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As Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome”. Incorrect incentives can have second-order effects that might have hugely negative impacts on your startup. This article explores the adverse impact of misaligned incentives and what to look out for.
There’s a lot of debate about whether raising capital or bootstrapping your way to success leads to better outcomes for founders. Perhaps there’s an alternative to chasing the venture dragon and raising multiple rounds – instead, just raise one round to get liftoff and build sustainably from day one.
In the late 2010s, startups were advised to raise substantial venture capital for fixed costs like software and sales, but this paradigm is shifting towards variable costs and asset-light models, driven by the commoditization of software and advancements in generative AI. This transformation is challenging traditional venture capital models, creating new opportunities for business developers and hyperscale cloud providers in a more variable cost-driven software industry.
The role of a product marketer doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the SaaS space. This article unpacks what this strategic role is all about and why you should consider making them the first marketing hire at your startup.
This article covers insights from Doug Adamic (CRO of Brex & previous CRO of Concur) about revenue growth and efficiency at venture-backed companies, as well as a general pulse check on the state of venture-backed startups.
It seems both big and small tech companies are leaning into measuring developer productivity. Here’s a deep dive on 17 tech companies, big and small, and how they measure this performance metric.
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“66% of us are starting the year burnt out” - if true, that’s worrying. Here are some suggestions for you, the founder, on how you can take more things off your plate, enabling you to recharge better.
When everything in the startup media looks golden, it’s easy to forget that success is often the result of an iterative series of failures. Society is quick to point out weird ideas and call them ugly, but we shouldn’t. Each weird idea, regardless of its ultimate success or failure, introduces new thinking into the world. We should embrace experiments and weird ideas, particularly as founders.
Revolut, a leading Fintech company, experienced hyper-growth through word-of-mouth and referral marketing. It constituted 65-70% of its traffic. The company’s overall marketing strategy was centered around its product. It aimed to provide something so good that customers would do the marketing for them. It used targeted referral campaigns to drive user acquisition and feature adoption. The campaigns included unique reward systems, incentives, and gamification.
Twitter’s former CTO and interim CEO Parag Agrawal has launched his own AI startups. They’ve received funding from some big-name VCs like Khosla Ventures.
The author, reflecting on a $130M acquisition, advises founders to actively understand mergers and acquisitions (M&A), build relationships with potential acquirers, and carefully negotiate deals.
Depending on your timeline, waiting for AI to advance may or may not be the right move.