team may manage projects (depending on the project or aim), but the trio is collectively responsible for the team's output and outcome.

Once the Product Trio model is created, roles, duties, team ceremonies, and cooperation models must be clarified.

Keep reporting lines by discipline. Line managers are accountable for each individual's advancement, thus it's crucial that they know the work in detail.

Cross-team collaboration becomes more important after 3 teams (15-30 people). Teams can easily diverge in how they write code, run ceremonies, and build products.

Establishing groups of people that are cross-team, but grouped by discipline and skills, sharing and agreeing on working practices becomes critical.

The “Spotify Guild” model has been where I’ve taken a lot of my inspiration from.

Last, establish a taxonomy for communication channels.

In Slack, I create one channel per team and one per guild (and one for me to have discussions with the team leads).

These are just some of the basic principles I follow to organize teams.

A book I particularly like about team types and how they interact with each other is https://teamtopologies.com/.

Affiliate marketing is a popular online moneymaker. You promote others' products and get commissions. Affiliate marketing requires constant product promotion.

Affiliate marketing can be profitable even without much promotion. Yes, this is Autopilot Money.

How to Pick an Affiliate Program to Generate Income Autonomously

Autopilot moneymaking requires a recurring affiliate marketing program.

Finding the best product and testing it takes a lot of time and effort.

Here are three ways to choose the best service or product to promote:

Find a good attachment-rate product or service.

When choosing a product, ask if you can easily switch to another service. Attachment rate is how much people like a product.

Higher attachment rates mean better Autopilot products.

Consider promoting GetResponse. It's a 33% recurring commission email marketing tool. This means you get 33% of the customer's plan as long as he pays.

GetResponse has a high attachment rate because it's hard to leave and start over with another tool.

2. Pick a good or service with a lot of affiliate assets.

Check if a program has affiliate assets or creatives before joining.

Images and banners to promote the product in your business.

They save time; I look for promotional creatives. Creatives or affiliate assets are website banners or images. This reduces design time.

3. Select a service or item that consumers already adore.

New products are hard to sell. Choosing a trusted company's popular product or service is helpful.

As a beginner, let people buy a product they already love.

Online entrepreneurs and digital marketers love Systeme.io. It offers tools for creating pages, email marketing, funnels, and more. This product guarantees a high ROI.

Make the product known!

Affiliate marketers struggle to get traffic. Using affiliate marketing to make money is easier than you think if you have a solid marketing strategy.

Your plan should include:

1- Publish affiliate-related blog posts and SEO-optimize them

2- Sending new visitors product-related emails

3- Create a product resource page.

4-Review products

5-Make YouTube videos with links in the description.

6- Answering FAQs about your products and services on your blog and Quora.

7- Create an eCourse on how to use this product.

8- Adding Affiliate Banners to Your Website.

With these tips, you can promote your products and make money on autopilot.

What Is That?

Berkus is a pre-revenue valuation method based exclusively on qualitative criteria, like Scorecard.

Few firms match their financial estimates, especially in the early stages, so valuation methodologies like the Berkus method are a good way to establish a valuation when the economic measures are not reliable.

How does it work?

This technique evaluates five key success factors.

• Fundamental principle

• Technology

• Execution

• Strategic alliances in its primary market

• Production, followed by sales

The Berkus technique values the business idea and four success factors. As seen in the matrix below, each of these dimensions poses a danger to the startup's success.

It assigns $0-$500,000 to each of these beginning regions. This approach enables a maximum $2.5M pre-money valuation.

This approach relies significantly on geography and uses the US as a baseline, as it differs in every country in Europe.

A set of standards for analyzing each dimension individually

Fundamental principle (or strength of the idea)

Ideas are worthless; execution matters. Most of us can relate to seeing a new business open in our area or a startup get funded and thinking, "I had this concept years ago!" Someone did it.

The concept remains. To assess the idea's viability, we must consider several criteria.

• The concept's exclusivity It is necessary to protect a product or service's concept using patents and copyrights. Additionally, it must be capable of generating large profits.

• Planned growth and growth that goes in a specific direction have a lot of potential, therefore incorporating them into a business is really advantageous.

• The ability of a concept to grow A venture's ability to generate scalable revenue is a key factor in its emergence and continuation. A startup needs a scalable idea in order to compete successfully in the market.

