Nat Eliason, of Roam and productivity-type videos fame, mentioned that consistency has been the primary driver for his content rise. It’s refreshing to come across his newsletters as well as Tiago Forte and David Perrell’s for how varied their content is. Typically, we don’t have one specific idea we follow. It’s a collection of all of our readings and experiences. My collection has probably been more evident in this – especially if you pay attention to the notes – generally around startups but also finance, vc, sports, media. Plenty that interest me.
So, this is hopefully my last WordPress post on here and moving to Webflow to move my thoughts and musings for the recent time further.
In light of this, I am going to be doing something with lists. Specifically, around startups. But I’ve been obsessed with historical rankings / lists for a long while. Only now going to be putting the together (I lied – I’ve been piecing the together for a while). Hopefully it leads to explorations and transparency with connecting various lists around them. Be it industry, job hunt, maybe put some clarity to the lists that are typically without much detail. We’ll see! Look out for further info.
Corona Investing (Meb Faber Podcast Part II, III)
Staying rich and dealing with downtrends
Cash / yield / gold all have drawdowns > 48%, so if you lose half of your money, does it matter?
Mixture of trend following and yield can get drawdown to ~30%s
When you just want to produce something for the day but you’ve been helping out others more than yourself, seek a site you use repeatedly for inspiration. Today’s Farnam Street and its post on quotes from AMAs 2020.
Shane Parrish, FS Founder – Jan 2020
I don’t want to optimize for work, and I don’t want to optimize for family time. I want to optimize for life. I get one life and I don’t want to look back at ninety yelling at myself because I regret doing or not doing something. I always try to keep that end in mind.
Anese Cavanaugh, IEP Method Founder – Feb 2020
Culture is the energy, the container, we create together to do our best work, show up as our best selves, be productive, and feel safe. It’s how we feel when we’re doing our work together.
Jeff Hunter, Talentism Founder – March 2020
All of us do work that matters. It may matter in a little way, it may matter in a big way. We’re surrounded by signals all the time that say some work is more valuable than others. But as I like to say, the person who cleans the bathroom and does that excellently is probably more valuable than somebody who’s the head of an organization and does it terribly.
Katherine Eban, Investigative Journalist – April 2020
As a journalist doing a book, it’s like a marriage; and I know this sounds a little cynical but, marriages only get worse as they go along so you have to be really in love to start with. So, there’s got to be a real love there with the topic because the project and the reporting and the work is only going to get deeper and worse the further you get into the project. Start from a good strong place.
Marc Tarpenning, Tesla Co-Founder – July 2020
Long-term thinking is really this idea of always keeping as much optionality in the future as you can. Because you don’t know what the future is going to bring. So what you don’t want to do is constrain your future possible options because you’re on some trajectory.
Jesse Mecham, YNAB Founder – August 2020
Budgeting just means you’re deciding. We don’t want people spending less, we really want people spending without guilt. That approach of thinking you’re going to push through and restrict yourself just fits and starts. People do that again and again. Give yourself room to learn how you spend money and learn what you care about, and slowly as you work the four rules, you’ve found something sustainable.
People who have habits that work for them have a happier, healthier, more productive, more creative life. People whose habits don’t work for them have a lot more challenges. It’s a question of thinking more about how to make something [which makes you happier] into a habit.
Stefanie Johnson, Management Professor – Oct 2020
One of the amazing things about inclusion is that it’s really something that any of us can do. It’s not like you have to be a leader to make someone feel seen. Any of us can do that.
here
Transform Your Data Science Projects with 5 Steps for Design Thinking (HumAIn Podcast 3/22/20)
Data Collection – thorough data navigation skills
Where is my data stored?
How large is the data size?
What quantity or quality do I need to launch?
Who manages the data?
When is it updated?
Why is it relevant?
Data Refinement – Large quantities of data are good, but high quality is better – invest in refining data
Who has data insight or dictionaries/features?
What data requires querying, feature engineering or preprocessing? By what techniques?
When will the data be ready to move to next place?
Where will it be stored?
Why will it need to be refined?
How can it be tested/validated for consistent performance?
Data Expansion – With best data, problem may not be solvable. Integrations with APIs, feature enrichment.
Who controls data access?
What budget is available for obtaining more data?
When do you stop expanding or iterating?
Where can you get high quality data sources?
Why are more data features needed?
How do we decide what is most relevant?
Data Learning – Models or features for insights for the product to accelerate the workflow
Who determines the benchmarks for the model?
What ML framework/algos are chosen for what you will predict?
When do you decide that modeling results are ready?
Where will you process the data locally or in cloud?
Why does product/feature require ML?
How much compute time or resources are available to model?
Data Maintenance – Implementing into Production, while the data degrades over time
Who is responsible for making changes to models with performance changes?
What triggers/pipelines/data jobs implemented to monitor quality of data?
If data falls below benchmarks, what do you action?
Where do you commit time in schedule to monitor pipeline for qc?
Why do your data modeling results decrease in quality in production?
How do you communicate the results to PM, Data engineers, software engineers and in what frequency?
Remote Work and Our New Reality (a16z Podcast #529, 3/23/20)
With GP Connie Chan for consumers, David Ulevitch for enterprise
Scaling enterprise and infrastructure operations
Prioritization, scaling and outages – platforms that are cut and pasted
Legacy technology or video codecs make it tough to scale for the way you’re doing
Tandem (watercooler), Zoom, Around the World
More people to chat / participate in a virtual setting
Recording and autodocumenting/archiving is easier than real world
Online classes and verticals – v2 curriculum beyond streaming and animation, A/R or interactive ways
Classes can fill up in the real world and now, with online settings, it can’t
Krisp – background noise elimination or Muzzel – popup notifications off during screen sharing
David is used to WebEx (from time at Cisco) for being always-on video conf
More engaged for virtual
Tandem will show you what you’re doing / what app – collaborate if shared google doc
Gaming and entertainment – playing with friends, children and maintaining relationships like Roblox
David installing an Xbox One even as a software dev moreso than gaming, but alone
Asana / Workboard to align teams and communicating what’s important for org transparency
Telehealth or telemedicine – more people going remote
Remote work – myth for jobs that aren’t possible to successfully do remote
Test case – most people aren’t comfortable video conferencing, but forced to
Some like the separation of work and home life – people do want to work where they want and live otherwise
What are the products/features – A/R or fashion show – save items for later when you overlay digital as a second screen
Browser extensions or different destination websites
Is it a horizontal or vertical platform that wins?
Investing in the Time of Corona Part I (Meb Faber podcast #206, 3/20/20)
Preseason training – running after practice to make it easier for games
His firm has 45k+ investors and he’s heard from only a few of them
Get rich – more money, and all relative
100k in net worth is Top 10% globally but 1M is top 1% globally – people want roughly twice as much
Luck as out of our hands – marrying into wealth or winning the lottery, Ken Fisher had a chapter on marrying rich
88% of millionaires are self-made, other book said 80%+
High-earning exec, upper level management, professionally as the path to wealth
Morgan Housel as saying “I want to be a millionaire” is instead “I want to spend a million dollars”
Timing – best (yearly, 17%) and worst (0.06% loss), market-cap weighted equities don’t work
Small cap value and momentum is about 16% – drawdowns are inevitable in these types of strategies
Portfolio manager hat for 20% returns – would look for concentrated tilts toward global value, momentum and trend following
Lever up to 1.5-2x but the risk is there
Small minority of companies with big winners – 100 baggers in investments
Sizing in private investments – sidestep threats to money, which is you (eg AMZN 95% drawdown on way up)
Money locked in – largest financial asset is house often – annuities are another
Paul Merriman where he gifts annuities to his grandchildren and wraps in a trust
Inconsistent opinion of illiquidity of house vs private
Startup investing – QSBS treatment – investors can exclude 100% of cap gains ($10mln cap or 10x cost basis of stock)
Investments into retirement accounts to gain – Thiel and Levchin doing this, along with Romney
Opportunity zones in long-term, as well
Angel List is one of his favorite, but there are others – own sweat or your labor or with others on behaving properly
Manu Kumar, CEO of HiHello (20min VC 3/23/20)
Founder at K9 Ventures, seed firm with investments in Carta, Lyft, Twilio, Auth0, LucidChart
Founder of 3 prior cos, 3 with successful exits and then Carta
Graduated in 2007, started his first company at 20, also
Noticed gap in ecosystem and created a job he wanted to do with K9 and seed/pre-seed
More capital being deployed and companies staying private longer, also
Seed before was $500k and now multi million
He’s a big fan of former operators starting venture funds but doesn’t have experience with many scouts
Founders taking early money, especially with multi stage funds – harder for option vat
Simpler answer for bigger firms – they’ve added new people, so what’s better than getting ball running with smaller checks
Safe playground and training for the newer folks at the firm as they grow
He believes this may phase out eventually
At pre-seed, he has luxury to get to know teams before investing, especially since he does only 3-4 investments a year
At later stages, there’s a concern for how quickly rounds are progressing
His investment fund cycle is 5 years – 15-20 portfolio companies per fund (Fund I – 19, II – 14, III – 1/3 at 6)
Check sizes have inched up marginally ($400-600k now but probably closer to $600k now)
He has no FOMO in term sheet plays for chasing – he wants a mutual agreement on investments
His LPs prefer concentrated portfolio, not diversification larger (Harry at 35-40)
How do you avoid adverse selection – general issue at preseed funds (he and Tim Connors)
For K9 – number of investments per year means he has a very tight filter – fit for investment thesis/model and mutual fit
Making the call on people – diamond in the rough – help them seek the diamond
How does he think about decision making as a solo GP? For LPs and fund itself?
