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ARE PEOPLE GENEROUS WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH?

MEASURING DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY? A RESPONSE TO MCKINSEY, PART 2

AUGUST

X WORKING ON SHARING SUBSCRIBER EMAILS WITH CREATORS

ARE COLLABORATION TOOLS OVERWHELMING YOUR TEAM?

Collaboration technology overload can drown employees in choices, leaving them feeling helpless. The irony is that by constraining those choices, adding frustrating obstacles to adopting yet another collaboration technology, and taking control away from individuals, employees can feel more in control of their work.

VISA AND MASTERCARD AND REPORTEDLY INCREASING CARD FEES

These changes would increase the interchange fees merchants need to pay when a consumer or business uses a card to make a purchase. For low margin businesses, this is a big deal.

SAAS IPO WINDOW INFLECTION

In honor of Klaviyo’s recent IPO filing, the first SaaS IPO in almost two years, here’s an interesting breakdown on the shared characteristics of companies that previously opened dormant SaaS IPO windows.

MEASURING DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY? A RESPONSE TO MCKINSEY

This is the first of a two part series from Gergely that explores a response to McKinsey’s recent “solution” to measuring developer productivity at your organization. We’ll link part two in our next addition.

THE THREE PHASES OF THE CEO

As a CEO, you quickly evolve from building a product and managing a company to managing people. This shift from building a product to focusing on sales and then hiring and scaling your team requires you to evolve how you govern your time and inputs.

REMINDER, YOU DON’T WORK FOR YOUR CALENDAR

Your calendar shouldn’t be a diary of someone else’s agenda. Audit your calendar on a regular basis and map out what gives you energy and what takes it away. Constantly prune meetings that do the latter.

NARANJO

This discussion dives into the importance of working at a company where everyone is equally passionate about doing great work and where the value of the People function is recognized. Culture is less about pizza parties and more about being bought into collective success.

THE INTERNET DEMANDS GREATNESS

The internet is loud and chaotic. An individual’s attention is being pulled in more directions than any generation before us. To stand out and win that attention, you increasingly need to be exceptional.

MCKINSEY DIGITAL’S GUIDE TO DIGITAL EXCELLENCE

What separates top-performing teams from those that are just starting out? Well, McKinsey breaks it down into a four-step process that sees a would-be rockstar set the foundations of their culture, organize teams around user needs, invest in appropriate technology to support their operations, and empower teams to be autonomous.

BELIEF EXISTS IN THE ABSENCE OF PROOF

As founders, belief is an internal compass we use to guide us to new realities that don’t yet exist.

WE ANALYZED MILLIONS OF CHATGPT USER SESSIONS

This article discusses data around OpenAI and ChatGPT traffic. OpenAI traffic has declined around 29% since May. Around 29% of ChatGPT prompts are related to programming, while education accounted for around 10% of all use cases. Other use cases include writing assistance, content creation, and creative ideation. Charts showing data on how people use ChatGPT are available.

OPENAI LAUNCHES CHATGPT FOR ENTERPRISE

OpenAI has launched a corporate version of ChatGPT with added features and privacy safeguards called ChatGPT Enterprise.

A BREAKDOWN OF INSTACART FOLLOWING ITS IPO FILING

On Monday, we flagged that Instacart had filed for an IPO. Here’s a quick look into the revenue of the business and how ads stack up against ordering.

WHY B2B'S SHOULD OFFER A STARTUP DISCOUNT PROGRAM

Discounted programs can be an effective way of acquiring startup customers early in their journey at low costs. Startups ultimately become the enterprises of tomorrow. The hope is that as they scale, their usage of your product scales also. This article debunks some of the reservations you might have in your mind about discounted startup programs.

WHEN TO HIRE YOUR FIRST PM

Don’t be tempted to hire a product manager before $1m ARR. PMs don’t write code or sell the product - they help to make good decisions. You need resources and activity for a PM to create the most impact, and you likely won’t have that at the earliest stages.

A GUIDE TO EMBEDDED PAYMENTS WITH MAXIMILIAN LEHMANN

Traditionally only banks and fintech companies could distribute payments, but companies like Lightspeed, Toast, and Shopify are changing the game. We’re in the early innings of potential with embedded finance. If you’re a SaaS platform now, you can embed and monetize payments out of the gates.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A VP OF SALES AND A VP OF MARKETING

Marketing’s job is to make sales easier. You can only do this with an effective working relationship between the leaders of each function. When hiring for either role, simple questions allow you to test their opinions of the other function and get a window into their thinking and future potential.

