If your startup is selling into multiple markets, you have to offer a local experience to your website visitors. Simple things like showing regional logos, regional case studies, and automatic language matching help to create the feeling that the site experience was truly designed for them, which in turn helps with engagement and conversion. This teardown of what Stripe does well and what needs improving is an excellent window into this thinking.
This article, written from the point of view of an investor, helps to bring a little context to the layers of value within AI right now. It breaks them down into the infrastructure layer, like cloud providers and chip makers; modeling and core, like OpenAI and Anthropic; and AI-enhanced products.
AI will fundamentally change how we produce and consume art and ultimately the type of art we create. This article explores this point in more depth and highlights the companies driving the change.
Your perspective on money often reflects the psychological wounds from your life experiences. Whether you’re a broke founder just getting by whilst you hustle away or you’ve exited a few companies, this article provides several lenses to look at money through – useful if your goal is to go from that broke founder to the not-so-broke founder.
The customer should be the central focus of any startup, with the teams closest to them (sales, solutions, and customer success) playing crucial roles. Leveraging these teams' unique understanding of customer needs and how the product can fulfill them is often an untapped value.
Most companies are. That's why teams at Shopify, Uber and Gong are using Fellow [6], the #1 rated Meeting Productivity software [6] on G2. → AI meeting recording, transcription and summaries [5] integrated in every meeting note and calendar event.
a16z has put together this list of 50 startups tackling some of America’s most pressing problems around defense, energy, transportation, and manufacturing. All of them are using AI in some form to accelerate their efforts. If you’re curious about real-world applications of AI, this contains great insights.
Many startups are crippling their growth efforts by overlapping some basic realities. True growth is not a hack and it can’t be achieved unless you’ve figured out PMF for your core business line. Here’s a list of things to be conscious of if you’re a founder with a growth team or in the market looking for that ideal hire.
Onboarding a new hire isn’t just about setting them up with their laptop and getting them access to Slack, it’s a key business process that many overlook. This article breaks down all the signals that suggest you’ve hit a bottleneck in your onboarding process as a scaling startup and explains how to overcome them.
In this post, the Head of Partnerships at Pigment discusses the importance of becoming partner-first, addressing digital transformation mandates, and helping your partners get promoted as a strategy for success.
Love or loathe it, investors want to know your ARR. Here’s a breakdown of how larger tech companies like DataDog, Dropbox, and UI Path calculate this metric.
Somewhat 101, but if you’re new to the topic, this is a decent read. This article breaks down the basics of debt and equity funding, pros and cons, and when you should consider these options at your startup.
DNS is an often-overlooked aspect of network security, despite being the 1st step of almost every malicious attack. Control D [14] makes DNS an easy problem to solve. Block malicious domains, unwanted content and browse faster on all devices. The best part? It’s so easy your grandma can (probably) use it [14]. Available for personal use and teams of all sizes.
There’s been a lot of layoff headlines so far in 2023. Brex was the most recent, laying off 20% of its staff. This article argues the layoffs are the result of two converging trends – a drop in venture funding, particularly in fintech, and a rising cultural force at play that’s inspiring companies to run lean and use layoffs as a way to pivot away from projects or reshape the company.
Microsoft's layoffs last year signaled a potential industry-wide growth slowdown. Microsoft is a mature company with pretty solid predictive capabilities around its revenue forecasts. If Microsoft is worried about the macro, should the rest of us?
NRR is a new term defined as a startup that boomed in 2021 and then kinda fell out of PMF but won enough users in that period and has high enough customer retention to stay alive. They’re not really growing, but they’re also not really failing. Pulling out of this slump is hard - this article touches on how to do it.
Conventional wisdom says you should hire smart people and leave them to it. Fine if you’re a well-funded startup that can afford super smart people, but what if you hire someone who has a little less experience? This article suggests early micromanagement AKA guidance is the way and it provides a light framework for you to use.
We sometimes confuse product managers for project managers, but their job isn’t to manage product deadlines. The highest value thing they can do is to continually align business objectives with user needs, using technology as the glue.
In the early days of developing an idea, it’s critical that you challenge every assumption behind that idea. You need to build a decision-making framework and the capability to disagree and commit. Without it, you’re just arguing in circles. Awareness of whether you’re arguing or debating is key to getting things done when the people involved might disagree.
Vertical software has become more of a thing over the past few years. These companies build for a singular or niche audience, allowing them to tailor their offerings. VCs have often pushed back, saying that by going niche, they're shrinking the market they're selling to. We’re still early in vertical software and fintech, adtech, and logistics support are still relatively untapped opportunities.
Written in 2019, this article seems particularly relevant today. We’re seeing a lot of dynamism in VC – the winding down of funds, GPs leaving bigger funds to start their own, and partners jumping to the operator side – how should you react as a founder if your champion at a firm leaves?
A free tier can be a great option for your startup. Companies like Slack, Zoom, and Canva have had huge success here. However, it’s not going to solve all your user acquisition problems. If you don’t already have a lot of eyeballs on your website or product, turning on a free tier won’t change that. Free tiers are a way to convert the traffic you already have, but only when you know how to convert the traffic to paid.
As companies of all sizes embrace hybrid work, they’re turning to gamification to help boost productivity within certain domains, like onboarding, training, and collaboration. Gamification attempts to improve engagement and encourage creativity by adding an element of fun to the task, like winning awards or completing questions.
Here’s a probing question that invites a useful thought experiment – if your company could have only one single advantage over the competition, what would it be? The answer to this question could have a cascading impact on your prioritization and competitive positioning.
We’re seeing layoffs everywhere in tech, from small startups to public companies. The primary goal is to cut costs or change the composition of the business. Here are some signals that might suggest a layoff is on the way and how you as a founder or executive team can make the hard call.
Dealing with a lot and not breaking down is part of the founder's job. This podcast explores some tactics you can deploy to better understand your physical and mental state.
ServiceNow, a $150b market cap company, last week announced that its gen AI products drove the largest net new ACV contribution for its first full quarter of any of its new product family releases ever, including its original Pro SKU. We’re already seeing enterprise-level AI applications drive meaningful revenue growth – that’s cool.
Your focus determines your reality. This article has a collection of quotes and positioning statements that help encourage you to focus, reduce the noise, and think long-term.
We use the term “optimization” a lot in tech. Optimization is about making tradeoffs between multiple variables that create the best outcome as a whole, whilst maximization is taking one of those variables to the extreme. Understanding whether you’re optimizing or maximizing is important.
Incremental changes happen all the time around us. They seem inconsequential, but they eventually compound and cascade into giant leaps in the world's operating model. This article explores some areas of innovation that seem so obvious when you think about them now, but even a few short years ago would have seemed like sci-fi.
A collection of lessons from Jam’s CEO on how the company inched its way to 1m users. A lot of this goes against conventional wisdom, like dogfooding, shipping fast, and iterating. Its team focused on rigorously testing its product and building something of high quality before they put it in a user’s hands.
Here’s a succinct pulse-check on what’s forecasted for 2024. More IPOs and M&A, venture’s power balance will shift to LPs, a tough market for founders, and the buzz of generative AI will likely start to wear off a little.
Raising debt seems like a no-brainer in an environment where you can raise venture dollars alongside it and double down on growth – either the venture money or the debt will surely spark growth. The reality is that the borrowed money better lead to revenue growth or it’s going to really impact your startup. Here’s a framework that covers what you should think about if you’re considering debt - like your runway requirements and approach to negotiating terms.