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You worked hard to build your business from the ground up, and to secure the capital that allows it to flourish. So why do most banks chip away at it with fees, minimums, and delays? Founders deserve better.
_*Brex is a financial technology company, not a bank._
A new era of innovation is emerging as the AI industry hits the limits of traditional "bigger is better" scaling. Techniques like real-time reasoning, novel architectures beyond transformers, and embodied AI are opening fresh paths to more robust, generalizable intelligence. Meanwhile, VCs are pivoting focus from bits to atoms, seeing untapped potential in AI-driven disruption in giant industries like energy and logistics. Seed and Series A startups pioneering this shift are attracting the lion's share of funding. As the world enters 2025 with new leadership and a revitalized M&A market, expect a surge of activity from investors who spot these seismic changes.
Just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a company is only as resilient as its greatest vulnerability. Identifying your "brittle points" - like dependence on a single platform, channel, client, or employee - is the first step to building redundancy and contingency plans. This is similar to engineering, where single points of failure are anticipated and mitigated through backup systems.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, emphasized the importance of an "extreme bias for action" and hiring individuals with "chips on their shoulders" during a recent Stanford talk. He also discussed building a balanced team by recruiting complementary skills and avoiding redundancy.
Did you know that your Google Ads Quality Score can directly impact both your ad placement and costs? A low score can deter your ad performance and increase costs. On the other hand, a high ad quality score not only improves your ad visibility, but also significantly reduces your CPC, enabling you to scale your ad budget further. This blog provides an actionable approach to understanding the key factors that affect your Quality Score (from ad relevance to landing page experience), how to optimize your campaigns, improve CTR, and lower costs – all while delivering better ROI for your business.
Most B2B teams have gaps in their go-to-market approach, lacking buyer journey maps, clear metrics, and engagement tracking. Plugging these holes requires focusing on the biggest constraint, usually generating quality meetings, through targeted content, comprehensive tracking, AI-assisted research, and personalized outreach. When executed well, this leads to 3-5x higher response rates and predictable pipeline growth.
Activation metrics are the key actions that turn new users into dedicated ones, but they're different for every product. In this post, PostHog shares its process of digging into user data to uncover the behaviors that predicted long-term retention. By testing multiple event combinations, it found that users who watched 5+ session replays and set a filter were most likely to stick around. Identifying your own activation metrics requires rolling up your sleeves and diving into the data - there's no shortcut. However, for companies willing to do the work, optimizing these metrics can be the secret to sustainable growth.
Meeting agent that helps run your meetings.
Generative AI platform for personalized visual marketing and advertising.
This book, written for startup CTOs, covers leadership, management, and technical topics. It aims to provide perspective on the common problems faced by every technical leader. The book provides frameworks for leaders to help make their own well-reasoned decisions. It offers best practices and provides reference materials for a better understanding of each topic.
Disruptive technology waves often feature innovation across all tech stack layers, stimulating further advancements beyond initial innovations. They involve both startups and incumbents, affecting both hardware and software, with agents of innovation in varied sectors. Foundational potential is marked by these waves as they set the stage for future technology developments, as seen with AI building on past internet and cloud advancements.
It's important to break down barriers so that everyone can participate in startup investing. Historically, one of the main barriers keeping lay people from investing in the startup ecosystem has been terminology. From “carry” to “liquidity,” “ARR" to “ROFR,” there's no shortage of jargon in venture capital that can confuse, frustrate, and overwhelm newbies.
When building a business, it's easy to focus on the end goal and feel discouraged when you don't get there as quickly as planned.
The answer isn't in your spreadsheets - it's out in the real world.
This post proposes a hierarchy of needs for workers to refer to when picking a startup to join.