building https://teapawt.net/t.co/G1WHIQl7Wi: ai agents for construction/ logistics/ manufacturing/ mining the long game: https://teapawt.net/t.co/cqhV9V0wBA
Barcelona
Joined December 2012
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how many follow-ups is too many?
i just reactivated a lead i had probably followed up with 15+ times.
eventually i left him alone for a few months, tried again, and now the timing seems right.
i used to assume that many unanswered follow-ups meant the opportunity was dead
in enterprise sales, the limit seems much higher than i thought. sometimes the problem is simply timing
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Mehdi Yacoubi retweeted
this stuff is so tiresome. jp morgan lead new york city yacht club to two successive cup victories, rockefeller raced trotters through central park, ellison made sailboats fly
you all are falling victim to the pastiche of martyrdom without any of the glory. get over yourselves
whatever opportunity is in front of you this week, take it seriously
it is surprising how often a small opportunity leads to a much bigger one, usually in ways you could not have predicted at the start
you rarely know which project, customer, meeting, or introduction will matter later
do the current thing as well as you can. the next opportunity often comes from that
Mehdi Yacoubi retweeted
Tu t'appelles Giovanni. 41 ans. Tu vis dans les Pouilles, dans le sud de l'Italie. Tu pratiques "l'Italianmaxxxing" depuis ta naissance. Tu ne sais pas ce que c'est.
À 7h42, tu te réveilles parce que Monica, ta femme, a ouvert les volets.
Tu sais que t'as bien dormi parce que t'as bien dormi. Malgré la bouteille de Primitivo Manduria que tu as bue hier.
Tu bois un espresso au comptoir du café du village avec ton frère Marco. Vous avez une entreprise de carrelage depuis 2009. Votre business plan repose sur le fait de poser du carrelage et d'avoir WhatsApp.
À midi, tu manges des braciole al sugo avec Marco et deux ouvriers. Tu reprends du pain pour finir la sauce et repars au chantier.
Tu rentres chez toi vers 17h30, tu retrouves Monica et les enfants. Tu fais une sieste sur le canapé sous un poster d'Antonio Cassano que ta femme te demande d'enlever depuis 14 ans.
Le vendredi, tu retrouves tes six amis d'enfance en terrasse. Vous commandez des doubles negroni, des olives et du pecorino. Vous jouez aux cartes.
Vous parlez trop fort sur le foot, Meloni, et le nouveau carrelage dégueulasse de la mairie
Cet été, ton cousin français, Baptiste, 34 ans, vient te rendre visite depuis Paris.
Il porte une bague Oura connectée, un bracelet en nylon, et un débardeur Under Armour à 90 € qui évacue la transpiration.
Il t'explique qu'il a consacré sept ans à optimiser sa longévité. Il est blanc comme un cul.
Tu lui demandes s'il est malade.
Il t'explique le cortisol, la HRV, les pics glycémiques et les effets de l'alcool sur le sommeil profond.
Baptiste refuse ton pecorino parce qu'il a déjà atteint son quota de graisses saturées. Il refuse ensuite ton double negroni parce que ça perturbe sa récupération.
Il sort une poudre verte multivitaminée à 79 € de son sac que tu recraches dans les plantes de ta grand-mère.
Le soir, tu prépares des spaghetti alle vongole. Les enfants courent partout. Ton frère Marco arrive avec l'équipe de carrelage du village et une pizza Margherita faite avec les tomates de son cousin Francesco.
Baptiste, cerné jusqu'au cul, t'explique qu'il ne mange pas après 19h30 pour sa prépa ultra-trail.
Il poste une photo avec toi sur Instagram avec la légende "italianmaxxxing"
Tu lui dis qu'il revient quand il veut.
Il arrive à Orly et se demande pourquoi son bracelet Whoop lui indique un pic de stress après ses vacances.
was talking to a large manufacturing company today,
multiple sites, strategic components, lots of repetitive work
their it rules are so strict that external systems cannot connect directly to SAP, and teams cannot freely pull data from it
so people still spend hours every day moving information around manually.
