I've been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales.  

In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment.  Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art – custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP.  You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

But once you achieve initial product-market fit and are down the Sales Learning Curve, suddenly you are faced with a new challenge:  how do I scale up the sales efforts?  How do I build a repeatable, scalable sales process that is like an industrial machine – not a crafts project?

Across our portfolio and in my own entrepreneurial experience, I have seen three main sales models work successfully in scaling B2B sales:  1) Enterprise; 2) Telephone; and 3) Developer-driven.  B2C sales and customer acquisition efforts are a different matter (and one I'll perhaps address in a future blog), but for B2B, those three models are the most common pattern.  I'll discuss each one below.

1) Enterprise Sales

The enterprise sales model is a pretty simple one and was the predominant model ten to twenty years ago in the IT industry.  If you want to scale sales, you hire more sales reps.  Find a new sales rep with industry experience, a rolodex and a strong track record.  You assign an annual quota to each rep, train them, feed them some sales tools and assign them a sales engineer (particularly for more technically complex products) and coach them along the way.  After 3-6 months, they work their way down the learning curve, close their first deal and are off to the races.

The typical quota for a sales rep varies by type of business model (SaaS vs. perpetual), product gross margin (e.g., 80-90% software products vs. 40-50% advertising products) and company maturity (e.g., a "jungle" stage company would have a lower quota than a "highway" company).  Typically you want to see a 3x ratio between the contribution margin per rep (factoring in the lifetime value of the customer, or LTV) and the cost per rep to acquire that customer, fully loaded (i.e., customer acquisition cost or CAC).

For example if you have a 90% gross margin SaaS software product and assign a $1.1M in quota for a rep (i.e., $1m in contribution margin) that makes $250K at target and assume another $50k in benefits and travel costs and $30k in marketing and support costs for a total of $330K, then you have a 3x LTV:CAC ratio in year 1.  Another rule of thumb for SaaS companies, some focus on "the Magic Number", which is the ratio of new sales to sales and marketing expenses.

If the customer is a recurring customer, then they are more valuable and a lower quota might be tolerated, although a separate group of account reps are often accountable and paid commissions for the renewal revenue.  If the marketing support is greater and the product is more mature, than a higher quota might be assigned.  In my former company, Open Market, we had rising quotas each year as we got more mature, from (if memory serves me) $1.1M to $1.3M to $1.5M to $1.7M to, finally, $2M in annual quota.  Advertising sales reps, with a 40-50% gross margin, might have $3-5M in annual quota.

Although it is an excellent fit for complex enterprise-class solution selling, many people think classic enterprise sales, as a standalone go to market model, is broken.  When you analyze it carefully, unless you can support large quotas due to very large deal sizes, it can simply be too expensive to hire senior sales representatives, distribute them around the country, set up offices and support them.  Many are therefore proponents of a sales model that relies more on telephone-based selling, as described below.

2. Telephone Sales

The telephone sales model is based on a group of lower-paid, typically younger sales representatives that sit in cubicles next to each other and grind out call after call.  To implement this sales model effectively, there needs to be a tight coordination between sales and marketing to generate qualified leads and to feed these leads to the sales organization.  There also needs to be a large target universe of potential customers to justify the volume of calls – the model simply doesn't work if your target market pool is in the hundreds or even thousands.

Sales reps in this model may be closers or simply openers who qualify leads carefully and then hand them off to the closers (in this scenario, the telephone-based representatives are often called business or sales development representatives — BDRs or SDRs).  Many organizations will have two separate groups – a group of SDRs that are nurturing leads and conducting product demonstrations and a group of telesales reps who are closers.  It is not uncommon for the SDRs to be right out of college or, at most, have only 2-4 years of experience and be earning base salaries as low as $30-40K.  Their quotas may be as low as $400-500K, but their salary at target might be only $80-100K.  With no travel budget and no field offices, the numbers pencil out nicely.  The telesales team can also be a nice training ground for enterprise sales reps – a path that can be cheaper and less risky than hiring someone externally.

