In this episode of Topline, Jason Lemkin discusses his experience and insights on investing, particularly in the context of platform shifts and valuation trends in tech industries. He reflects on the evolution of consumer companies, the impact of AI, and the dynamics of investment, noting the challenges of finding truly groundbreaking opportunities and the risks involved. Lemkin also talks about the lessons learned from different investment phases and the importance of being cautious in times of high valuations and market bubbles.
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Nvidia has seen a fairly meteoric rise in its share price and notoriety in the last few years. From selling chips to gamers to providing the rails that the AI revolution runs on. This profile on Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, provides a deeper look into the person behind the success.
Last week, CZ, founder of Binance, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, and the firm is being fined $4bn. This article provides an interesting teardown of Binance’s rise, the regulatory borders it flirted with, and how global regulators allowed the shenanigans to go on for so long.
The number of startups that have raised >$10m now going out of business has increased 238% in 2023 versus last year, and we still have a month to go. This record pace of shutdowns will likely continue until the end of 2024.
A collection of articles that walks through a step-by-step approach to raising funding. From putting in the work before your pre-seed, building the perfect deck, and negotiating on a term sheet.
Here are a few ideas on how to help the sales team make 2024 your best year so far.
Ramp’s former Head of Growth, Sri Batchu, had to get inventive and explore growth strategies outside of PLG, owing to their product being heavily regulated and unfit for self-serve. Here’s a breakdown of those tactics, which include referral loops, SEO optimizations, and building bridges between your engineering and sales teams.
A fundraising copilot for founders.
Boost your website’s SEO instantly right inside ChatGPT.
Monitor your competitors' marketing moves.
Ebi Atawodi is the Director of Product Management at YouTube, former Head of Product at Uber, and a former Director of Product at Netflix. In this podcast, she talks through the various components of successful product management, from how to run a strategy session to building your vision statement.
While automation will likely be the way of the future, today, it’s all about augmenting your existing processes/self without having to rip and replace everything. Don’t fall into the trap of just augmenting yourself to do your job better - thinking through what and how to automate things and viewing your role holistically will allow you to find the best use of AI for your needs.
It’s really just one thing: complexity. However, going into the details of that is important. Deals should be straightforward and fair (both ways).
Charlie Munger passed away on the 29th of November. Here are some of his top quotes, a lot of which stress the importance of keeping things simple and consistently sticking to something for a long time.
Requests for your time and energy increase as you start to build some reasonable success as a founder. Learning the art of saying no and being ruthlessly focused on a defined vision is the antidote to distraction.
Balancing your team’s focus on workflow improvements v. product capabilities can be the difference between a solid quarter and a year of cleanup. This post is focused on more mature organizations and team leaders looking to manage the balancing act.
More founders are rejecting the VC route in favor of bootstrapping or raising smaller amounts of capital from angels. Layoffs across tech have injected a huge amount of Silicon Valley trained operators, who are building their own profitable companies. The impact? More healthy companies that don't chase the venture rabbit down the hole and have an outsized impact on the makeup of our society.
Increasing loneliness, rising healthcare and education costs, and climbing C02 emissions paint a sobering story. There’s a lot to fix, but startups will play a leading role in the solution. Startups that tangibly make life better for all of us will attract young talent, and the companies that can attract the best talent will define the next generation of tech.
Four predictions about how tech will evolve and impact the world around us. Two directly involve AI, and the others declare how Femtech and Edtech, which seemed to have been on a low boil for a decade, will finally take off.
Raising capital for your startup involves kissing a lot of frogs. Be comfortable with rejection, reach out to more people than you think you need to, keep cold outbounds short, and ensure you’re mindful of how you present yourself.
Despite customer numbers remaining relatively flat, Fastly has maintained a stable NRR of 114%, meaning the value of its existing customers is growing YoY. Instead of accelerating product innovation, it seems the company has opted to inch itself to profitability.
In managing equity for your company, getting it right is crucial. This thread presents eight essential factors to consider in determining the appropriate amount of equity to offer to early employees.
Bind maps customer data to Discord so you can build a product-driven community.
Your marketing AI co-pilot.
Automated DM outreaches for Facebook and Instagram.
As your company scales, the role you play as a founder evolves. Being stubborn with that evolution can create bottlenecks. Here are some behaviors a founder identified they were doing that ultimately hindered growth at their $10m ARR SaaS company.
Who needs a technical co-founder with all the no-code tools and incoming AI co-pilots, right? However, based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years, companies lacking a technical co-founder underperform.
As a leader, it can be really hard to solicit genuine feedback from your employees. Success comes from how you package the request. You need to be comfortable with discomfort and come to the table with the right question set. Most importantly, take action on the feedback.
When quoting for a gig, or perhaps pricing your product for the first time, we tend to undervalue the service we’re providing. We’re sometimes insecure about our value and we don’t want to lose the opportunity. Think holistically about how you position your price to ensure you’re offering the best offer, not the cheapest.
A good recap of the 45+ minute talks between Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla where they dive into a variety of topics, from AI to “techno-optimist” manifestos. Both titans have great perspectives on things to come and how the tech industry should be regulated (hint: not at all).
The short of it is that comp and work-life balance is better, but tech workers are the unhappiest they have been since 2020. The shift is moving to workers thinking of their jobs more as transactional in nature.
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Open Banking seems to have been on a slow boil for a while, but it's making headlines more recently with real-time payments launching in the US. This report gives you a global breakdown of the state of play within open finance, as well as providing some definitions and a 101.
This long read unpacks Vitalik Buterin’s views on the future. Tech offers pathways to a radically improved global standard of living, but equally, presents several existential dangers along the way. He explores AI, healthcare, and the d/acc movement.
Whenever you log on to X, read the news, or browse LinkedIn, you’re met with totally opposing views on emerging topics like AI safety. We’re seeing this debate play out between Effective Altruism and Effective Acceleration. The former is in the more conservative camp against the latter with regards to the benefits of technological progress. This article offers some context towards this ongoing “tug-of-war”.
Daniel Parris helped scale DoorDash’s DS team from a scrappy startup through to a public company behemoth. This article shares insight into how companies can use data and predictive analytics to increase revenue.
Lightspeed shares insights from Google and TitanML about the ins and outs of optimizing LLMs whether via prompting or fine-tuning.
Part of the My First 16 series of podcasts. This one talks with Jason Gardner of Marqeta fame as he chronicles his early career and the impetus behind building and scaling the company.
Whether you’re bootstrapping or playing the venture game, these book recommendations are excellent for founders looking to master their time, use leverage, and think on a big scale.
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This interview with Eileen O’Mara, the Chief Revenue Officer at Stripe, breaks down her thoughts on how to approach crossing the chasm to the enterprise segment and the challenges Stripe has faced when approaching price-sensitive organizations that have bespoke integration needs.
Having a predictable pipeline enables more effective decision-making. VPs at Salesforce share how they approach this process by focusing on three core pillars: People, Process, Data, and tools.
The drama at OpenAI may be over but if you didn’t follow along during the fiasco, this recap not only gives a solid timeline, but also lays out the problems and challenges in the whole affair.
A long read that breaks down the fairly tumultuous journey of Marvel Studios before its acquisition to Disney in 2009. If nothing else, this article provides founders with a healthy dose of optimism, showing how deal-making, perseverance, and being able to sell your vision are core to doing big things.
When it comes to building products and deciding on all the details, some things are a matter of taste. Instead of laboring over those small details and wasting valuable energy, leave it as it is and let your subconscious unpack how you feel about it.