Benefit of being a solo founder from 1996 – dealt with it already and on his own – comfortable in making judgment call
Leaps of faith – incomplete data
100% accountable / responsible on both ends
Venture firms fall prey to group think – limit to where it’s healthy
Group think and consensus is dangerous – most innovative companies are doing something unusual and different
In 2009, for first investment out of K9 – he received a stock certificate and massive stack of papers
Called GPs – hands to CFO and gives to safe deposit box – what’s he do? Became the kernel for Carta (never touch paper)
Spent 3 years discussing this with teams before finally meeting Henry to pitch and pitch a second time
Running HiHello has changed what he looks for in companies he invests in
From before, no outsourcing or distributed or remote teams on his blog on K9 – recruiting has become a nightmare
Remote belief was wrong for him – learn and adapt – now he is comfortable in advocating for remote
As an investor, you aren’t at the cutting edge of products/technology – didn’t understand Slack until HiHello usage
Get to experience new stack in starting a company – comm, hr, resources, tech, etc
Fav book – How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Best board member – different ones add value in number of ways
What does he know now that he wished he had known before – Nothing
If you know too much, it can be a deterrent. Being naïve may be a good thing – learn things at the right time.
Worst thing for venture – mega funding rounds from multistage
Best for venture – operators turning investors more often
Workona as most recent investment – mostly working inside a web browser, building a desktop in the cloud
Misha Esipov, founder & CEO of Nova Credit (20min VC 3/20/20)
Using international credit history for application of cc, apt rental, loans and more
Misha raised $69M and KP, Index, First Round, Pear and Core Innovation Capital
Misha spent 5+ years in private equity at Apollo, I/B at Goldman
Goldman established a rigor for being first-principle, arbitrage, structure and similar in natural resources
Hunt for global raw materials (credit is unique pieces of data, formula for synthesizing and refine into pipelines)
For value – business without a clear path to generating cash isn’t an enduring business
Press and publicity can create the aura, but margin profile can contract and needs to thought out
Grad school in valley and got into YC summer program and incredible access to the venture funds in the valley
Authentic mission for what you’re doing and being honest – brings up the challenges and why they’re comfortable
He wants to see more VC’s creating more value by helping execs to get to world-class and small portfolios
He admired Matt Harris at Bain Capital – one of best fintech investors with a long-dated outlook across cycles
Not an investor but has a curiosity for the space and decisions for data usage
How do you manage the psychology of being a CEO? It’s his life’s work, so it’s hard to find a balance.
David Bradford at Stanford Interpersonal Dynamics told him – at onboarding and 1:1, deliberately enter a contract with you
If I’m micromanaging, you have a duty and obligation to call me out – I can’t scale as a CEO without that
If it’s not a tier 1, company-killing, decision, he lets the team decide and make mistakes
Leadership team must signal some diversity to go down – 3 cofounders scaled to 10 (and all new 7 were male, by accident)
Company example for future hiring managers for ensuring the proper candidates – reaching out to VCs
Here is what I believe, look for and expect for you in a role – no misalignment in expectations
Inevitably early on, it becomes on you to determine judgment for slipping on KPIs, individual may not be responsible
Mastery by Robert Green – when he was debating on starting Nova or go back to finance world
Purpose is to figure out the craft he wanted to master – financial engineering vs building org, team and pursuit
Superpower in company building – attention, listening and spotting subtleties for following up
Weakness – boundless potential on core business and pmf, wants to go into new thing but have to strengthen core
Financial access for newcomers that are new/migrants to the states – strengthening this global infrastructure
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I’ve been thinking of a transfer. WP pro? Off-site? Drive some different traffic, engagement.
But everywhere I look, it seems they focus on a very specific niche. Well, that’d bore me if I had to do multiple niches or pick a single to do first.
There’s a weird balance I can find between bouncing between options. Finance. Data. Products. Strategy. Read some startups here. Read funding notes here. Research there.
I think we’ll go with Webflow and try to let this be simple, easy and straightforward. Focus on the platform template and let them do the rest. Should speed up the site, also.
Why am I writing this and letting you know? Likely because I’m at an impasse personally and professionally. Got stuck professionally in consulting and contracting. When the work doesn’t seem like it can lead to further opportunities directly, we seek out others. How do we transition? What do we transition to?
I’ve overseen many projects in my time, some products, some features. If we’re looking for a broader sense – forest among the trees birds-eye view, maybe a few programs in my day. The designation wasn’t that in title, but it’s arguable. Finding the differences between product + project + program management has been interesting to read through literature in what I’d define as each. And even more interesting is going through the roles / titles in job opportunities among different companies. Loose definitions that encompass quite a bit.
I’m reading No Rules Rules. Co-writers Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Erin Meyer, author of Culture Map among others, dive into the transparency laid out at Netflix. Somewhat woven between stories and employee accounts is a framework for how to create this culture. It’s not for everyone, but it certainly entices to see how efficient an organization can be when employees feel emboldened and autonomous. It’s exciting, and leaves room to run. Processes and the chain of command are what hinder action so commonly throughout business. So far, the book is a fresh take on that. I’d consider checking it out! Otherwise, hope you enjoy the notes.
Adena Hefets, Co-founder at Divvy Homes (20min VC 3/13/20)
Early stage fintech investor at DFJ and original team at Square Capital
Started Square Capital, the lending platform on their business – talented, dedicated group that was very successful internal
multiB within Square itself, by now – thinking of what she wanted to do after
Started in P/E at TPG, as well – they wanted her to go to business school initially, but felt weird doing that without doing anything
Fintech – not as much innovation as she’d like to see – which industries that should be changing the most
Inflection points in the market like housing
Perspective as being everything – time as operator/ee at Square gave her insight to grow super fast
As an investor, she saw the forest of overall landscape – as founder, takes a lot to scale company
Believes she’d be a better investor now than before
“Growth is challenging” – may need to think distribution channels or what it means to develop one
Having a hard time prioritizing what product builds we have – to understand depth, have to see and work out a solution
Here are the 5 Prioritizations and which allows me to go down 1 product build
Unit economics – finance/p/e run by Jim Coulter and value-investing
Company’s ability to cash flow and unit economics for product (make more than you spend on each user/customer)
Level of deploying too much capital and trying to find optimal spend for seeking new customers
$X to acquire the next customers (paid vs blended) – Divvy gets quite a bit of organic distribution channels
3 addictions for founder of a company – paid marketing, over hiring (most people want to build out a team right away), lower pricing
Growing and successful company shouldn’t be indicated by how many employees – no hires and 10x revenue better
Lower prices by 10-20% for incremental growth – careful in discipline for value of product and being worth your price
She had an easy fundraise – her support prepared her very well and lucky
Debt raising compared to equity raising is far harder for diligence – home tap
Her investment bankers that she approached had no interest
She is far more devoted to execution focused while her cofounder is culture, feeling and empathetic for the company
Tough that people may expect females to be overly empathetic when she’s focused on customers and owning how/who you are
Pushing people hard – don’t really have “yes people” – instead, “how have you thought about x, y, z?” and “does it deviate from what we’ve done?”
TPG – inv committee would always have red tape – if you took exact opposite, how’s that look?
Evicted by Matthew Desmond – challenges with rent & housing in US – don’t want to be at Divvy
Persistence is strength – as a group, run through walls
Weakness can be patience
First check into Divvy was Max Levchin, incubated by HVF and Eric Wu at Nextdoor as a mentor
Hard role to hire for – (In valley may be VP of Sales) but for her, COO role
Jack of all trades – understand finance, marketing spend and other like HVAC in her business
100k homes in next 5 years for large amount of Americans (where the largest REIT is 80k)
Toni Shneider, Partner at True Ventures (20min VC 3/16/20)
Portfolio of early-stage investments includes Peloton, Hashicorp, Fitbit, Automattic, Tray.io
CEO of Automattic for 8 years helping WordPress get to top 10 global internet sites
VP of Yahoo after acquisition of former CEO post at Oddpost
Up and down on Sand Hill road for 1999 with Uplister and then Oddpost
Phil and John had asked him if he was interested in venture as they were going out to new fund
He said yes to both True Ventures and CEO of Automattic after being asked
Founder friendly and coaching investors/VC’s instead of bosses
Collaborative, where everyone is working closely, sharing credit/blame
Being an investor and operator while at Automattic
Helped that Automattic was distributed because he could respond to emails/texts/Slack
True designed for partners to pursue deals, co’s in their own way – could multi-task
Qualities of a great CEO and founder at companies – having seen wildly talented founders
Driven, generous, creative and optimistic – sales wizards
Love to focus deeply or obsessively (mentioned Blue Bottle Coffee – origin, experience of café, smell, prep and feel of cup – 10 years)
Changing as investor – originally s/w eng, product mindset & overestimate product importance / idea
He’s missed some deals, definitely
Instagram pass very early before they pivoted there – sometimes the timing is off and that’s okay
Focus on doing a great job for those that he makes a deal on
Remote teams – where do people go wrong?