Generating a high volume of leads for the telephone sales rep is the key to making this model work.  It is all about (highly qualified) leads, leads, leads.  Leads may be through inbound marketing techniques (such as webinars, blogging, white papers or other forms of content marketing) or outbound marketing techniques ("smile and dial" against a list of prospects).  The Hubspot folks (who are terrific in this area) estimate that each SDR in their mid-market group needs 150 leads per month to be productive and busy while for the small business team, they target feeding 2000 leads per sales rep per month.  This is an appropriate number to figure out and model to help guide whether you need to ramp up marketing (demand generation) or sales (closing) as you scale.

To that point, a well-run telesales operation will be super metrics-driven.  You can measure EVERYTHING – how many calls per day per rep, how many connects per call, how many positive conversations that lead to follow-up, how many demonstrations, how many proposals, etc.  These measurements help with the "machine-building" process as you can more predictably assess how you are doing at any given time and where you need to focus your resources – more leads, more SDRs, more closers, etc.  The best sales VPs of telesales operations are more like accountants than charismatic salespeople.  If you hire a charismatic leader as  your head of sales, make sure you hire a director of sales operations to support them.  I never fully appreciated the value of this role until I saw it in action myself at Open Market where the director of sales operations managed all the numbers and operational details, freeing up the charismatic sales VP to hire, lead and close the big deals.

Alignment between sales and marketing is critical in any sales model, but under the telesales model it is even more critical.  Organizationally, SDRs may even work under the marketing organization while the closers work for sales.  Whatever the organizational configuration, the definition of a lead, clarity on the quantity of leads being targeted, and alignment on the quality of a lead required before handing off from marketing to sales are all key elements to work through.  Marketing automation platforms are particularly helpful here so that you can track someone from website visit all the way down the funnel through close.

Again, there are many who believe even the telesales model is flawed and outdated.  Hiring armies of young, inexperienced professionals and training them to become sales reps and operate in a "boiler room" style environment can be expensive.  To achieve friction-free revenue (and who doesn't want friction-free revenue?), a third sales model has emerged which I'll call "Developer Driven".

3) Developer Driven Sales

My partner, Chip Hazard, wrote a terrific blog post on the power of developer-driven adoption, something we have seen play out very successfully at a few of our portfolio companies, but most notably 10gen (maker of MongoDB).  As Chip points out, if you can architect your product as a platform (build APIs that are accessible to 3rd party developers) and get bottoms-up adoption from the development community, you can drive adoption without investing heavily in sales.  Chip's examples are mainly from technical products (his main area of expertise), but this approach can be employed for any product where customers can trial, see value quickly and begin adoption without taxing your sales resources.

To do this effectively, you often need to employ a freemium business model – making it easy for a developer or customer to try your product for free, get set up and quickly self provision (ideally within 5 minutes) without ever speaking to anyone at the company.  This provides the ultimate inbound marketing model – customers contact you when they have tried your product and are convinced it provides them with value.  Once value is established and the product usage ramps up, you can hear the cash register ringing.

Instead of hiring telesales people, you hire "Community Managers" who arrange hackathons and meetups, actively engage the community on the forums, and shares relevant content through various social channels.  When things are really working well in a developer driven model, developers are embedding your platform in their products and each developer becomes a marketing agent for the company.  In effect, your developer support team becomes your marketing team.  

Summary

The magic in developing a go to market strategy is that there is no "one size fits all" approach.  Many companies will design their sales and marketing machine as a blend of each of these approaches.  Use a developer-driven model to drive trial and inbound activity.  Telesales to close high-volume, smaller deals.  And then enterprise sales for the select strategic deals with average sales price (ASP) > $100K.

Different phases of your business will see more emphasis on one area than another.  For example, many companies embark on a freemium model initially, then depend on inbound upsell, later hire a telesales team to ramp up the upsell process by adding outbound activities, then hire an enterprise team to close the big deals.  Dropbox is an example of a company that has followed this path with tremendous results.

The main point is that you need to be as strategic and thoughtful in designing your go to market model as you are in your product or company strategy.  Only then can you evolve from a crafts model to a machine.

I include a chart below from a recent board presentaiton from my portfolio company, tracx (a SaaS social intelligence platform) that frames the multi-stage process in a particularly clear manner.

