on 06-Nov-2016 (Sun)

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product—even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately—you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.

(Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.

• LTV > CAC. (It appears that LTV should be about 3 x CAC for a viable SaaS or other form of recurring revenue model. Most of the public companies like Salesforce.com, ConstantContact, etc., have multiples that are more like 5 x CAC.)
  
• Aim to recover your CAC in < 12 months, otherwise your business will require too much capital to grow. (Banks and wireless phone companies ignore this rule, but they have access to tons of capital.)

2. I stated above that leaving the history of the preclassical logos in the shadows is bothersome for two reasons. The second reason, which I will adduce briefly before going on to Descartes, has to do with the profound link established by Foucault between the division, the dissen- sion, and the possibility of history itself. “The necessity of madness, throughout the history of the West, is linked to the deciding gesture which detaches from the background noise, and from its continuous monotony, a meaningful language that is transmitted and consummated in time; briefly, it is linked to the possibility of history.”

Before describing the moment when the reason of the classical age will reduce madness to silence by what he calls a “strange act of force,” Foucault shows how the exclusion and internment of madness found a sort of structural niche prepared for it by the history of another exclu- sion: the exclusion of leprosy. Unfortunately, we cannot be detained by the brilliant passages of the chapter entitled Stultifera navis. They would also pose numerous questions.

But I wonder whether, when one is concerned with history (and Foucault wants to write a history), a strict structuralism is pos- sible, and, especially, whether, if only for the sake of order and within the order of its own descriptions, such a study can avoid all etiological questions, all questions bearing, shall we say, on the center of gravity of the structure. The legitimate renunciation of a certain style of causality perhaps does not give one the right to renounce all etiological demands.

The passage devoted to Descartes opens the crucial chapter on “the great internment.” It thus opens the book itself, and its location at the beginning of the chapter is fairly unexpected. More than anywhere else, the question I have just asked seems to me unavoidable here. We are not told whether or not this passage of the first Meditation, inter- preted by Foucault as a philosophical internment of madness, is destined

Progesterone converts the endometrium to its secretory stage to prepare the uterus for implantation.