If you work on something that can be done remotely – it should be a win because people can work how they want
Fewer distractions with other stuff
Centralized companies that don’t trust the remote model instead of going all-in from the get-go
Salesperson that has to deal with geographies and sales should be in that area but you can have some centralized teams
True had 3 very large exits – Ring (LA) to Amazon, Duo Security (NYC) to Cisco and Peleton (Ann Arbor) IPO – all built outside of SV
Bay Area is fantastic but it’s possible outside of that – 25% SV, half in the US and another quarter outside of that
Pros/cons of distributed
Pros: access to global talent pool, happy employees
Cons: how to build relationship/trust without an in-person connection, so far
If remote, need to figure out a way to be together (Automattic is once or twice a year together)
Favorite book – Their Eyes Were Watching, then Jim Collins’ Good to Great, also Predictably Irrational
Time allocation for a portfolio – super responsive when they need him, half with existing portfolio and half for new
Zero inbox person by end of week
Biggest challenge at True Ventures – de-carbonization because it’s a completely new area and that it’s not a good place for VC
Best board member so far – one for him was Ellen Pao from Project Include
Most recently investment and why he said yes?
PiaVita – med diagnostics platform for vets – impressed by founders – wanted to work with them
Sam Parr, CEO of The Hustle (webinar on cold email 3/19)
Crafting a message for cold email – AIDA
A: Attention – interesting or curious – subject line and aligning the value add there
I: Interest – interesting facts or use cases
Hustle Con to CEO, for instance, interest that people at conf are avid learners and hustlers
“Hate Salesforce” in reply to a tweet – hate the upload feature, for instance & you’ve an answer
D: Desire – Show them how life/task is better with your product
Do it by hand, sew dresses faster. X got a better
A: Action – single specific action from this point – tell them what’s next. Signup or make a scale.
I want to include how awesome The Hustle and their Facebook group Trends is. If you’re looking for ideas or new solutions to improve business/create a hell of a network or simply reach out to knowledgable people, it’s worth it. Yes, I posted an affiliate link – yes, it’s still worth its weight. Try it for $1.
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Foundations. Linear effects. And continuous learning. How are they interrelated?
If you skip foundational learning because we’re too task-focused or hoping to land at an end result, you may luck into some 1:1 mapping of a linear effect. If successful, it may not even be a bad thing. After all, you completed your project / passed your test, whatever it may have been. However, that foundation that you may have missed out on (whether known or unknown) leaves something to be wanted. If the foundation is there, or often when you have the time to recognize the weakness and think systematically from there, you can make connections that surpass linear effects. Learning up from there doesn’t just climb a ladder, it adds others and helps you make connections that can be fruitful in further and further adjacent areas.
We see quite a bit of the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ or ‘generalist vs specialist’ conversations, especially in tech / data science. It’s hard to cover the depth if you start in a niche, unless you had or build a great foundation. Then it becomes easier to recognize opportunities that are similar to what you have done or learned previously. Cross referencing or adapting yourself to new language and key points that pretty much match. Then, knowledge over your foundation compounds and connections present new ideas in a better light. I’m sure this fails in some roles of various industries – but the deeper / broader your foundation is, the more likely you land on a similarity that can make it easier.
In this age of more information, it’s hard to sift through where to start foundation-wise. I think we could do a bit better on that front. I suppose this is somewhat the appeal of schooling – you get someone to hand you a syllabus and a guideline for what the frameworks are for some sort of foundation for a topic. Not up to you at that point, but it’s a block to start. After schooling, you hope that a job is a good starting point for giving you those basics while also creating your own style / fitting into processes. Rough to find yourself a machine in the cog where there’s little room for your own flare – blockers for expanding into other avenues.
What are the best ways to develop these foundations? Are there online curricula that demonstrate starter points or ones that people have found topic-specific? Each of us have our own style, so feel free to share – videos / courses / online / books / etc….
Matt Mochary, Coach to VC’s and Founders (20min VC 3/9/20)
Benchmark, Sequoia, Brex, Coinbase, Flexport, Plaid and others
Investor at Spectrum Equity & cofounded Totality – sold to Verizon
Growth equity fund in late 90s, heyday of growth internet – junior partner but couldn’t make a wave yet
Founded Totality with a friend, raised $130mln and hired a ton of employees
Academy Award shortlist for shortlist documentary and Doing Good for Mochary Foundation
Came back to SV after having kids, best place to raise a family but didn’t want to start a company
Wanted to become a coach, strategic thinking and coaching – students at Stanford were his first
They recc’ed to friends that had graduated already
Replaced fear with joy as the motivator
Prefrontal cortex where creative thought occurs, amygdala is fear and anger – fight/flight
In world of modern thoughts, recognizing fear/anger is being self-aware – he tells others to tell him if he has them
If there isn’t urgency, he can wait – but otherwise, he tells someone else and has them decide
When he has a group together – withholding neg thoughts is bad
Think about it and once you have it, that’s powerful – if you don’t hear the thought process, you can’t fix it
How to share difficult subjects that doesn’t trigger the counterparty – books “Difficult Conversations” or “Radical Candor”
Timing of this has to be a good thing
Having anger named and thoughts named “Hey, I sense that you’re feeling a lot of anger and I guess is that your thoughts are _”
The person visibly relaxes but often less than what he says
Imposter syndrome is fear – pick where you feel joy and take the things you don’t feel joy and remove them
Energy audit, essentially – hour by hour (red/green markers)
Could outsource tasks, stop doing them, or find out ways to be energy-raising for the things that need to get done
Repeat the process in 30 days and then again in 60 days
CEO role has to take care a lot of things – need to get done and get done well
Cofounder example – extreme introvert and extrovert (half reports one, half reports other)
Introvert loved internal meetings and extroverts loved external ones
Boards are the death of every great investor – if you sell to founders, you join their board forever – lots of time (4x year)
10, 15, 20 where 40-50% are board meetings and 20-30% with partners, other time for support of portfolio co’s
Lose time to do what you really want to do – instead, ask “How can I be the most helpful to you?”
You have a network and they need introductions, customers, recruits, etc
Every single interaction he has – always asks for feedback “What did you like?” and “What was effective?”, brutal, possible
Declares an action for recognition of the questions
If feedback doesn’t resonate with you, don’t need to accept it
Favorite book “High Output Management”
He was a glutton for coaching, not seeing his family – really enjoys both but needs to find balance
He gains energy from coaching vs the draining
How does he feel about rising Chiefs of Staff – extension of yourself after automating and inbox zero but people still asking for more
Training them is key – full access to your email/calendar and sitting beside you for every meeting/call for ~2 months
Correlate and pattern match as you on your behalf – start with them and that gets your shit together
If I don’t respect you, I won’t tell you about it – other will hate you for it – letting someone KNOW about being on time
All companies should try to do Pledge 1% and act on it – feels SV doesn’t quite do its part
Peter Feigin, Kevin Quealy, Graphics Editor at The Upshot and NYT (Wharton Moneyball 3/11/20)
Propensity scoring for people matching on probability of using a shot – marathons and faster times with shoes
Would love to randomize experiments for everything, but tough to do that with marathon winners
How big an effect might a shoe matter?
Regulations for heel heights are at 40mm but 38mm is where Alpha are (popular shoes)
World records have kept coming down
Why are early returns nonrepresentative – cities tend to report last
Rule changes for NFL that they’ll vote on: sky booth ref, continue/restart a possession after scoring as 4th and 15
With no crowds in NBA games, possibly to identify randomness of home/away splits
Is it refs that end up being influenced or is it the crowd/home cooking, etc
David Brooks, NYT author (KindredCast on WhartonXM)
Was going through a tough time while a professor and told his class – they proceeded to let him know if he needed anything, they’d be available
One of most powerful times of showing vulnerability and changing the design of the class thereafter
Relationships on which are the most important – focus in class – Marriage, Vocation, etc
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I think we can see a bit where we’re going as a society. Need some more community and less individual pieces. This has likely been exasperated by the current pandemic and the uncertainty of the approach taken to present a future. Thankfully, the internet does allow us connections from nearly any and all places, so for that, we can be grateful.
So, Trends would be if you want to learn from some excellent experts in the widest variety of industries. It’s for the curious, bold and excited. Ecommerce, SaaS, storage facilities, other real estate, business, professional services, whomever. There’s someone for every problem, ideas aplenty for solutions otherwise. Talk to a ton of people who just seek to do. This is all without even mentioning there’s a newsletter with a wide swath of input on the most prevalent (or soon to be) trends based on a heavy dose of research.
If that’s not enough, then whoever/wherever you are in your career, there are members that have volunteered to be mentors depending on what you’re seeking. Bounce ideas? They have that. Grow to $1mln, sure. Exit plans? Check. It’s the group to figure out what you think may be the next step. See it here: Trends link (yes, referral but I promise it’s worth it)
Next two revolve around code/no-code and building/hacking your way to product. IndieHackers, fairly split I’d guess between those that can code / develop and those that choose not to – as well Makerpad – a community of no/low-code people trying to replicate big scale/functionality with little effort. If you’re a student, especially, these are incredible – Makerpad‘s community/videos/walkthroughs are awesome value. Better if you’re a student, too. It should inspire you to start something – or at least see what it may look like.
IndieHackers – similar. Plenty of hustlers and side businesses there that you can interact with, as well as a podcast that is top notch, both for inspiration as well as knowledge/insights. See basic problems with solutions turn into full-blown businesses (Rent a Card Sign to Wedding Card printing, as two examples). The knowledge and people, from a straight global environment, is intoxicating. With the good kind.
Hopefully you’ll take these to heart and check them out. For now, these are the notes below. Some more experts, successes and adventures.
Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures (20min VC 3/2/20)
Dropbox, Revolut, Supercell, Plaid and Transferwise – all financial things
BizOps at Dropbox, where company 10x’ed while he was there
Went from 200-1500 people while he was managing there
Was looking for a new thing, possible operator – talked to Index and some of other best ventures
Importance of hiring / hypergrowth – 8 week interview process at time at DropBox
80% of time would be on hiring, not what he was looking forward to doing
Highly commoditized as venture capital now – industry sees more money but offer is needed
Evolution over last decade – Andreesen as services, others as sector expertise, data for a few
Relationships as differentiator – connecting good investors, trust as foundation
He was 30 years old in joining Index as an associate – flat hierarchy though, ton of autonomy and start investments
Had been associate in a p/e firm 8+ years prior
Find platform for the autonomy to increase your risk and search there
Titles have become meaningless – true question: can you lead your round? Associates can at Index.
To ask partner for looking for seed or traditional venture fund – are you going to dedicate the time to help get to next stage?
If answer is no because it’s a rounding error, not worth it, likely. Earlier stage investments = more time, often.
More angels joining – extremely risky and making money is hard
Upside has limitations
If he were to leave Index, he’d ask who are the smartest people to add to cap table – rolodex for increase business
Historically, meeting the demand – all these great founders/operators on deeper side
As an early board member – listen – don’t need a loud voice or overplay position as new member
Being judicious about when to weigh in, praise, critique – impactful areas for you to dive in
Favorite board member – getting to be in meetings with many at Index – Mike Volpi
Offering hard conversations and messages to founders
Lessons learned while passing or no – not focused, be direct
Meet with an investor and then they get ghost you – try to close meetings
Complement or help founders with an intro or interesting cases
Thinks fintech is booming – not a bubble currently – trillion dollars in incumbents
Just beginning to shift to the new crop – the 50th largest bank is $50bn in market cap
Rise of Monzo and Revolut for UK / Europe – are they not going to just add student loans/mortgage/lending
Best ones should, he thinks – Robinhood / Chime / New Bank (Brazil) – current account and then cross sell otherwise
Favorite book – Barbarian Days by William Finnegan about surfing and surfing in SF
Looks to see more climate tech investing
Plaid selling to VISA – as a big win
Enterprise software founders – “Have to get to $1mil ARR to get series A” – not true if it’s a solid business
Data privacy company investment – new category of software to go after data privacy
Jeff Lawson, founder & CEO of Twilio (Invest Like the Best ep 158, 3/3/20)
How to build a platform – cloud comms platform to customers like Twitch, Lyft and Yelp
At his office – “Draw the Owl” – best values as needing to explain
Call to action for builders – go figure it out – doing what you do as 2 step process of draw a few circles, then beautiful
Early customers needed product (as API) opposed to the investor method which said it’s not a product
Content center app, marketing – developers can take APIs that provide infrastructure to build an app at scale, quickly
Twilio has virtualized the communications center much like AWS does computing and storage
Stripe / Google Maps for similar functionality
New era for enterprise software – initially, CIO made the buying decisions and things cost millions of dollars, years to implement
On prem and expensive
SaaS around turn of millennium could buy online and their heads could provision the services they needed
For the scale and software – it’s a platform of things in their API
Build or die compared to buy or build
Incorporating software into business model – company would need new back-office financial
Buy from vendor or build it – already built / reinvent but this would be solution after solution
Banks with core competency for amazing software – digital banks
In response, incumbents can do the same thing (one of Twilio’s is ING – few years ago promoted a new CEO)
Becoming Agile, outside of devs, set of Agile teams – each part of small team
Agile at ING video on YouTube – one of largest banks’ leadership in business saying they have to build to be successful
At AWS – customer intimacy to align by customer needs
A product company with a solution makes a lot of assumptions for what their customers’ needs – may not intersect with differences
A platform, however, can be utilized to build anything by customers – ING built a whole contact center on Twilio
Lots of companies as on-prem for contact centers because the contact center market was broken – move to cloud
Their billboard in SF that’s been there for 6+ years – “Ask Your Developer”
Merging business with tech and developers but many companies just give them the tasks instead of the big business decisions
How can we do that?
Developers often enjoy doing the work over the weekend – Hack-a-thons over weekends or doing stuff then
Finding what it means to be a part of your tribe – heroes, symbols and rituals
Skip Potter – CTO of Nike, building unbreakable relationships with customers, being Agile, serving Nike
ING story
Nations / religions have many rituals – companies have rituals (say, bagels on Thursdays for all-hands)
Wednesday night dinner at the offices – defining who they are, with a theme each week
Symbols – what matters to the tribe – powerful thing you have are the values
Culture: what you feel when you walk into work every day, whether articulated or not
Can be good, can be bad during the interactions within the company
Values: handles on the culture – allow for you to describe and guide the culture
No shenanigans, foolish/nonsense – can’t just create/invent values
Introspect the feeling when you walk in early – pooled 15 of people about 1/3 at the time to debate
Be an owner
Wear the customer shoes – customer-centricity
Way you are customer-centric, looking at problem/company from perspective
Go to a customer – I will trade you a Twilio-branded shoes for your shoes
Kindest thing anyone’s done – Kevin O’Connor as founder of DoubleClick was an angel investor in one of his first company’s (dotcom era)
Come to my Hampton’s house in the winter, bring a cofounder and figure out what you’re going to do, I’ll put in some money
No plowing of roads – would order Amazon/UPS would plow the road for them – took about 9 months
Invested in first company, and then believed in him as entrepreneurs
Tomer London, Gusto co-founder (20min VC 2/28/20)
Raised $520mln for Gusto, people platform for small businesses providing one place to run payroll, manage benefits, support
General Catalyst, CapitalG, KP, T Rowe, Fidelity, and more – also angels Shopify founder Tobias Luttke, Sam Altman, Max Levchin, Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Hartz and Elad Gil – did a PhD in EE at Stanford before founder/CEO at Vizmo (customer care for enterprise)
Originally from Israel, parents have a small clothing store in Hypha – started by picking up a VisualBasic book for the store at 11 yrs old
Count inventory, sizing, and could do it via a computer with inventory management software – helped his dad, grandpa, cousins and friends
10 years ago, moved to the Bay Area to start his PhD at Stanford – met his cofounders Josh and Eddie – family history and connection to SMB
Fundraising = creating change as a tool
New channel to acquire customers that may be able to scale – $100mln ARR in 7 years, but maybe take 4 years with funding
Might be making promises that can’t be fulfilled
If you have a product, but you see an R&D opportunity for a new product to similar customer-set that may have a good opportunity
Investors have a lot of time to talk about start-ups so they set the tone for “requirements” for seed/A/B/C
Fin/VC Twitter and social media – he tries to be away and off of it
Echo chamber may not enable the creativity of different thoughts
Hard to have the mental space to think different/contrarily
Gusto started in YC 2012 Winter – had good traction, knew people and were oversubscribed
Josh came up with thinking about investors similarly to culture fit – values/motivation alignment sharing with Gusto
Raised a $200mln round, working with 100k small businesses including dentists, lawyers, tech, barbershops and working
Look for opportunities and purpose – less about being big but around specific R&D initiatives, scaling growth channels
Try to make sure to bring people on the cap table that can add value – specifically, VP of Product Adam Nash at DropBox has been sounding board
Be really picky about the people you bring on
Delightful experience really matters
Product / design reviews: product quality with function, ease of use, and delight (can’t add this later, has to be inherent)
Delight is something of value and in a way that may be unexpected
People come to them because someone has told the prospects that they love their payroll/benefits provider
They don’t use the MVP, they use MLP (lovable product) – don’t waste time building things people won’t use
Scoping down to test and ship it
How does it feel like to get paid? Maybe not anything at all – boring, just a check in the bank, missed opportunity
Did a design sprint (a la Google Ventures) – short period of time/process for an email experience in payday – celebration
When you meet someone for the first time – first 20-30 seconds really matter, personality shines
If you understand personality of a product and brand, you can bring people in through copy/illustrations
Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm and Tyler Tringas, Earnest Capital founder (The Indie Hackers podcast #152, 3/6/20)
Picking the right market to get started in that originated from Justin’s blog post called “The Main Thing”
Justin was following curiosity – somewhat interesting after talking with Nathan Bashez – main thing swallows most value
Eating out in college with limited $, he’d order entrée and water – most folks just do that
Is that applicable to how we think of products? Can we frame it the way we build products?
Josh was doing subscription forms for embedding in Medium posts – Medium increasing audience
It was a nice-to-have to store
Insightful posts for nice, concise wrappers around important things to consider
Justin has a series and Tyler’s been the “reply guy”
This is important to think about, and then what should we think about?