To read more on this topic, here are a few books / blogs I recommend:

• Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
• The Science of Building a Scalable Sales Team by Mark Roberge, Hubspot CRO
• The Bridge Group's Blog on inside sales
• Building a Sales and Marketing Machine by David Skok
• Stanford B-School case on Jive Software by Mark Leslie and Mark Stevens

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Today's IPO by Tremor Video is seen by many as a harbinger for the adtech community (full disclosure:  Tremor Video is a Flybridge portfolio company).  Rightly so.  Tremor is the first public offering of an adtech company since Millenial Media's IPO in April 2012.  One can argue how successful the Tremor IPO was, and the broader industry implications, based on the first day's opening price and trading, but the real test of these offerings is what happens next – how companies perform and execute over the next few quarters.

One thing that is clear, though, is that the advertising community would be wise to keep an eye on the "tech" portion of "adtech".  I have argued in the past that software is eating marketing.  Simply put, technology is radically transforming the marketing function and the role of the marketing professional.  The flow of advertising dollars into digital, addressable media is well-documented and well-understood.  It is estimated that in 2013, $100 billion will be spent on digital forms of advertising, representing more than 20% of the total advertising market and continuing to grow rapidly in share  (see chart above).

Less understood is that managing digital advertising is far more complex than its analog counterpart.  Advertising agencies have retained their industry wide hegemony as a result of this complexity.  With so many new technology vendors popping up and so many immature point solutions being deployed, the core competence of agencies has gone from being great at relationship managemnent to being great at technology platform management.  As DataXu's Mike Baker likes to say, Mad Men have become Math Men.

But, in every industry, software improves and gets simpler and simpler.  Technology platforms gain in scale, become more mainstream and training programs become more mature.  As all this happens, agency services are required less and less.

So, the lesson that may get loss in the Tremor IPO hoopla?  Agencies are being transformed.  Technology companies are sweeping into the advertising industry, much like they did in marketing (see Salesforce.com, Eloqua/Oracle, Exact Target/SalesForce, Neolane/Adobe).  And the days of getting the job done with thin technology in combination with armies of bodies are over.  To be a valued, strategic player in the market, you had better have a thick, differentiated technology stack.

Think about all of the amazing technology innovation that has impacted businesses over the last three years.  Since 2011, we have seen an explosion in cloud computing, in mobile, in technology-enabled business services and in globalization.  All of us feel more productive as professionals and our businesses feel more productive instutionally.  As a nation, the US must be cranking in productivity.  Killing it — particularly after rebounding from a recession, right?

Now look at the latest US productivity statistics (Q1 was just released last week):

• Q1 2013:  0.5% (annualized)
• 2012:  0.7%
• 2011:  0.6%

In other words, despite three years of amazing innovation and growth, we don't seem to be gaining in productivity.  What's going on?  

In 1986, observing a similar phenomenon on the heels of the PC revolution, MIT Economist Robert Solow quipped:  "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Those of us that are immersed in the innovation economy may find this hard to believe, but we are not, as a whole, actually more productive when we are in the midst of an innovation cycle boom.  New technologies take time to absorb, refine and make mainstream.  Computer software can be reprogrammed quickly.  Humans can't.  

Forrester captured this phenomenon nicely in a chart they produced a number of years ago predicting "the next big thing" in computing:

We can't imagine a world without broadband wireless, iPhone 5s, iPads and the cloud.  But we've got a lot of work to do to absorb these amazing technologies and make us all more productive as a whole.

Today is Demo Day for Techstars Boston.  I love Techstars Demo Days for many reasons, not the least of which is the amazing community that gathers to hear the brief, well-rehearsed pitches from the various start-ups who have spent months planning for this big event.

As accelerators like Techstars gain in popularity, many entrepreneurs wonder whether they should be applying and, if admitted, joining an accelerator and when they shouldn't.  I get this question a lot from my students, particularly as they're graduating and scrambling to figure out where they should start their company, how to raise capital and whether an accelerator is right for them.  Here are a few guidelines that I would think about if I were an entrepreneur making such a decisions.

