Docusign's 7000 employees and the iron law of B2B SaaS sales

Docusign has over 7000 employees. Someone on the internet periodically discovers this fact and wonder how could this be! What are those 7000 employees doing? The first part to the "What are they doing" question is "Sales", but that's not the full answer. Per their latest 10K filing, 68% of their workforce is sales, marketing, and customer success so that's ~5000 of those And then 1760 of the workforce, a 24% is engineering, product development and customer operations Leaving sales a…

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A critical(!) review of Scaling People, a book by Claire Hughes Jones that I liked (ie I liked both the book and the review) though I am not as critical as the review is. CHJ 's book remains one of the best attempts at making the tacit art of management legible. What happened to the US machine tool industry? Scott Alexander: Should the future be human? Things you learn dating Cate Hall, and Cate Hall on agencymaxxing Casey Handmer on Elon Musk The promise of SGLT2 inhibitors Menopause and longevity Karuna T…

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"The startup burnout to spirituality pipeline is strong for a reason.": A glimpse of absolute perfection Short term twin study on the impacts of a vegan diet in healthy-ish patients. Compared to control, patients in the vegan diet saw decreases in fasting insulin, weight, and LDL cholesterol FAQ on Lantern Bioworks, a biotech startup producing an oral probiotic that can prevent cavities for life Scott's Beyond Abolish the FDA proposal All the different kinds of cardiovascular disease, and how man…

Rapamycin is not an aging drug. But what is an aging drug?

The title of this post will spark some controversy. But it is, under a reasonable interpretation, not false, just spicy 🌶️. It make sense to start from the perhaps less controversial view that "rapamycin is an aging drug" and explain why that is wrong as well. My issue with those that talk about rapamycin as an "(anti)aging drug", or a "geroprotector" is that it's often unclear what of this is being said There's a unified thing called aging that affects everything that goes wro…

Some thoughts on causality in biological systems

Sometimes one reads discussions of causality in academic papers. Expressions like "this gene causes that" or "Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by XYZ". Or of course, "We don't know what causes X". Recently I found myself thinking about these three statements: We don't know what causes Alzheimer's yet (eg here at NIA) Old age does not cause Alzheimer's, but it is the most important risk factor for the disease (also here at NIA) Aging causes Alzheimer's (eg here at Fightaging)…