they are now looking at on-prem ai for some of these workflows
i keep seeing versions of this
the harder a company is to integrate with, the more useful it becomes to build ai that can operate inside its existing constraints
being bootstrapped made us much broader than we would have been otherwise
we needed revenue, so we stayed open to different industries and different problems. if a good company had a painful process we thought we could fix, we tried
that forced us to get good at adapting quickly instead of waiting for the perfect customer or use case
now, after enough deployments, the pattern is starting to reverse
each new project gives us more reusable software and a better understanding of that industry
we started broad because we had to. over time, the verticals are becoming products. – at Barcelona, Spain
good things happen to your business when you keep the main thing the main thing
it's always tempting to think the answer is somewhere else. a new channel, event, product, market, hire, strategy.
most of the time, the boring answer is to spend more time selling, and building – at Barcelona, Spain
quite crazy that with all the tools and resources available today,
most of the engineering application I receive can't point to a single thing they've built in their free time
agency is still in short supply – at Barcelona, Spain
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so many large companies will do (are doing) the same, which will create great opportunities for companies that can bring ai inside their existing security, data, and IT constraints
the demand will still be there
the deployment model will just look very different from giving employees unrestricted access to public ai tools – at Barcelona, Spain
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we can now build in a week what would have taken us months a few years ago.
getting one large company to trust it can still take six months.
that gap keeps getting wider.
small teams can build very capable enterprise software now. but adoption still depends on getting someone senior to care, access to real data and systems, trust from the people doing the work, IT approval, procurement, security, and enough internal support for the project to survive the politics.
we’ve had cases where the technical part moved quickly and the organizational part took months.
once you are inside a large company, understand how it works, know the people, have integrations running, and have actually delivered something useful, that position becomes very valuable.
the software will keep getting easier to build.
earning that level of access probably won’t. – at Barcelona, Spain
play the long game with sales
a good lead can be real and still go nowhere for months. budget gets frozen, priorities change, someone leaves, internal politics get in the way.
that does not always mean the opportunity is dead.
keep the relationship alive without forcing it. send something useful once in a while. meet when you are in town. remember what they were trying to solve.
a good number of deals come back when something changes internally
and when that happens, being the person they already know and trust is a very good place to be – at Morocco
one of the strangest parts of enterprise sales is winning the deal, then discovering that people inside the company are still trying to stop the project. a few things I've learned:
1. executive approval does not mean the organization wants the project. sometimes the people who need to provide data, validate outputs, or change how they work have very different incentives
2. resistance is rarely explicit. it usually looks like delayed files, missed meetings, endless new requirements, slow validation, or “technical concerns” that keep changing
3. you need to understand very early who can actually stop the project. org charts do not tell you this. one operator or middle manager can sometimes block weeks of work
4. the reason for the resistance matters. some people fear losing control, some fear being exposed, some think the system threatens their role, and some simply do not want more work
5. spending time on-site makes this much easier to see. you learn who people listen to, who controls access to information, and where the project is really getting stuck
6. one of the best ways to change the dynamic is to make a skeptic useful to the project. ask them to test the hardest cases, challenge the output, and help define what good looks like
7. solving one annoying problem for the person resisting you can change the relationship surprisingly fast. people become much more cooperative once the deployment helps them personally
8. informal relationships matter a lot. coffee, lunch, sitting next to someone while they work, being available on WhatsApp. a lot of enterprise progress happens outside formal meetings
9. you still need direct access to the executive sponsor. if data access, IT, or validation is being blocked for weeks, the issue has to become visible without turning it into a personal fight
10. some of the hardest deployment problems are organizational. getting a company that already bought the system to actually let you deploy it can take as much work as the technical side
11. bring a big box of donuts – at Grand Casablanca, Morocco
Mehdi Yacoubi retweeted
Tu t'appelles Thomas. 36 ans. Ça fait 8 ans que tu es entrepreneur. Trois business, jamais un salaire. Hier, tu apprends que ChatGPT Codex peut recréer en 10 minutes le SaaS que tu as mis 3 ans à coder.
En 2018, tu quittes la finance pour « faire quelque chose qui a du sens », comme prévu à l'ESSEC. Après une vidéo de The Family et un talk rue du Petit-Musc, tu es persuadé que tu vas changer le monde.
Tu lances une marque de vêtements inclusifs en laine d'alpaga issue de l'agriculture régénérative. Tu lèves 8 400 € sur Ulule auprès de 73 contributeurs, dont ta mère et ton prof de SES. Tu annonces avoir validé ton product-market fit.
