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Sam Altman took to the stage to announce new products and features available from OpenAI at the company’s first-ever developer conference. Here’s a long take that breaks down the talk and the key takeaways.
DataDog announced earnings that beat plans. In its earnings call, it mentions that it’s seeing signs that the cost-cutting activities that dominated the start of this year are plateauing, which hopefully acts as a signal of good news for tech.
Probably not. When hiring salespeople, dig into these points. Known brands are easier to sell, and enterprise SaaS is meaningfully different from SaaS built for smaller businesses. Only the very best salespeople can context switch between SaaS effectively.
Usage-based pricing seems to be rising in popularity. It’s a revenue model that scales value for both parties as a customer uses your product more. What metric you decide to pivot your pricing around is hard to land on. This metric is commonly called the “Value Metric”. Here’s a breakdown of metrics used by some top companies.
Reflections from a diverse set of 8 unicorn founders on things they might have done differently earlier on in building their businesses.
Personalized AI content for brands.
Automatically detect and prevent chargebacks in your Stripe account.
Automatically qualify, route, and schedule inbound leads to supercharge your sales pipeline.
Software building on top of open-source LLMs, how defensible is that? A lot of AI, much like vertical SaaS, is a winner-take-most market. Investors and founders are racing to reach an inflection point that brings down their CAC and makes market capture increasingly easier.
Shutting down a company often comes with a grieving process, just like a breakup or the loss of a loved one. Give yourself time to process before jumping back into the startup fray – investors tend to watch out for clear rebounds.
Teams with high trust often function more efficiently. Trust requires a degree of transparency, but transparency can be unsettling without context. How you share information is just as important as what you share.
Managers and employees often play this bizarre game where they pretend the employee will be working at the company forever. That’s never the case and the company won’t be around forever either. Honest conversations about career ambitions will help with retention and trust building.
If you haven’t seen the news about OpenAI Dev Day yet, this thread gives a good estimation of what is now possible. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
Bill Gurley gave an impassioned talk at the All-In Summit a few weeks ago that has been held in high regard. Here to give the counterpoint, Steve Blank lays out why he thinks Gurley might have gotten it wrong. Gurley’s talk and Blank’s rebuttal are both well said.