Areas of disagreement are the implications for doing business outside of this – narrower (think: bootstrappers/indiehackers)
Currently, Tyler believes indiehackers should be shying away from big things and verticals
New twists on WP hosting, Todo app – not paying attention to 2nd order effects and incumbents
Don’t build on top of other platforms vs building on top of others (Jason Cohen on an app store where someone else pulls you with)
To get traction, need big ideas and concepts and then niche down by product or audience
Distribution or differentiation – typically this is often in main spaces
CRM, PM tool, ToDo, basic ecommerce, CMS hosting – chock full of stuff
Tons of successful ones, lately (last 5 years), are apps – automated collections on Stripe, error collections on Rails, bolt-ons
Developer market is one of most unique markets – things that work there may not work outside of it
Devs have a larger #, avg revenue and highly incentivized to get better at what they do – maybe parallels with doctors
Reachable online, congregates online and tons of opportunity to reach them
Ecommerce first may share this, content-based, ad/news/blogs similarly compared to pure offline markets
ConvertKit – state of union surveys between bloggers and creators – cognitive ceilings of bubbles after meet-ups and conferences
Differences of WP plug-in, Shopify extensions for ecommerce entrepreneurs, etc – big market differences
Characteristics of markets matter – pointing yourself in some direction to pull yourself, it matters what you’re first 1% is
Size of market does matter – leaning too far – have to quantify the demand for a product in a specific category
Number of potential customers, new customers, average spend, frequency of purchase, growth rate, % reachable
His market for Transistor.fm as moderate sized podcast hosting – say, 70k customers, potentially
Tyler considering “side dishes” in the main verticals because of differentiation for your product and jump into distributions
$10k MRR per founder may be the “default alive” amount but completely depends on what you’re doing
Young Indie Hacker as total time without massive audience/trust can’t launch a direct competitor to Google Analytics
Privacy-focused analytics as a trend, simple analytics, too – big audiences launch failed products all the time
Experience matters, everything you bring to bare matters – Justin started blogging in 2008 – built the audience over time
Reuben Gamez doesn’t care for audience – he knew SEO and had timing to help
What trade-offs do you have to make for a market?
Where are you in your life? Stage matters – spend some time on the slopes/get your experience
Affiliates for Justin’s foot off the ground to succeed
Nathan Berry – pattern in his life earlier than Justin – early 20s blogging and publishing then, selling early
The practice and experience matters
Main thing for niche audience or side thing for huge audience – questionable unfair advantages, main thing in huge market
Pretty core product for them – “Crossfit gyms, for instance – Mind/Body went after yoga studios and everything for it as SaaS product”
If you have a particular product insight into P/M or payment txns – try to match the niche product where insight is overvalued
IndieHackers as afraid of competition they make this product that nobody really wants to pay for as Unique
Justin brought up going to meetups in other cities/states to be the outsider and find out what they want
Gaming & Chrome OS / Steam, Going Cashless, Coronavirus Latest (a16z 16min on the News 3/8/20)
Jonathan Lai and Andrew Chen from Consumer team, Alex Rampell from fintech team
Steam – Valve corporation as the largest PC distributor of games after starting as Valve game
Publishers controlled access to physical retail points – devs would take 20-30% of their games
Developers actually made it 70% with Steam partnership – just took 30% otherwise, indie developers rise
30k games under Steam – not all would run on ChromeOS hardware, but can see smaller indies get access
90mn MAU, 1 bn registered accounts – social graph that may get ChromeOS more information
K12 education – 60% of computers are Chromebooks now – Roblox, Stadia, Minecraft as possibilities for younger
Google Stadia may unlock tiers of games for longer sit-down sessions because they wouldn’t be able to target all platforms
Entertainment over long-term, new gameplay experiences – click to play alongside as an ad or video, social onboarding
Going cashless – no employee theft, checkout line, armed trucks vs cash only (cc fees and tracking)
Both sides of consumer cutting and for small businesses – rich people monetized at interest margin but others on fees
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So, we are into September of the pandemic year. Fires, hurricanes off the Gulf Coast, bubbliness of tech, political turmoil, and chaos in general driving the narratives. I know that it’s been a while since we last talked. Whirlwind of finding a new place (without seeing it in person), hiring movers, figuring out the best way to move, when to pack up from my place, when to pack up everything in the girlfriend’s, moving physically, purchasing new furniture, building and organizing has swallowed almost all of the time and sapped creative energy. Pile on to that that there were fires in southern California that had reached our new paradise, enveloping the sun. Suffice to say, we finally enjoyed a weekend (still very active, though) and now room to breathe this week brought me back to WordPress.
You know how many boxes there are in moving? I can completely relate to streamers or Dave Portnoy’s adventure. It’s rough. Covid seemed to jack up prices, as well, which seemed annoying. People that had moved double the size and similar distances were 30-50% less simply due to covid risks, I suppose? The misunderstanding of how contagious or how volatile the infection is clearly resulted in a few industries that got to take advantage in the name of “safety” (moving holds the same risk as it normally would unless you weren’t being cautious/careful in who you hired and brought onto jobs employee-wise). But hey, in options, you pay for the tail risks or you implode.
I still think drones or a body camera that projects out house / apartment layouts would be fantastic for realtors, buyers, sellers, websites related to the space. However, I’m more convinced now that moving companies could do a quick consultation of job requirements with them, designers could customize spaces with accurate measurements of space (blueprints / measurements of rooms don’t do justice to the nooks and crannies, as well as the ‘efficient’ space there may be with windows, shelves, etc). I know that various websites have independently done ‘customize your room’ with their products but if there’s an easy way to copy/paste urls or route APIs with image requests to an easily-replicable copy of your room (a la body-camera / drone), you may have an easier time selling across many products/offerings/sites.
Again, the drone technology continues to improve, so it’s possible we’ll have this or something from the phone to test out as image and object recognition improve. Could likely hack together something that did this. Attach a camera to one of those Costco drones that are $15 that are supposed to stay above ground upon simply detection of walls.
Anyhow, take a look at these awesome founders and investors that I listened to on various podcasts. The mix of serial entrepreneurs, big tech aspirations and side hustles was very fun to listen to.
Ashton Kutcher, Founder & GP at Sound Ventures (20min VC 2/17/20)
Portfolio including Lambda, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and others
Ashton’s wins include Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb, Optimizely and Time’s 100 Most Influential
Started at Univ of Iowa studying biochem engineering – power of a computer and learning to program
Piqued his curiosity but he wanted to be an actor – started a production company at 25 (reality TV including Punkd, Beauty & Geek)
AOL Chatrooms early on – marketing Dude, Sweet in various rooms – continuation in marketing movie
Buffering speeds increasing – content would be digital
He wanted to find companies that could quantify distribution of content and accelerate distribution of content
Met Sarah Ross over at T/C, working for Mike Arrington – hired her to run his digital divison
Introduce me to everyone that matters in the Valley (T/C 50), Jason Calacanis, Mike Cuban, Kevin Rose, etc…
Asking all the questions – made his first investment into Optimizely (A/B testing platform)
Arianna Huffington as how does he introduce himself – as a father, first, apparently
Future of internet are perpetually young, tech capability – learning and an ambition for new/useful/different
Cutting edge of technology became his 3 teenage step-daughters so he mined them for ideas (as he was 35+)
Major VCs and partners have a technical background, as entrepreneurs formerly or study to allow understanding of tech
Toward companies with technical innovation and build company off of it – but isn’t their first lens
Cultural narrative that may be important and valuable that you can build a product from
Example – #metoo as here to stay or enduring – shift towards filling the void as rightful demand
Looking at fertility space as trend for expansion
Send a snapshot of the home screens for people’s phone on Twitter/Instagram and source ones he’s unaware of
Most brilliant people going to companies – which – did a survey with the founders
Distance traveled by an individual – $1k to $1mil, a dime to $100k (as incredible)
Growing up, he would probably say that his twin brother going through a heart transplant at age 12
Going through a divorce of his parents that was tough
Companies failed that didn’t feel good – not particularly rough since there are multiple
Strong intuition in products not familiar – hard to get familiar
Eating the dog food – before investing in Airbnb, he lived in them for 6 months
Apple-ification of app ecosystem for UI/UX, enterprises getting smart also
Consumers would use their enterprise software and to use the nomenclature would be better for their CTR
Understanding what people want and simplify that – 3 things on a screen, where would you put the most important
Spending time with founders mostly
Ability to increase distribution funnel (his 5-10+ million Twitter followers), Spotify gave him an affiliate site with a discount code
Largest music management side for partner, collective on branding and helping
Versed on being in PR – public mistakes, apologize or utilize to get out of jams, crisis/preventative PR
Product-sensibility, where you want to be – business, also – what does a company need to measure
Which metrics matter, industry standards on metrics, how to improve them
Portfolio manager from growth team on Stripe that works with them – narrative/storytelling
Scaling angel to much larger institutional checks – Ron Conway was one of his earlier mentors, as well as Dan Rosensweig
Cap table becomes your early board – value add outside of employees, low burn, grow team, disciplines
The Undoing Project, Scale by Jeffrey West, Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell
Misnomer about him – he’s cold (social animal, but super awkward)
True happiness is being able to take your time
Biggest challenge – Building a high quality team is hard with Sound Ventures
Celebrity investing rise – lot of people are going to lose money, Wish he’d known: kindness doesn’t always come back around
Recent investment with Sound Ventures that he’s excited by – Community (partner helped incubate) – luxury text messaging
Jude Gomila, Founder & CEO at Golden (20min VC 2/10/20)
Self-constructing knowledge database built by AI and human-intelligence
Raised from Founders Fund, a16z, SV Angel and others
Also a successful angel in 150 companies including Carta, Airtable, Superhuman, Gusto, Linear and others
Jude started Heyzap alongside the founder of Mercury, Immad
Passions around tech, learning, universe working – physics in tech form (hardcore engineering) or abstract theorems (randomness/computability)
Never wanted to work for someone – wanted to build things, but wasn’t aware of tech scene in London
In uni, at 18, he wanted to start a company – formed a consultancy with a few friends
Large Chinese manufacturer of egg packaging into Europe – wrote a plan to how they could do this
They wanted them to run the business – he called every farm in the UK but they didn’t want to change
Wanted to find something they could do themselves for a product that people would want with margin
Digital photo frames – own brand into higher side of market – surprising
April, had burnt through YC money and wanted to raise a round for Heyzap – 6 per day back to back
Not impressive investors, go back on their word, converged on better investors instead
USV pitched and they got the deal – Naval and USV for board – cool conversations on angel investing
Mechanics on legal terms, contracts – part of something larger
Put all of his money into angel investing in the next 7 years, advising as well
Reality is out there, fairly objective – all follows similar rules, working together
Ethics – both sides should have ethical framework/grounds – how to act during exit or bad situation
One side making money, one on future – is it to top Roth IRA or something else?