Tu vends 31 pulls pendant le Black Friday, tout en dénonçant la fast fashion sur Instagram. Tu fermes et publies « 7 leçons apprises en tant que founder » avec une citation de Morgan Freeman : « Soit je gagne, soit j'apprends ». Le post devient viral.
En 2020, tu pivotes dans la food : une dark kitchen de bowls végétariens locaux livrés dans des bocaux consignés à Montreuil. Tu dépenses 9 000 € en branding avant de découvrir que les clients veulent surtout manger chaud et à l'heure.
Après 3 spritz, tes potes t'accusent d'exploiter les livreurs pour t'enrichir. Tu n'as pas de salaire.
Tu rejoins un incubateur où 6 « chargés de mission » qui n'ont jamais monté de boîte t'expliquent comment scaler la tienne avec les concepts de Simon Sinek. Tu trouves ça extrêmement enrichissant.
Un an plus tard, tu fermes. Deliveroo n'est « pas aligné avec tes valeurs ». Tu remercies la BPI et 28 personnes dans un post LinkedIn promettant « une nouvelle aventure ».
En 2023, fort de ton expérience dans la restauration, tu lances une « tourismtech » : un SaaS qui prédit les restaurants que tes potes vont aimer. Tu paies un publi-reportage sur Forbes.
Tu passes 3 ans à développer ton MVP. Tu fais les afterworks de Station F. Tu as 14 mentors, 8 pitch decks et une photo avec un secrétaire d'État. Le Dauphiné Libéré te classe parmi les « jeunes prometteurs ». Tu as 34 ans.
Tu as 800 utilisateurs freemium, aucun client payant. Mais un business angel t'a dit que « les signaux sont positifs ». Cette fois, c'est la bonne.
En 2026, un stagiaire le recrée avec ChatGPT Codex en 10 minutes.
Tu recroises Chantal, ancienne camarade de l'ESSEC, chez Bio c' Bon. En 2018, quand elle était devenue chasseuse de têtes freelance, tu lui avais posé la main sur l'épaule : « Ce n'est pas scalable, ni à impact, mais chacun a son ambition. »
Chantal vient de payer sa maison à Hendaye, bosse en remote et facture 20 000 € par mois. Elle n'a jamais mis les pieds dans un incubateur. Elle ne sait même pas ce qu'est un business angel.
Tu voulais fuir le monde corporate. Tu en as recréé les réunions, les KPI et les jeux de statut. Sans le salaire.
Après 8 ans de galères scalables, tu demandes à Chantal comment elle a fait.
Elle te répond qu'elle avait un gamin à nourrir, donc qu'elle n'a jamais pu sauver le monde.
sundays, 25k steps, long walks in the neighborhood, son sleeping on me in the baby carrier, founders podcast + calls with friends/fam
doesn't get better than this – at Morocco
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a few things i’ve learned selling enterprise ai at mirage:
1. the moment a prospect sends real drawings, operational files, ERP exports, or gives us access to the people doing the work, the deal changes. before that, interest is still cheap
2. some of our best opportunities started with a very specific problem that looked small from the outside. once we got inside the workflow, we found much larger problems around it
3. we’ve learned to get much closer to the actual users early. a senior executive can start the project, but the estimator, planner, dispatcher, engineer, or operator usually tells you what will make the system useful
4. having top management behind a project makes an enormous difference. getting data, getting IT involved, organizing workshops and making decisions all happen much faster
5. pilots work much better when the customer gives us something they already know the answer to. a completed takeoff, an old tender, a known operational result. you can compare against reality instead of debating whether the output “looks good.”
6. going on-site has changed deals for us. you understand more in a few hours inside a port, mine, construction office, or logistics operation than in weeks of calls
7. some customers initially ask for one feature and end up showing us a much bigger problem once we start working together. this is why we try to understand the surrounding operation before deciding how narrow the product should stay
8. customization has helped us win early. large companies often have years of internal rules and strange ways of working. being willing to adapt around them has been a real advantage while we are still small
9. the best sign that a deployment can expand is when other teams start asking for access before you have tried to sell them anything
10. a lot of what we are building now came directly from customer work we could not have predicted from the outside. the more time we spend close to the operation, the less interested i am in guessing what enterprise software should look like from a desk – at Morocco
Mehdi Yacoubi retweeted
After this moment, these men will statistically earn more, live longer, nearly halve their substance use, commit far less crime, and have their brains literally rewired for protection.
Men need children.
Children need fathers.
Society needs both.
