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Dear <<First Name>>,

While writing my blog post on a what if investing scenario, I ended up re-reading bits of the sci-fi classic Replay by Ken Grimwood about a 43-year-old man who dies of a heart attack only to wake up as his 18-year-old self. He relives his life with the full knowledge of what's to come for the next 25 years.

So what does he do? He becomes an investor (with startup money from sports gambling) and gets very rich. Then he dies at age 43 again, waking up to another replay of his life. He plays subsequent replays differently, but I thought it was telling that the first replay would of course involve an attempt at trying to make as much money as possible.

I must admit, I probably would have done something similar (bet on sports, buy stocks). The lure of surefire easy money sounds irresistible and I'm sure I'd justify my actions by saying I would use the money for good. But then what? Like the Ring in Tolkien's books, would such power ultimately corrupt and change me as a person?

Last week's newsletter got a 64.0% open rate and the most-clicked link was 68 bits of advice from Kevin Kelly.

Consumed
Ferrari Capital Efficiency (blog post)
Fascinating interview with a former SVP and Chief Product Officer at Ferrari about how and why the carmaker spends much less on capex and R&D for its vehicles than its competitors.

Because it is a luxury brand and they only sell a limited quantity vs. mass carmakers, Ferrari has less room to save on variable costs of manufacturing the car (e.g. the cost of components, labor to build each car, etc.), requiring the business to find efficient ways to design, prototype, test, and optimize their cars.

How to Sell a B2B Product by Calvin French-Owen (blog post)
From the co-founder of analytics software Segment, some good tips on selling business-to-business SaaS products with takeaways that's relevant to other B2B businesses (like an agency!).

"In enterprise software, customers pay for software based upon the value that software provides, not the cost to deliver or build that software.

The same product can be sold for $50, or $5,000,000–and the price comes down to how much value the buyer is getting from the software. As long as the buyer sees it as a positive return on investment, it’s worth it to pay the price.

A great salesperson steers the conversation towards that value. If you’re not anchoring against the value, you are literally leaving money on the table."


Created
What If We Had Invested In the Software Companies We Use at Work?
This is something I've wondered about on and off over the years, so I decided to just put things on a spreadsheet and see. The experiment: what if we took the value of the first year software fees and put them into the company's publicly-traded stock? Roughly $50k in software fees turned into... a good deal more.

Cheers,
Peter

P.S. You can check out my list of books read right here. My hope is to get a good mix of challenging reads with some that are entertaining, inspiring, and instructive.

If you like what you've read, please share with your friends. They can sign up for the list here. Also, I always welcome recommendations of any kind–books, podcasts, movies, etc.

About me: Peter Kang is co-founder of Barrel, a digital agency in New York City. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and dog.
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