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An insightful read from a founder of a venture-backed B2B startup that shut down. The biggest takeaways include: You need to really nail your ICP and build vertical use cases if you’re playing a horizontal game, don’t underestimate incumbents, and be mindful of confirmation bias from the supporters around you.
We put this in the highlight because it’s a needed reminder. As founders, we like to look at the competition or the best in class companies out there. Sometimes this can be useful, most of the time it’s not. You cannot copy Google. Its search business is so profitable that it can afford to do all those quirky things, your startup likely can’t. Focus on you.
Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures and former VP Product at Facebook, put out an 84-page slide deck recently that digs into the state of venture capital. It’s a long but very enjoyable read that gives a poignant view of the landscape.
You likely wave the figure around when talking to investors, but do you really understand what goes into calculating your gross margin? Here are some live examples to help bring it to life.
A bundle of insights from Lavanya Shukla, VP of Growth at Weights & Biases, on how to build a user acquisition flywheel instead of a funnel.
Asking the question of what advice you’d give a younger version of yourself is a super interesting exercise and this time done specifically with Reid Hoffman. Hint: he missed Stripe.
Groupthink joins your meetings, creates agendas, takes notes, and then instantly shares the summary with everyone else.
Visualize your online PR and link coverage.
Personalize every single email at any scale and in any language.
In-office, hybrid, remote–whatever working model you choose, there’s always trade-offs. If you’re even partially remote, igniting a sense of personal responsibility with your employees is critical. They need to know what their company objectives are, why they were chosen, and exactly how their role and daily work relates back to them.
a16z is calling this “The Superhero stack.” They dive into what role tech startups might play in changing how we think about public safety and security response.
Given the high concentration of cash and equity tied up in the top companies and their inability to do anything with it because of antitrust concerns, it will definitely put a damper on the M&A market with no end in sight.
Having a fully-vested co-founder or key hire depart the company is a killer. To hedge against this predictable outcome, more founders should adopt longer vesting cycles for themselves and the earliest big equity employees.
This question acts as a forcing function for feedback. You’ll know where you stand, and the investor will also be confronted with the need to refine their thinking a little.
Biden has gone all in on an executive order that, while lacking teeth, gives a good sense of where the administration is coming from when it comes to AI, and from that, we can glean potential impacts on the startup ecosystem.
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Odoo Experience, starting on October 8, promises to reveal Odoo 17, thought to disrupt the industry landscape once again. Anticipate innovative features, including a new website builder and a game-changing point of sale system adapted for restaurants. Odoo's legacy of innovation is set to reach new heights, offering businesses enhanced applications to boost operations and improve customer experience.
The Lean Startup approach has been a powerful framework for founders for over a decade. Build MVPs, test, experiment, and iterate. Moving fast has been a guiding mantra. How relevant is this methodology in 2023 and beyond? Eric Ries, the founder of the Lean Startup methodology, dives in.
From helping you to write code to checking the quality of that code and adding repeatability to your content generation, AI is going to impact how we think about leverage in the daily operations of our software companies. This article explores the common areas where you should be thinking about adding AI to your operations.
Global deal count in Q3’23 slipped well below pre-pandemic averages to its lowest point since 2016. What does this mean for you? Nothing we haven’t heard before–funding is harder to get and VCs are making decisions more slowly, prepare accordingly.
Thinking about a free trial or freemium offering? Here are some questions to ask yourself. It ultimately comes down to how easy your product is to use without any guidance and the value that the customer represents.
Do things that don’t scale your time but do scale your understanding and revenue.
It’s always hard to know when to go into Europe but if you have a universally interesting product, get there sooner and put boots on the ground. Landing in London usually helps as you’re close to pretty much every major brand on the planet and in their timezone.
A priority inbox for product teams that reduces information overload, prioritizes work, gives instant context, and augments core workflows using AI.
Layer cuts your research time by 40% with AI-powered summarization, information extraction, and more.
Realtime UI personalization, powered by AI.
No doubt as a founder, you consume a lot of content on a weekly basis. Articles, blog posts, tweets, this newsletter. With AI, the amount of user-generated content is going to increase exponentially. The systems you build to defend your attention will be more important than ever.
The implosion of Convoy was hard to miss last week but VCs have a long history of screwing it up when it comes to trucking. They forgot about the most important part about trucking: the driver. This is a great breakdown of the state-of-the-state and things to come.
The price of doing business on the blockchain is only getting cheaper and will continue to do so. Does that mean meaningful business can finally be done on these platforms? The outcome of this crypto craze will likely be a wildly boring and insanely huge blockchain business, but it’s still another 5-10 years out.
Your ability to aggregate and understand customer data is improving, allowing you to have a better understanding of your customers, predict their future behavior more accurately, offer scaled customer support, and curate messaging that resonates more accurately.
Consensus rarely proceeds innovation.
Tim Ferris breaks down the best way to start your morning.
Microsoft has survived several platform-level changes and come out on top. This article looks at the bets that the company has made throughout the last few decades. It covers how the company dealt with the transition from DOS to a GUI-based OS, the introduction of the internet and smartphones, and now, the development of generative AI. Microsoft's parallel betting strategy has led to growth in new adjacent markets, leaving the company better off. However, its strategy contained many uncertainties and might not be suitable for many companies.