0229 - Go To Market Operations with Neil O'Herlihy

A podcast episode recording of the first session of the Pepperdine/UCD MBA-MSC workshop held on April 17th, 2024.

Neil O'Herlihy talks about why your strategic 'gut instinct' is probably going to be wrong in a rapidly changing technology product environment. We are so used to thinking in terms of averages that we find it hard to develop an intuitive understanding of markets where power-law demand/reward curves work. 

"We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, we just need to be ready when it does!”

Case Study Overview: 

InceptionExp is a fictitious rapidly growing Silicon Valley company offering unique AI solutions that can improve and optimize themselves through AI. InceptionExp have low costs of sales and very high year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth with huge headroom. They are operating in a context of technology and scale race where there are strong economies of learning and scale. The rapid pace of technological innovation means the environment is highly uncertain. Demand for InceptionExp's product/service in EMEA is skyrocketing, requiring rapid expansion to address this market. InceptionExp's customers and markets exhibit power-law distribution, meaning a small percentage represent the bulk of the opportunity.

Given the rapid innovation in the AI-building-AI market we need to decide:

1. How should InceptionExp build its EMEA go-to-market team,

2. Should it use an EMEA go-to-market hub location

3. How it should prioritize resources in a power-law market, and

4. How much to focus on sales efficiency?

Notes:

Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos by Shona L. Brown, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

The Lean Startup by Eric Reis

HBR on Strategy podcast (https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/07/defining-a-growth-strategy-in-uncertain-times)

episode recounting the different responses by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on the future of the mobile phone.

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: “It was just cold”

Artist: Andrew Codeman

Source: https://bit.ly/2Msarcj

License: “CC BY 4.0”

Cover Art 

Title: Eras ITC + photo of Neil presenting + 300% sat, 6,500K, pastels smooth.

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: podcast-NeilOHerlihy.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

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