First, broadly speaking, accelerators serve a very valuable role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.  In many ways, as Eugene Chung of Techstars NY points out, they are like finishing schools for entrpreneurs.  Like a college, there is a rigorous admissions process.  And once admitted, the participant receives an extraordinarily rich education, in this case in the field of entrepreneurship.  Also like college, the best accelerators represent valuable networks, where your "classmates" and even other alumni as well as boosters all become a part of your professional support system.  Finally, the brand of the network will always be associated with your brand.  Dropbox and Airbnb will always be known as "Y Combinator companies", which initially helped buttress their brand, and more in more is helping enhance the Y Combinator brand.

So with that in mind, here are a few reasons when I think an accelerator is a great choice for the entrepreneur:

That said, not all accelerators are created equal.  Just like with a college, your personal and professional brand will always be associated with that particular accelerator, so choose wisely.  Some accelerators specialize in certain domains (e.g., Rock Health for healthcare or Learn Launch for edtech).  Others have stronger reputations for fundraising vs. product development.

If you want to get a sense of the quality of the particular accelerator you are considering, you should ask around about them – graduates, senior entrepreneurs, VCs, start-up lawyers, bankers and accounting firms will all have their opinions.  One tech reporter, Frank Gruber, publishes an annual ranking of accelerators that is pretty good, although it leaves out hybrid organizations that aren't technically accelerators, like Boston's Mass Challenge (which is a contest) and NYC's First Growth Venture Network (which doesn't take any equity).

Accelerators are thus not for everyone.  If you are already well-connected to a particular entrepreneurial community, have a entrepreneurial track record and network, and are comfortable with your fundraising skills and relationships, then an accelerator probably isn't worth it for you.  But if those attributes don't describe you as an entrepreneur, an accelerator may be an excellent choice.

Now…off to demo day!

I was invited to testify at a Senate hearing tomorrow in front of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.  Below is my planned testimony.

(update: the video of my initial statement is below and the full hearing video is here) 

The immigration reform debate is near and dear to my heart and has whipped up the passions of many in the Innovation Economy, including Mayor Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless others.  It feels like, finally, we may get some positive movement on this and I'm honored to have the opportunity to help in any small way I can.

JJBussgang Senate Testimony – Immigration Reform – 5-8-13

http://www.scribd.com/embeds/139813328/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll

If you are inspired to lend your support, visit / contribute to:

• National Immigration Forum
• The March for Immigration
• FWD.US

I was born and have lived in the Boston area almost all my life.  I went to school here, met my wife and married her here, built a family and pursued my career here.  I am a rabid fan of all the sports teams and love exploring and connecting with every nook and corner of this community.  Never have I been more proud of the resilience of my home town.  Never have I felt more meaning in the statement:  “I am a Bostonian.”  In the Flybridge partners meeting this morning — which was held at one of our homes as our office is a part of the crime scene and in “lock down” mode — we discussed where we were when we learned of the horrible events, how we felt, who we know who was touched by it all.  We checked in with loved ones throughout the meeting and fielded kind notes from friends and colleagues.

I gave a talk at Harvard Law School this week to a VC and Entrepreneurship class on raising your first round of financing.  It was good fun and forced me to rethink my usual presentation and add some practical elements.  You can view the presentation here:

My other SlideShare presentations are here.

My first time jumping into the start-up world was as a freshly minted Harvard MBA in 1995.  As my classmates were rushing off to high-paying, high-powered jobs on Wall Street, I joined a Series A start-up with 30 employees as a product manager, making $65,000 per year – lower than my pre-MBA salary at management consultancy The Boston Consulting Group.  Since then I've had a terrific ride, but I often think of that fateful decision when I get asked, repeatedly, by other freshly minted MBAs:  "How do I get a job in a start-up?"  Or, more generally, "How do I even begin to find and assess start-up job opportunities – I don't even know where to start?"

The start-up universe is a large one and can seem overwhelming and impenetrable to the uninitiated.  In order to narrow things down, I recommend following a simple, four-step heuristic.  Here's the advice I give:  

• Pick a Domain.  First, figure out your passion in terms of domain.  Are you more of a B2C type or a B2B type?  What blogs are you reading?  What articles in Techcrunch or the Wall Street Journal capture your attention?  What companies are your dream companies to work for?  Answering these questions will help narrow down a set of domains that you are excited about.  It can be more than one, but it shouldn't be more than, say, three.