THE TRADITIONAL FUNDING CYCLE DOESN'T WORK FOR CLIMATE TECH

Venture investment has been developed around companies that have predictable stages and timelines for growth. Raise your Seed when you’re at X level, move onto Series A at Y. For climate tech, these rules simply don’t apply. They have long R&D periods and often require a fair amount of capital before they can flip the monetization switch.

OTE FOR SALES REMAINS HIGH

Despite cost-cutting, on-target earnings for sales reps across tech have remained high to attract talent. But, as expected, attainment of those targets has dropped in the current challenging market.

WORSE, BUT UNIQUE

Sometimes it’s ok to be worse than the incumbents, as long as you’re unique.

RAISE LESS, BUILD MORE

A steady reliance on venture capital funding is a risky strategy. Instead, focus on building an enduring company first and raise only when it is a no-brainer decision.

WELLBEING AT WORK IS ABOUT FEELING CONNECTED

Whether hybrid, remote, or fully in-office, the leading indicator of performance and reduced instances of burnout is how connected an employee feels to the broader organization. This involves more access to information and resources, time to do work, and feedback from peers and managers.

KLAVIYO FILES FOR AN IPO

At almost $600m ARR, still growing at 57% YoY, and profitable for the last 6 months, could Klaviyo be the first SaaS IPO out of the pandemic gates that sets the path for others?

INSTACART FILES FOR AN IPO

Grocery delivery giant Instacart has filed to go public in what is the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since December 2021.

EMBRACING FAILURE

Founders are increasingly being more open with their failures, and that’s a good thing. It shows that building startups and pursuing innovation is all about experimenting and taking shots on goal. Failures aren’t failures, simply attempts.

YOU NEED A CO-FOUNDER

Although there’s been some successful solo founders, you’ll often hear that you need a co-founder in a complimentary domain in order to build a truly great startup. But what is a co-founder? It’s really just a title, someone you trust to run the company in your absence. It doesn’t need to be someone with equal equity as you.

THE ENGINEERING EXECUTIVE’S ROLE IN HIRING

A comprehensive dive into the components of an effective hiring process for technical roles. Build a scalable system, train your hiring managers, set benchmarks and reporting windows with your recruiting team, and determine compensation levels before you kick off the hiring process.

POOZLE

Poozle is an open-source single API for Product Integrations.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 21 DAYS

Our expectations of how people use technology and the reality of that usage can often be different. Stay close to your users.

HOW TO GET SOMEONE ON YOUR PODCAST

Make it as easy as humanly possible for them to say yes, schedule, do the prep, and show up.

IS REPORTING CASH-ON-HAND TO YOUR INVESTORS NOW A RED FLAG?

Over the last 18 months, a lot of my personal portfolio companies started to put their cash-on-hand status right at the top of their investor update. It showed that month-month they were being cautious with cash, but it also often meant they weren’t really growing all that much. As the macro improved a little, is now the time to start deploying capital to build value?

PRACTICE SPEAKING UP

The imaginary cost of speaking up is often less than the real cost.

FEWER MEETINGS MEANS YOU HAVE TO SHOW MORE IMPACT

If you’re declining meetings to focus on other things, eventually you’re going to have to show that this tradeoff meant something.

ADYEN SAW $20 BILLION WIPED OFF ITS VALUE IN A SINGLE DAY

KLARNA ANNOUNCES HUGE GROWTH IN KEY EUROPEAN MARKETS

NVIDIA IS INSANELY PROFITABLE

Nvidia's revenue grew 88% in Q2 2023. Its operating costs have only increased by 15% in the last year.

USE FUNDRAISING AS A FEEDBACK LOOP

TO PLG OR NOT TO PLG

ACQUIRING 5 MILLION USERS WITHOUT GETTING LUCKY

OPENCOPILOT

An open source AI copilot for your SaaS product.

MANAGEMENT: “THE TROUGH OF ZERO DOPAMINE”

It’s hard to know if you’re doing a good job as a manager. The feedback loops are either long or unclear. Being a good manager requires a completely different set of skills to what you’ve likely built before. This takes time, and you’ll need to get comfortable with making a lot of mistakes along the way.

THE CLOUD 100 REPORT BY FORBES

Forbes has released its eighth annual Cloud 100 list, ranking the world's top private cloud computing companies. This year's list reflects the impact of market contraction on the industry, with AI companies like OpenAI rising in prominence and traditional cloud leaders facing challenges.

CLOUD UNIT ECONOMICS

THE $100,000,000 VALUATION