Q&A | What Is Mark Reading, Watching, and Listening To?
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All right, folks, welcome to The Science of Scaling, a show about how to scale your sales and revenue. We've got a bunch of questions from you. I love it. Our Matthew Brown, our producer's here. And Matthew, what's the question we have today? All right. So this question is all about you. So people want to know, what have you been reading, watching, and listening to? Okay.

The full broad life, not just professional. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm a little bit all over the place. So let's start with just a relaxing one. I have a pool table. I sit there and I play pool at night. I might drink a glass of wine and I have whatever PGA tournament's on in the background. It's just so relaxing to me. I also love to watch comedy.

I like secretly write down jokes. I have a list of 17 pages of jokes. So I don't know if one day I'll get up and do it, but I love just to like, I just have it going because you never know when a joke's going to come to you. And I just love watching all comedians. They're so good. I would say like my favorite ones are like those super dry, punchy ones like Mitch Hedberg, who unfortunately passed away a while ago, but he just had such a unique, unique

delivery and writing style. I thought he was phenomenal. And someone that was similar to him is Demetri Martin, which I think especially his early stuff, he had such a unique, funny way of looking at the world. So that's how I kind of relax. We can go over to some professional stuff specifically on GoToMarket. To be honest with you, like

I don't think there's a single book or person that I follow. I basically like, excuse me, I like follow, I think everybody. Like, honestly, I'll read some cool thing and it'll trigger another thought and I'll read their thing and their thing and their thing. So I will read stuff from like hundreds of individuals to get like their contribution to the ecosystem and I'll incorporate it. I prefer highly tactical stuff.

and in the startup world. And so like, I'll give you examples like Jocko from Winning by Design, I think is brilliant in terms of like methodology, design, frameworks, et cetera. And another example, like a little self-serving, but Liz Kane, one of our partners at Stage Two Capital, writes a Saturday column on Ask Stage Two. And it's like super tactical, like what, it's literally just like this, what founders are submitting. So it's that type of stuff where I just like to like,

not be as soft and fluffy, but like really tactical on how we can learn from it. Okay. Back to really personal stuff. I think I've talked a reasonable amount about this in other, you know, podcasts or whatever, but I am a very spiritual person. I am a deacon at my local church.

I grew up Catholic, now congregational, but I also see religion as a slice of my overall spirituality. I love to study all religions. I've read works from every religion and I love to explore religion.

what's overlapping amongst them and what's different and they influence who I am and even outside of things that we maybe don't consider to be religious but spiritual which make up my I'm a yogi I do yoga every other day I meditate every day I pray every day and reflect and so I also read a lot about that stuff I read about crazy stuff I

like teleportation and telepathy. I think there are some amazing smart leaders that predict by 3000 humans can do it. Who knows? Let's try to do it. That's crazy, Matthew, right? But like, for example, one specific book I'm reading right now actually is about yoga and dreams. And this individual has been studying people who like

claim that they're living a similar, a parallel life in their dreams as they are in their conscious life. It's just fun to kick that stuff around, you know, and it really progresses me. But, but honestly, like,

That stuff's kind of out there, but like that aspect of my life has been really important for me to reflect every day on the unique gifts that I've been given and think very hard on how I should use those gifts to make the world a better place. I believe that's the meaning of life, honestly.

And it's led me to a lot of great things and it gives me an enormous sense of purpose and confidence and reduces my anxiety on a daily basis because I feel like I'm being very thoughtful about what I should do. So do a lot of reading on that stuff. And then back to work a little bit. From an entrepreneur standpoint, I'm consuming everything on AI.

Everything on AI. I'm reading books. I'm mostly listening to stuff because I feel like books is a lagging, lags the content and it's the real time blogs and especially the podcasts out there. I listened to a bunch of them and am just studying AI. I think the most important question in every boardroom today, regardless of your two employees or 200,000 employees is,

Given the problem we solve or opportunity we enable as a business for our buyer, if we can fast forward 5, 10, 15 years and try to envision what the AI world is like, what the tech looks like, and imagine how that same problem or opportunity is addressed for our buyer in that world. That's a very important vision right now and how we can get there.

And I do feel like it's a bit of a moment of what they call innovator's dilemma from Clay Christensen. And there's lots of ways you can describe an innovator's dilemma, but it's sort of like if the incumbent's starting here and the startup is starting here, are we going to be on video? There's a lot of ways to explain innovator's dilemma, but if the incumbent is starting here and the startup is starting here and the right answer's here, up here,

Who can get there faster if they both know the right answer? Like, so let's just take like in the move from on-premise to cloud, you had PeopleSoft and HRTech, on-prem defender, and you had Workday, cloud attacker. So we know the answer is what Workday is today. They've captured most of the new market share creation in HRTech, but they were able to get there faster than PeopleSoft. And even if PeopleSoft knew the right answer, it's really hard to get there.

It's like the innovators dilemma and that move was three big things. One was new technical architecture. PeopleSoft would have had to rewrite their on-prem software onto the cloud. Lot of money to do that. Number two is subscription pricing. PeopleSoft is like, yeah, it's 5 million bucks this year and then we'll charge you 500,000 in maintenance every year after. Workday is like, it's 100,000 a year. That's disruptive to an on-prem company.

And then the third one is distribution. Something very true to HubSpot's heart, which is like, you know, PeopleSoft was like good looking salespeople that knew how to golf and take people to steak dinners. And Workday was marketing generated leads fed to an inside sales team and closed in the beginning. So disruptive. So what are the innovators dilemmas for the move from cloud to AI?

Been doing a lot of thinking about that and a lot of like reading and listening to podcasts and trying to come up with them. So yeah, hopefully that was what you're looking for. A little bit of professional, a little bit of personal. I try to keep it balanced. I appreciate the curiosity and can't wait for next week's question.