• Pick a City.  Next, figure out where you want to live.  Again, there may be multiple options, but ideally one or two favorites.  Each start-up community has its own plusses and minuses, quirks and idiosyncracies.  I find that once young people choose a particular start-up community, they stay there.  It's a natural phenomenon – they build relationships over time that lead to one opportunity after the next.  Your co-workers in one start-up become your co-founders in another.  Thus, young professionals should be thoughtful about choosing a city early in their career because of this "settling in" phenomenon.

• Pick a Stage.  Next, determine what stage company you prefer to work in.  Do you want a company that is still in the jungle phase (hacking through and trying to establish a path to success), the dirt road phase (established initial product-market fit and now trying to execute and scale in a relatively clear direction) or the highway phase (optimizing and scaling along a well-trod path)?  This decision should be made somewhat based on risk appetite and somewhat on personal makeup and preferences.  If you are a risk-taker and enjoy the challenges and roller-coaster ride, then the jungle phase is for you and you should bias towards seed funded or recently Series A funded companies that are pre-revenue.  If you are more conservative, want a good salary and prefer to pick a "safe" winner, then a highway phase company that is pre-IPO or recently IPO'ed is the right choice. 

• Pick a Winner.  Now that you have your target domain, geography and stage, focus on picking out a few winners – the hot companies that everyone thinks has great momentum and potential.  After all, why would you want to work for anyone other than the absolute hottest company in a given category?  How does an outsider figure out who the winners are in a given domain, market and stage?  Ask a handful of insiders.  Find the top 3 VCs, angels, tech lawyers and headhunters in your target geographical market and ask them for the two or three hottest companies that match the domain and stage you are interested in.  Compile this list, pressure test it, and see what patterns you find.  The firms who get the most mentions with the most compelling underlying evidence will naturally rise to the top.

Below is a sample chart that I put together answering the question for someone interested in either e-commerce, mobile or SaaS companies in SF/SV, NYC or Boston.  The first company listed is an earlier stage company (either jungle or dirt road) and the second company is a later stage company (either dirt road or highway).  This list is illustrative – just to make the point – not in any way attempting to be comprehensive.

(full disclosure:  tracx, 10gen and Savingstar are Flybridge portfolio companies)

Once this heuristic is complete, you now have your target list.  The next step is to get warm introductions to the target.  This is easier than you would think.  LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful tool, as are the various alumni databases.  VCs are often happy to pass along your resume and background to their portfolio companies – after all, they are doing them a favor by sending them highly qualified talent.

In general, the start-up community is so incredibly generous with its time and has such a strong "pay it forward" culture, that with tenacity and time, you can get to almost anyone.   In fact, I recommended you aim high.  Use this heuristic to narrow down your search and then list out the 10 people that would be your absolute top choices to sit down for 30 minutes with face to face.  Then, go after those 10 people in any way you can (without stalking them or being a nudge!).  These networking meetings will help you establish valuable relationships, even if the job fit isn't there.

In short, be organized, focused and tenacious.  Aim high, seek out the incremental networking meetings and pick yourself out a winner.  Things may not work out, but at least you're putting yourself in a position for a little positive serendipity.

In classic economics, deflation – a downward trend in prices – is a dangerous force that leads to recessions (see:  Japan, economic disaster – a case study).  In the world of the Internet, deflation viewed as a positive force, leading to massive consumer gains.  How can we reconcile these two competing beliefs?  And what impact will this deflationary pressure have on the production of high quality content?

I've been thinking a lot about deflation and its impact on the Internet economy since reading two articles in two different newspapers this last week.  The first was this article in The Economist about the music business.  The article contained a chart showing music industry revenues peaking in 1999 at $27 billion and dropping consistently as a result of the disruptive power of digital music and iPods/iPhones.  Industry revenue may have finally flattened out at $16.5 billion, but the bigger story is that over $10 billion of value has been taken out of the music business thanks to over a dozen years of digital disruption.  Artists are still producing a ton of music (I would guess music proliferation has grown during this period, although I haven't seen the data), yet the Internet has produced massive deflationary pressure.