• The attraction of a business idea to a broad spectrum of people is significantly influenced by the current socio-political climate. Thus, the requirement for the assumption of conformity.

• Concept Validation Ideas must go through rigorous testing with a variety of audiences in order to lower risk during the implementation phase.

Technology (Prototype)

This aspect reduces startup's technological risk. How good is the startup prototype when facing cyber threats, GDPR compliance (in Europe), tech stack replication difficulty, etc.?

Execution

Check the management team's efficacy. A potential angel investor must verify the founders' experience and track record with previous ventures. Good leadership is needed to chart a ship's course.

Strategic alliances in its primary market

Existing and new relationships will play a vital role in the development of both B2B and B2C startups. What are the startup's synergies? potential ones?

Production, followed by sales (product rollout)

Startup success depends on its manufacturing and product rollout. It depends on the overall addressable market, the startup's ability to market and sell their product, and their capacity to provide consistent, high-quality support.

Example

We're now founders of EyeCaramba, a machine vision-assisted streaming platform. My imagination always goes to poor puns when naming a startup.

Since we're first-time founders and the Berkus technique depends exclusively on qualitative methods and the evaluator's skill, we ask our angel-investor acquaintance for a pre-money appraisal of EyeCaramba.

Our friend offers us the following table:

Because we're first-time founders, our pal lowered our Execution score. He knows the idea's value and that the gaming industry is red-hot, with worse startup ideas getting funded, therefore he gave the Basic value the highest value (idea).

EyeCaramba's pre-money valuation is $400,000 + $250,000 + $75,000 + $275,000 + $164,000 (1.16M). Good.

References

• https://medium.com/humble-ventures/how-angel-investors-value-pre-revenue-startups-part-iii-8271405f0774#:~:text=pre%2Drevenue%20startups.-,Berkus%20Method,potential%20of%20the%20idea%20itself.%E2%80%9D

• https://eqvista.com/berkus-valuation-method-for-startups/

• https://www.venionaire.com/early-stage-startup-valuation-part-2-the-berkus-method/

He kept it under wraps for years until he legally couldn’t.

His shirt is incomplete. I can’t stop thinking about this…

Actually, ignore the article. Look at it. JUST LOOK at it… It’s quite disturbing, isn’t it?

Ughh…

Me: “Hey, what up?” Friend: “All good, watching lord of the rings on amazon prime video.” Me: “Oh, do you know how Amazon grew and became famous?” Friend: “Geek alert…Can I just watch in peace?” Me: “But… Bezos?” Friend: “Let it go, just let it go…”

I can question you, the reader, and start answering instantly without his consent. This far.

Reader, how did Amazon succeed? You'll say, Of course, it was an internet bookstore, then it sold everything.

Mistaken. They moved from zero to one because of this. How did they get from one to thousand? AWS-some. Understand? It's geeky and lame. If not, I'll explain my geekiness.

Over an extended period of time, Amazon was not profitable.

Business basics. You want customers if you own a bakery, right?

Well, 100 clients per day order $5 cheesecakes (because cheesecakes are awesome.)

$5 x 100 consumers x 30 days Equals $15,000 monthly revenue. You proudly work here.

Now you have to pay the barista (unless ChatGPT is doing it haha? Nope..)

• The barista is requesting $5000 a month.

• Each cheesecake costs the cheesecake maker $2.5 ($2.5 × 100 x 30 = $7500).

• The monthly cost of running your bakery, including power, is about $5000.

Assume no extra charges. Your operating costs are $17,500.

Just $15,000? You have income but no profit. You might make money selling coffee with your cheesecake next month.

Is losing money bad? You're broke. Losing money. It's bad for financial statements.

It's almost a business ultimatum. Most startups fail. Amazon took nine years.

I'm reading Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Creation of a Global Empire to comprehend how a company has a $1 trillion market cap.

Many things made Amazon big. The book claims that Bezos and Amazon kept a specific product secret for a long period.

Clouds above the bald head.

In 2006, Bezos started a cloud computing initiative. They believed many firms like Snapchat would pay for reliable servers.

In 2006, cloud computing was not what it is today. I'll simplify. 2006 had no iPhone.

Bezos invested in Amazon Web Services (AWS) without disclosing its revenue. That's permitted till a certain degree.

Google and Microsoft would realize Amazon is heavily investing in this market and worry.

