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“All new ideas are combinations of old ideas, but not all idea combinations are created equal,” wrote Frans Johannsen. Mick Pearson designed the Eastgate office building in Harare, Zimbabwe based on techniques he observed termites employ to stabilize the internal temperature of their nests. Remarkably, the Eastgate maintains an ambient temperature between 73-78°F despite variances in external temperatures from 58° to 88°. Johannsen argues in his book that most innovation comes at the intersection of fields, and Pearson is just one example.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about his experiences with the inside/outside bias. Kahneman, a team of graduate students, and the Dean of the Hebrew University School of Education collaborated on curriculum for judgment and decision-making for high schools. At one point, Kahneman surveyed his team to estimate the amount of time remaining to complete project.

The group’s opinion ranged from 18 to 30 months. The Dean, who had developed several textbooks in the past, initially concurred with the group. But Kahneman prodded him on the timelines for his other projects, at which point the Dean reflected and responded previous teams completed these projects in 7 to 10 years’ time. Thinking as an insider, a member of the team, the Dean dramatically underestimated the scope of the project remaining, despite his expertise. Ultimately, the book was completed eight years later. Inside/outside bias.

About one third of US startups that raise a seed round raise a Series A. The larger the seed investment, the greater the odds the company successfully raises the next round. A $500,000 seed round results in a series A 20% of the time, while $1.5M seed increases the chances to 30%, an increase of half. larger seed rounds enable early-stage companies to experiment more, hire more aggressively, recover from mistakes better and attain more of the milestones necessary to raise a series A.

The Future of Machine Intelligence is a free collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications.

In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summarize a 20 minute video into four descriptive sentences. In fact, this summarization ability isn’t limited to graphical content:

Over the last six years, seed rounds have grown in size by 12% annually. Series As have grown by 14%, series Bs by 9%, series Cs by 14% and series Ds by 11%. In that same timeframe, the median series A and series C has doubled. Median seed rounds have more than tripled in size.

Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. Over the last five years, seven of the twenty-nine quarters have reached or exceeded the $15 billion mark, all of them within the last two years. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average.

There’s a new class of company that wield data to create long-term competitive advantage. TheRealReal uses this morning’s sales data to inform this afternoon’s marketing campaigns. Hubspot motivates its sales teams not just with a target quota, but a blend of key sales metrics that reflect the strategic priorities of the company. Zendesk’s data team educates and trains its employees to use data in meetings to prioritize key product management and marketing efforts.

A senior executive described her management philosophy as heavily influenced by Daniel Pink’s book Drive. In his 20 minute TED talk, Pink argues traditional incentive structures like bonuses and raises don’t work for knowledge workers. Instead, autonomy, mastery and purpose motivate them best.

Autonomy grants employees the flexibility to achieve their goals as they see fit. Purpose means serving a goal larger than the self. Mastery provides employees the opportunities to continuously improve their skills. Sometimes, these three principles are called APM.

Sales velocity is the equation that governs the effectiveness of your SaaS startup’s sales team. Often, sales teams use the word sales velocity to refer to the number of signed contracts in a given month or quarter. But sales velocity classically defined is a different concept.

Sales velocity originates from operations research, field of study pioneered by Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of computing, and Georges Doriot, the patriarch of the venture capital industry. Sales velocity measures the output of the sales team in dollars per day or month.

A user has maximum intent. She has watched the humorous demo video, chuckled when reading through the clever marketing copy, and filled out the abbreviated, optimized user registration form. She wants to give the product a spin. How long does the account verification link take to appear in her email box? Is it long enough for her to switch tabs, change contexts and lose interest?

The half-life for new product trials brief. How many seconds with a user does a product have? The typical web-browser spends 15 seconds on each webpage. When researching new software, those sessions are likely to be a bit longer, but even at a minute, that’s not much time to deliver the email and keep the user moving through the conversion funnel.