The second article that I was struck by was in the Wall Street Journal, depicting the explosion of online video.  Titled, "Web Video:  Bigger and Less Profitable", the article reports on the rapid growth in online video views (39 billion in December), yet the fact that prices are dropping rapidly due to the oversupply of video inventory.  The CPM (cost per thousand views) that advertisers are paying has dropped from $17-25 in 2011 to $15-20 in 2012.  Advertisers and content producers are used to this trend.  Whenever a new advertising medium emerges, prices are high at first, and then steadily drop as inventory swells (I wrote about this in a post that provided a bearish analysis of Groupon back in 2010).  Every content business today faces this rapid drop in CPMs across every category, resulting in severe cost pressures.

So if the producers of music, video and other content are getting hammered on deflation, who is benefiting?  Consumers.  Consumers are getting access to music, video and other sources of content for less.  They're also getting subsidized by business advertisers through social networks and search.  McKinsey did a study a few years ago that sized the consumer surplus from the Internet at over 100 billion euros.  Interestingly, they concluded that in measuring this surplus, consumers have benefited 85% of the gains from the Internet as compared to 15% for producers.

Thus, while the business press is full of stories of disruptive gains in business transformation, the real story of the Web is the power of the consumer and the massive gain consumers are receiving.

Although I am thrilled with the consumer surplus, I struggle with where this logical chain is eventually leading us.  I worry that if there is too much deflation in content, that this consumer surplus will hit a natural limit.  That natural limit will be that content producers will stop investing to produce high quality content.  After all the inefficiencies have been wrung out of the system, eventually fewer producers of content will be willing to produce great content because the rewards just are no longer there.  If this were to happen, consumers would be all the poorer for it.

My conclusion:  although deflation has produced awesome consumer gains in the last decade, it is emerging as a real threat to content producers.  But at some point, perhaps soon, it will tip to being a negative force that will cause high quality content produers to turn away and pursue other methods of financial gain.  If that were to happen, we might regret allowing deflation to run rampant on the Web.

All the focus on the Pope's departure from the Vatican has got me thinking about the meaning of religion.  Those ruminations have led me to a surprising conclusion:  one of the reasons the force of entrepreneurship has become so powerful in recent years around the world is that entrepreneurship has evolved into a global religious movement.

Wikipedia defines religion as follows:

Religion is an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.

Similarly, the start-up world has evolved into a set of shared beliefs and values.  For example, the notion of Pay it Forward has become a core part of the entrepreneurial ethos.  In religious communities, when someone is in need, the community rallies around them.  People do kind things to other people just because it is the right thing to do.  The start-up world has a similar share value – investors, CEOs and service providers throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem are always willing to lend a hand, donate time and provide guidance and counsel.  When I talk to entrepreneurs I've never met before, I always have a sense that we are kindred spirits on a shared journey.  There is an immediate connection and mutual respect, just as I feel when I meet a member of my religion (Judaism).

The canonical texts of the entrepreneurial world are firmly established and widely read.  Although they haven't sold as well as the Bible, there are a set of books that nearly every member of the entrepreneurial ecosystem has read, including:  Crossing the Chasm, The Lean Start-Up and Four Steps to the Epiphany.  Even those who have not studied these books and their derivative works are familiar with the concepts.  

The cultural force of entrepreneurship is a powerful one.  This force and the cultural norms they impose can vary from the profound (it is no longer ok to look down on the "little guy/gal" in business, young people are now listened to more carefully and given more opportunities to have an impact) to the mundane (it is now ok to wear jeans to a serious professional meeting, it is no longer ok to pull out a Blackberry in a meeting as opposed to the iPhone).  The binds that tie the community together are strong.  I can walk into a start-up event in Sao Paolo, Jakarta or Little Rock and have the same dialog about the same concepts – just as I can when I walk into a synagogue on Friday night anywhere in the world and feel at home.

The prophets of entrepreneurship have been firmly established.  Paul Graham, Steve Blank, Eric Ries and a few others have risen to a status such that anything they say or write is followed closely by hundreds of thousands of followers.  The entrepreneurial community reads all the same blogs and debates the same issues around the world.  Certain corporate leaders, such as Steve Jobs (who, arguably, was practically deified in the wake of his tragic death) are also viewed with such reverence that they can command massive followings and sway opinion.

I could go on, but you get the point.  I'm not sure what to do with this observation, but I think it represents a profound undercurrent that drives the start-up system in a very positive way.  I'd be curious if others see it similarly.