Bezos anticipated high demand for this product. Microsoft built its cloud in 2010, and Google in 2008.

If you managed Google or Microsoft, you wouldn't know how much Amazon makes from their cloud computing service. It's enough. Yet, Amazon is an internet store, so they'll focus on that.

All but Bezos were wrong.

Time to come clean now.

They revealed AWS revenue in 2015. Two things were apparent:

1. Bezos made the proper decision to bet on the cloud and keep it a secret.

2. In this race, Amazon is in the lead.

They continued. Let me list some AWS users today.

• Netflix

• Airbnb

• Twitch

More. Amazon was unprofitable for nine years, remember? This article's main graph.

AWS accounted for 74% of Amazon's profit in 2021. This 74% might not exist if they hadn't invested in AWS.

Bring this with you home.

Amazon predated AWS. Yet, it helped the giant reach $1 trillion. Bezos' secrecy? Perhaps, until a time machine is invented (they might host the time machine software on AWS, though.)

Without AWS, Amazon would have been profitable but unimpressive. They may have invested in anything else that would have returned more (like crypto? No? Ok.)

Bezos has business flaws. His success. His failures include:

• introducing the Fire Phone and suffering a $170 million loss.

• Amazon's failure in China In 2011, Amazon had a about 15% market share in China. 2019 saw a decrease of about 1%.

• not offering a higher price to persuade the creator of Netflix to sell the company to him. He offered a rather reasonable $15 million in his proposal. But what if he had offered $30 million instead (Amazon had over $100 million in revenue at the time)? He might have owned Netflix, which has a $156 billion market valuation (and saved billions rather than invest in Amazon Prime Video).

Some he could control. Some were uncontrollable. Nonetheless, every action he made in the foregoing circumstances led him to invest in AWS.

The VP has revealed a secret that should frighten the rest of the EV world.

Tesla led the EV revolution. Elon Musk's invention offers a viable alternative to gas-guzzlers. Tesla has lost ground in recent years. VW, BMW, Mercedes, and Ford offer EVs with similar ranges, charging speeds, performance, and cost. Tesla's next-generation 4680 battery pack, Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi were all delayed. CATL offers superior batteries than the 4680. Martin Viecha, Tesla's Vice President, recently told Business Insider something that startled the EV world and will establish Tesla as the EV king.

Viecha mentioned that Tesla's production costs have dropped 57% since 2017. This isn't due to cheaper batteries or devices like Model 3. No, this is due to amazing factory efficiency gains.

Musk wasn't crazy to want a nearly 100% automated production line, and Tesla's strategy of sticking with one model and improving it has paid off. Others change models every several years. This implies they must spend on new R&D, set up factories, and modernize service and parts systems. All of this costs a ton of money and prevents them from refining production to cut expenses.

Meanwhile, Tesla updates its vehicles progressively. Everything from the backseats to the screen has been enhanced in a 2022 Model 3. Tesla can refine, standardize, and cheaply produce every part without changing the production line.

In 2017, Tesla's automobile production averaged $84,000. In 2022, it'll be $36,000.

Mr. Viecha also claimed that new factories in Shanghai and Berlin will be significantly cheaper to operate once fully operating.

Tesla's hand is visible. Tesla selling $36,000 cars for $60,000 This barely beats the competition. Model Y long-range costs just over $60,000. Tesla makes $24,000+ every sale, giving it a 40% profit margin, one of the best in the auto business.

VW I.D4 costs about the same but makes no profit. Tesla's rivals face similar challenges. Their EVs make little or no profit.

Tesla costs the same as other EVs, but they're in a different league.

But don't forget that the battery pack accounts for 40% of an EV's cost. Tesla may soon fully utilize its 4680 battery pack.

The 4680 battery pack has larger cells and a unique internal design. This means fewer cells are needed for a car, making it cheaper to assemble and produce (per kWh). Energy density and charge speeds increase slightly.

Tesla underestimated the difficulty of making this revolutionary new cell. Each time they try to scale up production, quality drops and rejected cells rise.

Tesla recently installed this battery pack in Model Ys and is scaling production. If they succeed, Tesla battery prices will plummet.

Tesla's Model Ys 2170 battery costs $11,000. The same size pack with 4680 cells costs $3,400 less. Once scaled, it could be $5,500 (50%) less. The 4680 battery pack could reduce Tesla production costs by 20%.