VC wants you to win the gold medal – that’s what is important because of model
A personal best for you is better risk:reward, $20mln or 50 or 100 that’s fantastic, but not for VC
Praying / spraying – he doesn’t like the praying part – more rational
Numbers do matter, so spraying doesn’t fit this
If there are nonlinear returns, you have to do 10-20+ investments (since network effects are nonlinear)
Nonlinear market caps of monopoly or something like this are higher but capped at $1tn, likely
Need to see different learning processes for various investments – has a lot of bullets and time
Red/black flags for situations that you’ll always say no – yellow flags that you may be able to fix
Markets and dynamics shift, but not human behavior – processes that identify these are very good
Ability to get in to deals – how did he convince founders to take the money ahead of market?
What companies need to exist? Knew that Paychex and ADP were terrible software, similar share, org charts broken
Put it into a blog post of ideas that he wanted to see. Simple UI and great CX around payroll.
Talked about culture of Gusto that wanted to exist and be unique. An hour of no business stuff, just the culture.
Difficult to say whether you have confirmation or not – didn’t do well for a certain reason, can go again on the hypothesis (2-4 times)
David Sellinger, Founder of Deep Sentinel (OkDork w/ Noah Kagan, 2/14/20)
Early Amazon work on ad-buying tech & first AI systems, directly with Bezos
Started RedFin, real estate, as a side hustle (8pm – 4am)
UX as the centerpiece, especially for investment deck:
They wanted to build quick, interactive maps, simple straightforward
He stumbled into Amazon after doing another ecommerce problem
Google AdWords in 2001 – $0.50 per click for niche products with 50% conversion and 100-300% margin
VP of Consumer wanted to go thru economics – $0.50 per click, $1 per conversion & repeated
Bezos funded Deep Sentinel
Provides 24/7 guards that monitor your home and best in market at a reasonable price
He’s not in a place to solve climate change or global politics, but can build this safety of people in their homes
Looks like Howie Mandel & he can pull it off fairly easily (but taller)
Line between crazy and brilliant is quite blurred – Shawn Parker for Kagan
Bigger visions? He has AppSumo where it’s like Amazon for software
Big problems that are chosen – in-depth interviews (Shawn’s with Fortune) realizing the craziness, intellect, drive to problem selection
Safety net for trying things worth trying because you get to rich, or super rich
Day he launched RedFin (after year of working on it), was on the front page of Seattle Times in 2004, Imran Real Estate
400k visitors on first day – ISP called saying they don’t support porn sites (didn’t believe traffic numbers)
Left Amazon 2 weeks after launching
Believes that Amazon is a culture of Bezos – future holds more change than today, destroy the business today and go forward
Senior executives to try out and do this – categories that don’t work, Fire Phone, Amazon Music or Photos
David says he pays for Google Photos $150/yr – embodying the mantra
One day in 2003-04, advertised Madonna book “Sex” and lost $100k Google Advertising Project but they weren’t looking for it
Initially, Amazon didn’t run ads at first, for a while
If you’re looking at Samsung TV, you’ll find a cheaper or different TV for conversion
Had CATE algorithm (ML, Bayesian optimization) – stumbled on ad on website Code Red at Amazon credit card
No matter what they showed before that, the most profitable thing to show the user was this ad
Proved the ad was the way to do it – data backed it up (after saying it was terrible and they’d never do it as retailer)
Balance is always a judgment call – willingness to re-litigate with any suggestion by new data
Process of optimization vs innovation, Thomas S Koo by Structure of Scientific Revolutions book
s-curve with normal science (optimization – some paradigm to optimize with evidence), build up that the model doesn’t work
Early – matter was earth, water, fire and air before coming to atomic model
What are the things that don’t fit into the model – the exceptions to figure out a rationalization
Jeff giving advice to him while starting at Deep Sentinel, launching
Design of the product, speed at which they move, and willing to experiment with the way they interact with customers
Design award for being most aggressive camera – top part is LED light ring, battery-powered and was initially designed to not turn on
Changed it so that the AI turns on the ring and spins – accidental launch after his team came to him saying it
Camera will turn on red LED light on and say “we’re watching”
Top of funnel for Deep Sentinel – cheeky top of funnel, but tech is done very well
If you shoot someone, you’re the suspect, even if righteously
Israeli security system, and he does contracts for background checks – (In California, has to do that) – uses HireSafe once he does that
Mentioning that an Uber driver would be a security agent for a billionaire in the bay area – Noah asked him and it was $70k to sleep outside
All the pieces but what would keep you from being larger?
Markets can be very engrained and it’s a trick to get a customer to buy a different way
Enterprise – wiggle your way into customer market and then switch it
Nobody searching “cameras with someone that actually protects house” – should be this way, but not since people are used to others
Redfin as them figuring out hook – address searches, neighborhoods and data for it – found the customers
Have to take people buying burglar alarms and getting the market that they don’t work (99% false alarms)
15% of LA County budget is spent on false alarms – once people pass yard sign, it’s ineffective
After his neighbor got burglarized, he went through and called all the security companies
ADT, Bay Alarm, Brinks, SimpliSafe, camera people, all standard questions – how does it prevent crime? How does it work? What do you do?
Salesman for ADT at his home, what’s the new tech that PREVENTS crime? “The sensor was wireless.”
Value was the slice of time in the interactions – AI changes the business process to make the human part efficient
Average home needs 24/7 availability for ~700 seconds of security a day – when people are entering or exiting the property
Intense decision for lifetime of relationships – pitched investors, got feedback
Bunch of his money in to build his prototype to do first tests, F&F of $1mil for in-market prototypes
Put together market research, addressable market, problem and pricing
Shasta with Series A went from $7mil to $23mil round, did it over tranches because hardware expense
Using other people’s cameras, 3 months, to get to own cameras and prototype about 18 months, then 6 months for market
Noah did his own checklist for “Operation Dragon Flame” to keep his house safe – reddit as one of the best in home security
CPTED – Crime Protection Through Environmental Design – active crime and other stuff
Front door with ivy, for instance, or a fountain with stones in it – rule #1 – answer the door
Ring as picking up because insurance policy and Amazon as the biggest thing for packages getting stolen
Peleton as interesting because of being expensive enough to only get people with the money, so they don’t even notice the subscription
Choosing to not give away the camera because of attracting the wrong customers
For Deep Sentinel in the future – looking at small business offerings and working on making AI faster, as well as faster hardware
New one coming out in 6 months, new stuff broadening platform
Emmett Shear, Twitch co-founder and CEO (20min VC 2/21/20)
Starting Kiko calendar, just wanting an online, collaborative calendar
Getting funding and going to YC with a $15k fund for the summer – felt like they were doing something
Eventually raised $60k, used to build it out until Google launched their calendar
Went to sell on ebay – had a bid for $50k – took listing down because of 2 links they had
Ended up getting traction and selling for approx $250k – seemed like it was worth it compared to other classmates
Took the money and made Justin.tv with his cofounder – other cofounder had a visa issue and had to work elsewhere
Turned it into Twitch, saw how they had to change around 400 to managing people, letting go of product control
Gabriel Weinberg, founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo (20min VC 2/14/20)
Physics major who didn’t want to do academia and startups seemed the thing to do in 99-00
Idealistic right out of college – started an educational software co that went nowhere – liked the industry, though
Tried to raise money but failed – started next company in the bust and didn’t think about raising
Sold but didn’t have investors or employees – just him and a partner
Didn’t take venture until series A
Bootstrapped DuckDuckGo until series A in 2011, 4 years in
Relatively risk averse, world heading toward data collection and saw privacy
Wrote every line of code, marketing and such
Some founders have lots of net worth tied up into company (uses himself as 12 years in to DDG) – take some money off the table
Data monopolies that underlie the data duopoly due to the network effects
He did a “do not track” litigation and he tried to put teeth to automatic parts for browsers
Scale of market and advertising auctions in place are much stronger than the previous generations of tech strength
One channel often drives the bulk of a winning strategy – experimentation in different channels
Diversification play for doubling down – ends up as creative solution
Andrew Chen’s “Law of Shitty Click Throughs” – over time, channels saturate and CTR go down
CTR used to be 30%, now 1-2% – with a new channel, can be through the roof
He was one of the original Reddit advertisers
Constant measurement to see if it’s reaching a diminishing return – trying to find next channel
Avoid spreading yourself too thin
Market is pretty big & DuckDuckGo has crossed 30% for market awareness – standard of trust online, be the consumer priv. brand
Traction trumps everything – metrics depend on business you’re in
Generally, if you have highly engaged users, you’ll attract anyone – no numbers/tractions is all narrative/storytelling
Numbers there – storytelling can be terrible and you’ll still be able to get funding
Marketing will only get you so far – PMF underneath – constantly find counter-metric of retention/inbound funnel
Look at both – for Gabe, his metric was # of searches (was public as DDG.com/traffic) and now they have apps/extensions for privacy
Tracker blocking, private search, browser extension and now look at MAU’s (and can’t track their users as policy)
Key is to keep business processes going – everyone on same page, develop them as 15 employees because of a distributed company
Scaled nicely once they figured it out but was chaotic at first – Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
Building a remote team – all organized and tactical – everything in one place so people can see
For them, it’s Asana (big view called “Our Current Objectives” – all projects and anyone can follow along, owner/responsibility)
Feedback mechanisms and culture of accountability – has to be built into the values of the company
Experimental mindset – fails are good if the hypothesis and data is there at the end, running a good post-mortem for experiments
Post-mortems for every single project – no stigma for them in the first place
Good projects have no blame – what could have been done better? What could change and nobody to blame?
