Parse notes
People tend to think of startups as creating something from nothing, but it’s more like finding order in chaos, and given the changes in the funding environment, the variables within that chaos are a little different compared to previous years. This read is a healthy reminder that fundraising is not the goal - it's just one of many levers you can pull in order to chart a course towards an outcome.
This article offers some high-level research on the biggest factors that are causing the risk teams at large tech companies to lose sleep. Some of them seem far from the startup world, but it’s curious to see that the majority will likely also be felt by small company founders.
The evolving landscape of startup investing is a mix of diverse ideas and methodologies. The crowded field makes it difficult for founders to navigate. This post chats with insights from 8 unicorn founders to hopefully make some sense of it all.
Stripe’s advisor and former COO Claire Johnson published a book earlier this year called “Scaling People” designed to be an operating manual for culture and hiring. This interview with Johnson breaks down some of the key highlights from the book, including the impact of brand, onboarding, and soft power.
Modern sales successfully defines the buyer journey and aligns the sales process to it. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you don’t spend a meaningful portion of time defining your customer and developing a deep understanding of the way they search for and buy products.
What signals should you look out for that might suggest you’re ready to start to diversify your product offering, and more so, how? This article highlights six different types of product expansion in increasing levels of difficulty based on these vectors.
Build automation workflows that reflect your customer journey. Include email, in-app messages, and internal notifications to your team. Measure results with A/B tests and conversion goals.
Summarize hours of customer interviews in minutes.
SaaS billing on autopilot with full flexibility.
Earlier on in your company life cycle things are generally simpler. You have one product, solving one pain, and a small team running it. As you grow, things get more complex, but it’s that layer of complexity and pursuing multiple strategies at the same time that delivers outsized value. This article explores some examples of companies that failed to juggle multiple strategies and paid the price.
Tiger drastically reduced its investment activity in 2023 and is set to cut its deal flow by 90%. This shift reflects a broader pullback in the venture industry and is one more indication of valuations creeping downward.
Often when we’re asked this question we start to talk about results that have already happened. We rarely talk about the smaller actions we’re doing right now. The real answer is not where you’ve been, but where the impact of your actions will take you.
Salesforce recently shared that they’re placing sales reps on performance improvement plans after only a month or so of missing quotas. Generally, it seems that companies are leaning harder on their sales reps and considering redundancies if they dip below 30-40% attainment of their quota.
Lightspeed’s take on the legaltech landscape as it relates to AI is interesting and transparent from the view of what’s-good-for-VCs-is-good-for-everyone take. There are few interesting insights and only time will tell if they are on the right track or not.