With these cost savings, Tesla could sell Model Ys for $40,000 while still making a profit. They could offer a $25,000 car.

Even with new battery technology, it seems like other manufacturers will struggle to make EVs profitable.

Teslas cost about the same as competitors, so don't be fooled. Behind the scenes, they're still years ahead, and the 4680 battery pack and new factories will only increase that lead. Musk faces a first. He could sell Teslas at current prices and make billions while other manufacturers struggle. Or, he could massively undercut everyone and crush the competition once and for all. Tesla and Elon win.

The Kardashev scale grades civilizations from Type 1 to Type 3 based on energy harvesting.

How do technologically proficient civilizations emerge across timescales measuring in the tens of thousands or even millions of years? This is a question that worries me as a researcher in the search for “technosignatures” from other civilizations on other worlds. Since it is already established that longer-lived civilizations are the ones we are most likely to detect, knowing something about their prospective evolutionary trajectories could be translated into improved search tactics. But even more than knowing what to seek for, what I really want to know is what happens to a society after so long time. What are they capable of? What do they become?

This was the question Russian SETI pioneer Nikolai Kardashev asked himself back in 1964. His answer was the now-famous “Kardashev Scale.” Kardashev was the first, although not the last, scientist to try and define the processes (or stages) of the evolution of civilizations. Today, I want to launch a series on this question. It is crucial to technosignature studies (of which our NASA team is hard at work), and it is also important for comprehending what might lay ahead for mankind if we manage to get through the bottlenecks we have now.

The Kardashev scale

Kardashev’s question can be expressed another way. What milestones in a civilization’s advancement up the ladder of technical complexity will be universal? The main notion here is that all (or at least most) civilizations will pass through some kind of definable stages as they progress, and some of these steps might be mirrored in how we could identify them. But, while Kardashev’s major focus was identifying signals from exo-civilizations, his scale gave us a clear way to think about their evolution.

The classification scheme Kardashev employed was not based on social systems of ethics because they are something that we can probably never predict about alien cultures. Instead, it was built on energy, which is something near and dear to the heart of everybody trained in physics. Energy use might offer the basis for universal stages of civilisation progression because you cannot do the work of establishing a civilization without consuming energy. So, Kardashev looked at what energy sources were accessible to civilizations as they evolved technologically and used those to build his scale.

From Kardashev’s perspective, there are three primary levels or “types” of advancement in terms of harvesting energy through which a civilization should progress.

Type 1: Civilizations that can capture all the energy resources of their native planet constitute the first stage. This would imply capturing all the light energy that falls on a world from its host star. This makes it reasonable, given solar energy will be the largest source available on most planets where life could form. For example, Earth absorbs hundreds of atomic bombs’ worth of energy from the Sun every second. That is a rather formidable energy source, and a Type 1 race would have all this power at their disposal for civilization construction.

Type 2: These civilizations can extract the whole energy resources of their home star. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Freeman Dyson famously anticipated Kardashev’s thinking on this when he imagined an advanced civilization erecting a large sphere around its star. This “Dyson Sphere” would be a machine the size of the complete solar system for gathering stellar photons and their energy.

Type 3: These super-civilizations could use all the energy produced by all the stars in their home galaxy. A normal galaxy has a few hundred billion stars, so that is a whole lot of energy. One way this may be done is if the civilization covered every star in their galaxy with Dyson spheres, but there could also be more inventive approaches.

Implications of the Kardashev scale

Climbing from Type 1 upward, we travel from the imaginable to the god-like. For example, it is not hard to envisage utilizing lots of big satellites in space to gather solar energy and then beaming that energy down to Earth via microwaves. That would get us to a Type 1 civilization. But creating a Dyson sphere would require chewing up whole planets. How long until we obtain that level of power? How would we have to change to get there? And once we get to Type 3 civilizations, we are virtually thinking about gods with the potential to engineer the entire cosmos.

For me, this is part of the point of the Kardashev scale. Its application for thinking about identifying technosignatures is crucial, but even more strong is its capacity to help us shape our imaginations. The mind might become blank staring across hundreds or thousands of millennia, and so we need tools and guides to focus our attention. That may be the only way to see what life might become — what we might become — once it arises to start out beyond the boundaries of space and time and potential.

This is a summary. Read the full article here.