Action items, templated and what went right/wrong/different
Wrote a book called Superthinking on Mental Models – what he learned is that you can skip to the strategic thinking
His first check into DDG was his own, but angel was Scott Banister that was a user who followed and emailed him to reach out
Tons of people that are great in Philly, but distributed surpasses this because being open to this creates a talent pool
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Razor’s Edge – Jack Welch autobiography for how many times he’s been knocked to his senses.
“Eventually I learned that I was really looking for people who were filled with passion and a desire to get things done. A resume didn’t tell me much about that inner hunger.” After learning to select for mindsets and not pedigrees.
Growth, not self-importance. Chapter in book “Too Full of Myself”. He promised to develop.
Questions for podcast: Honest feedback – ask execs what they liked/disliked and how they thought it would change.
Kidder, Peabody (WS ib firm with Enron-type culture in acquisition by Welch) – didn’t work out – cost GE hundreds of millions of dollars – self-confidence vs hubris.
Lou Gerstner after taking IBM role – asking frontline employees what could be changed. Sometimes taking a role and coming in to ask those that have been around for a long while what may work, what doesn’t work, and doing it with humility to figure out internal ideas around efficiencies is the best option. Probably more often than not, even.
Vlad Magdalin, Founder of Webflow (The Indie Hackers Podcast #144, 1/24/20)
Visual s/d platform, without writing code – web design and website builder initially
155 people as of the morning of Jan 24, started 7 years ago
70% remote, 20 countries, 30 states
70k customers and 1.5 years ago, $10mln in revenue (with guide to double – lagging indicator, though)
Empower more people to build software (est. of 5% there)
Original idea – (search as solved problem in 90s before Google did it slightly better)
He was a web dev, taking photoshop files and turning them into CMS repeatedly, thought there would be a better way
Video he saw (Inventing on Principle talk on creating games/animation) – could marry the tools for front-end and back-end after seeing it
He wanted to make his and his brother’s life easier, initially (agency work working with businesses, dentists/doctors in Sac that he could help)
Late 2011-12 started becoming more prominent with tools like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Wibli
Someone encouraged him to apply to YC for a bigger opportunity – he had started Webflow in 2005 and others to get discouraged
Created a small prototype with a 3 month runway (savings and credit cards), Kickstarter video for ~$300k for a year or two, build product
Kickstarter wanted to take them down because they don’t do SaaS stuff ($20k into video already), running out of money, Sac/SD returns
Put together 5 week plan for shipping – read-only on HackerNews (design tool that went crazy on dev site – side-by-side for CSS changes)
Within a week, 25k people were on the waiting list (also had a lot of detractors), had a year to try to convert them as they built it
When product launched, it was so limited that only converted 100 people, needed the investment to finance further product
Got enough blind optimism from that list, though, to push through
At seed, investors not really taking board seats, but if you don’t get to profitability, control/equity seeps out in desperation in the new round
People believed in web tools from believing in you as a person
Ron from Rainfall Ventures would do breakfasts & walks in SF with Vlad – he’d tell to take 6 months off to get inspired (long-term, Patagonia)
Knew they wanted to climb mountains and find a sherpa for doing it faster, safer – investor true partnership (could wait since earning)
Found that in Accel – LPs were pension funds so they were seeking global maxima
Making money to break-even as “default alive” vs “default dead”
Not optimizing for revenue, much more long-term project for a goal to help that many people
Probably from his childhood in Russia, being poor, religious craziness, refugees entering America
Leadership model isn’t “I know everything, do it” – bringing other ideas to products/teams/processes
Baked it into the mission of the company – empower people to build software without code
Create the company where each individual can live an impactful and fulfilling life – whatever it means to them
Glue/foundation to doing the right thing
Believes that team comes 1st – wasn’t thinking about team, structure, values & core behaviors of the company as a system
Considered architecture, features, code base and tests – much harder to build the organism of people than this
Still maintaining activity with prod management and vision of the company plus features
Creators and developers, leadership becomes its own challenge and reward, where YOU are the code base that can be improved
No-code conf: knew I wanted to build, create and software and now we can see there are others like me
How do you market Excel, for instance? How do they look at Webflow? Find a vertical.
Clients expect a certain level of custom work that need to move fast for a project – Webflow persona
Those using Webflow get a feel for what they may be able to do next once they’re a user
David Sinclair, PhD (Rich Roll Podcast 2/10/20, via Kevin)
Professor in Genetics at Harvard Med School
Lifespan book, NYT bestseller now – aging is a disease that is treatable
Laird Hamilton morning pool workout (had done it the morning of podcast)
Start out at 250 degree sauna (wtf?), shower, and jump into the pool – swim until out of breath
Get weights and jump up and down, drinking water if you don’t get it (ScarJo talk about 5 minute holding breath)
He’d made mistake going too far into the deep end
Warmed up in sauna before jumping into an ice bath – said this wasn’t too bad
Got to 3 minutes, as well
Ray Cronise work and Metabolic winter hypothesis – bundling up at night and temperature comfort zones
Ray did a book, Healthspan Solution, with Julieanna Hever
Polyphenolic as bright colors, white/watery as less so
Growing oranges – harming plants, for instance, where you nail the trunk a day before picking
Great wine – just as they’re stressed, without rainfall, for instance
Organic vs real organic – sunlight, rougher conditions (“hyperorganic”, with a chuckle)
When you eat, hot and cold, plenty of exercises
Breakthrough in longevity – exercise, less food, all of these things through the same mechanisms
Found this in yeast cells aging – one gene, PNC-1 that makes NAD
Give the yeast stress, they live longer, less sugar, higher heat, otherwise
2013, oleic acid is a great potent nanomolar activator, similar to resveritrol
Needs to be in a fatty food to get 5-10x, not a capsule
Hoping to breakthrough drug-wise and aging, but naysayers have delayed 10 years
Easier for him to not talk to media so as not to get misquoted, especially like at Harvard
Always being worried about jobs/too many people/issues surrounding that
Mobilization of research and technology
Old london in 1858 – cholera outbreak, had to figure it out with politicians getting in their way
Cholera from water well, removed handle and it went away – people didn’t want to admit this, so politicians replaced handle
80% aging as lifestyle and 20% genetics, metformin trials with FDA
Doctors treat disease, not lifestyle – people have already gotten to the cliff – whack-a-mole medicine
Wealthier countries and education ends up being more sustainable on a population level – less than 2 kids per couple
He’d suggest restricting food (food 3 times and snacks is perma-glucose) is best for restriction
Polyphenols where plants are stressed out – Okinawans and South Indians
Carnivore diet – arguing that it doesn’t anticipate stress diet, body will age long-term still? Weird.
Body’s clock is screwed up by longevity cycles
NAD levels increase – he won’t get effects of jet lag (seen this myself with a workout after flight)
Not taking metformin on days he works out
TAME (targeting aging metformin) – susceptibility for aging and diseases, clocks slowing or not
Peter Diamandis, author of “Future is Faster Than You Think” (Wharton XM, 2/12/20)
Autonomous, hyperloop or AI taxis
Tim Wigmore, staff writer at The Daily Telegraph (Wharton XM Moneyball 2/12/20)
Checking z-scores for Total Strikeouts in MLB for talking about Astros/Red Sox variation
Largest in modern HISTORY for the Astros (5-6 sd’s)
Can measure the differences – it’s possible first and second order effects
Other teams realize this is happening, breaking balls not swung out outside zone, for instance
Good teams play generally more innings on the road than at home because if you’re winning, only play 8 at home
Rates could be different, regression to the mean
Highest point differential through this point for the Bucks – 46-7, though weird distribution of wins for league
u-shaped, 80% in tails and 20% in the middle .400-.600
Tim as Cricket writer for many other publications – speed one, as well
Home-field advantage in playoffs for MLB is only a few % points, much lower compared to the NBA
Cory Zue, Founder of Place Card Me, Pegasus (The Indie Hackers Podcast #147, 2/12/20)
Having fun on the path to independence, living in South Africa – Cape Town (5 years after growing up in Boston)
Was CTO of high-growth startup before going to a sabbatical
Working on breadth vs depth – across multiple projects, trying to get to not having to work by 2023 – collectively $26k profit annual
Seeing the adjustment of not having the cache as CTO – not all of his ideas as brilliant
Spending so much of lives working, so he’s really enjoyed launching and getting users
Joined Dimagi in 2006 as ee #1, CTO until 2017
He wanted to make money – needed to design his life (as time spent on his sabbatical)
Hasn’t been full-time on any personal projects over last 3 yrs
His wedding was the inspiration for Place Card Me (could do in Word with MailMerge if you know how to do that)
Had 2-3 days before happened that it wasn’t going to come in
His goal was $1 for the 6 months – took about that long but only a week or two for the website
Started at $10, $5 as he figured out the SEO (HackerNews/Noon,FreeCodeCamp, etc… by ending signatures/posts with it)
Every possible reason for why it wouldn’t work
Nobody would ever pay for it. Went on Etsy and they were going for $8 without automatic template and features
Has to be traffic, then – didn’t know if it was $5/mo, or $100/mo or something else
First year – $1k, 2018 – $10k, 2019 – $20k revenues and he hadn’t worked on it much, organic growth as primary
Seeing how the growth could be done to optimize revenue growth
Wedding stuff works almost entirely on affiliate advertising – Pinterest or Etsy or otherwise, he sees Google
Getting into the printing game ($5 digital templates) – cards are up to $1/card (200 person wedding, for instance)
Keeps track of hours in total for each project and his total is ~450 hours, so 12 work weeks for $30k
Strategic decision to decide on a business (especially since as CTO, he’d get a call for servers down if out at a bar)
Shouldn’t scale with people – wanted to be small or independent – no services/support team
Work in an industry that you want to tell people about – though he says wedding is a weird one to him
Project that he can tell his friends about (though he can’t even tell about his new project, either, too complicated)
Choose the customer that you want – he says a lot of developers would love to have developers as their customers
They understand them, can overcome bad UX, bugs, and certain understanding (Tuple founder as well)
Pegasus – code template that allows you to get up and running with a SaaS application faster
Web framework base language: Python, Ruby, JS – framework: Jango, Rails, Node
Sitting on top of Jango, including out of the box- user stuff (login/acct manager/password – multi-tenant orgs)
UI and Stripe integration, as well
Started to work when he started Place Card Me (2.5 yrs)
Had a more mature product development with Pegasus, so it went a bit better
Identity gets wrapped up with the products, though
Truth about 1000 True Fans, Pricing of Our Attention (a16z 1/27/20)
Kevin Kelly, first proposed in 2008 and updated – just need a thousand true fans
Attention to widget – hire ad agencies, make ads that people will see the ad and take their attention from the consumer
Can short circuit this by paying the audience directly for their attention – call out – $0.25 to watch ad, email
Why do we give this away for free? Can fight the spam problem.
