Parse notes
An insightful read from a founder of a venture-backed B2B startup that shut down. The biggest takeaways include: You need to really nail your ICP and build vertical use cases if you’re playing a horizontal game, don’t underestimate incumbents, and be mindful of confirmation bias from the supporters around you.
We put this in the highlight because it’s a needed reminder. As founders, we like to look at the competition or the best in class companies out there. Sometimes this can be useful, most of the time it’s not. You cannot copy Google. Its search business is so profitable that it can afford to do all those quirky things, your startup likely can’t. Focus on you.
Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures and former VP Product at Facebook, put out an 84-page slide deck recently that digs into the state of venture capital. It’s a long but very enjoyable read that gives a poignant view of the landscape.
You likely wave the figure around when talking to investors, but do you really understand what goes into calculating your gross margin? Here are some live examples to help bring it to life.
A bundle of insights from Lavanya Shukla, VP of Growth at Weights & Biases, on how to build a user acquisition flywheel instead of a funnel.
Asking the question of what advice you’d give a younger version of yourself is a super interesting exercise and this time done specifically with Reid Hoffman. Hint: he missed Stripe.
Groupthink joins your meetings, creates agendas, takes notes, and then instantly shares the summary with everyone else.
Visualize your online PR and link coverage.
Personalize every single email at any scale and in any language.
In-office, hybrid, remote–whatever working model you choose, there’s always trade-offs. If you’re even partially remote, igniting a sense of personal responsibility with your employees is critical. They need to know what their company objectives are, why they were chosen, and exactly how their role and daily work relates back to them.
a16z is calling this “The Superhero stack.” They dive into what role tech startups might play in changing how we think about public safety and security response.
Given the high concentration of cash and equity tied up in the top companies and their inability to do anything with it because of antitrust concerns, it will definitely put a damper on the M&A market with no end in sight.
Having a fully-vested co-founder or key hire depart the company is a killer. To hedge against this predictable outcome, more founders should adopt longer vesting cycles for themselves and the earliest big equity employees.
This question acts as a forcing function for feedback. You’ll know where you stand, and the investor will also be confronted with the need to refine their thinking a little.
Biden has gone all in on an executive order that, while lacking teeth, gives a good sense of where the administration is coming from when it comes to AI, and from that, we can glean potential impacts on the startup ecosystem.