Bad economic models break in having to pay for attention
In media, publications/magazine/newspapers don’t have a choice for ads they run – decided by advertiser
What if anyone could run an ad and you get the benefits of the ad if people clicked on it?
Crowd decentralized version of ad network – money flowing through system through blockchain
Creative people making ads that worked and sponsors have to pay when they’re watched
Decentralized ad system that puts power back to the audience, that requires blockchain to maintain integrity
Proposed ad idea in The Inevitable (his book)
In TikTok, people are doing ads (ideas/product/content) viral purely AI-based can do learned intent
Any creator can go viral despite not having a huge audience/following
Economic just needs to be built in to get the paid side
True fans that you get money directly from – number you need to get to make a living, about 1000 true fans
Your true fans become the marketers for the casual fans – they do the hard work, promoting, evangelizing network
1 in a million of people on earth will still enable you 1000+ fans, so find that idea that can work
Published an idea called “I’ll Pay You to Read My Book” – people don’t care about selling books, want them to read it
He said he’d pay people to read the book, and make money doing it
Sell for $4 and pay $5 – ebook on Amazon can determine yay/nay since fewer people finish it
Gaming economy and gaming narratives as bigger economies than others – endless narratives
Optimize for the few, rare completers but making money off of the ones who dip in and out
The actual book is a container for the thought – most don’t make lots of money on them, it’s the speaking outside
On average, we surrender our attention for $3/hr for books, let’s say
Dickson Chu, Global Head of PortManagement at BBVA (Mastering Innovation 10/10/19)
Next Phase of the Fintech Phenomenon
25 years in finance, before fintech was cool
Innovation in banking – common perception of not going together (tech + banking)
Citibank in 60s and 70s had quite a bit of innovation, ATM and otherwise
From 80s and 90s on, not so much innovating – mobile has now changed everything
Enabled different experiences, compute device as always connected
What’s old as what’s new – has been accelerated in mobile
Fundamental challenges in risk + security – credit card numbers leaking, retailers as ancillary players that get hacked
Some as consequences of the high growth freemium model – banks as spending a considerable amount of money to prevent
Pharma as lowering cost and better ideas for outsourcing innovation and research – high R&D industries, in particular
At BBVA – run a series of events around world for open call to participate culminating in November finalists to Madrid
They see 1000+ new ideas and companies – sometimes within the bank or regional differences
Much larger % of students is going into students 20-25% compared to 5-10%
How do we replicate NY/SV ecosystems elsewhere? Hard to get an engineering element of this.
Lots of graduates requirement would put many geographies in play
Dickson mentioned London, Berlin, and Toronto
Running Simple, as one of the first neobanks out in Brooklyn before going to Portland to find community skill-base
Tagline was to make banking simple – simplicity, transparency and great value
Questioning hidden and overdraft fees
Rina Shainski (@rinasha), Chair & Co-founder of Duality Technologies (TechRepublic with Scott Matteson, 1/29/20)
Trend of right to personal privacy, specifically data privacy driven by ML / AI power that needs more data
GDPR in 2018, CCPA in 2020 and harsher sanctions
Challenges and potential solutions?
AI/ML as the commonly blamed parties, but tech can solve it
Privacy enhancing tech (PETs) can be used to protect privacy while enabling the usage of data
Previously, de-identification and anonymization such as personally identifiable info (PII) fields from data
These are increasingly useless because of re-identification of anonymized data
PETs as secure computing – homomorphic encryption, multi-party computing (MPC), zero knowledge & diff privacy
Her company (Duality Tech) allows d/s computations to be performed on encrypted data
Privacy difference between consumers and businesses?
Consumers are the owners and source of private data. Enterprises as aggregators and custodians
Creation of data after providing services, or result of that
Digital footprints for benefit of better services, research, progress but if falls in the wrong hands, exploited
Social media isn’t the only thing – lots of apps using location that user willingly/knowingly sometimes
Legends Brunch for NBA All-Star Weekend (NBA TV Radio, 2/15/20)
Horace Grant and Frank Isola talking to Bryan Colangelo and Sheryl Swoopes
Colangelo on starting in Chicago as the expansion team there – going all over for scouting tournaments
Exploding growth of NBA, including the following year – got an offer from Seattle, originally
He didn’t think there was anything in Seattle, so he passed
Received a MIL offer – wife asked why not in PHX
Next day, he got a call from the owner inviting him down there
Picking the Olympics – anyone that wanted “in” and had been there, no 1st or 2nd year players
44 down to 12 without a tryout with Popp
Sheryl on Kobe/Gigi’s loss – both for the past and present
Mentioned growing up watching Michael, since no WNBA until 1997
Houston squad used to support them in Houston – Cuttino, Francis, Moochie Norris
That’s different than Kobe wearing WNBA stuff, coming to All-Star game the prior summer with GiGi
Deserved to be better pay / if others see him, gives more credibility and questions can arise properly
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Productivity tools have been all the rage. Those familiar with adoption of new technology or tools in an office setting bigger than 20 people have likely been through what’s described as the J curve for adoption, popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock in their paper (see: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/brynrocksyv_j-curve_final.pdf) of September 2018 on general purpose technologies. There is a slope downward to start for the adoption because the productivity decrease and difficulty in trying to set it up often leads to a loss. Over time and the consistent use, it can go away and lead to the productivity gains we sought in the first place.
Well, I’m in that too many tools, too many valleys section. Bundle and use a tool that tries to do it all? Or unbundle and use multiple tools. If you are trying to optimize notes for one platform and it doesn’t work for your other platforms (mobile/to-go/car), is it optimal? Is 90% great if you miss on the 10% you don’t have a good solution for? I’m not sure. I’m hopeful that audio can work easily – may even jump into Otter.ai for transcription there.
A family friend of ours was so obsessed with keeping track of all his clothes, colors and features that he took it upon himself to build a database of his closet. Upon telling someone else, I recall a similar story for someone who went further and did bar codes on their clothes. You spend so much time obsessing over something you’d love organization over until that organizing takes up the time you were hoping to save. We could take this further and draw similar analogies to corporate, big companies compared to start-ups in growth as an early employee – always something to be done, may not be optimizing the work, just attempting to get something out compared to optimization runs for something that worked until it breaks. Exciting work on either end but ultimately, there’s a line you must draw.
There are tons of benefits to organization for notes, processes, documentation in that someone could come in at any point and figure out what connects to what. There’s a context. I think YourStacks is doing something like this for personal / professional use of tools and games and everything one comes into contact. There have been corporate / enterprise stack technology sites that break down webpage technology or company technologies. Then there are transparent people / companies who document it both privately and publicly for others to see. We try what we think may improve but it’s tough to know where to start.
There’s a lesson to be learned here in starting, trying to going from there. Some of us want to try to optimize all the tools or one tool to its fullest before moving forward. How good is good? Or not good enough? At what point do you pass to the next or add another tool? How many tools are too many? And will we get a bundling or unbundling of different aspects? I’m hopeful we get voice tools that enable bundling for all sorts of this. Currently, I’ve yet to find the solution. Let me know what your set is!
Dr. Tara Smith, Professor of Epidemiology at Kent State University College of PH, Erik Moses (Wharton Moneyball 2/5/20)
Hockey – East and West split of conferences currently, top 4 teams in the East and defending champs Blues in the West are 5th
More or less deterministic (coin flips previously) – 50% as max from a conference if coin flips
Mookie Betts as trying to get 10 year, $40 mil per because he’s so young
Joined in August 2013 after being at Univ of Iowa in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark Capital (Invest like the Best 1/28/20)
Investing in early-stage, MongoDB, Elastic, Mulesoft and advice for POS in enterprise software building Canvas
MongoDB – 2012 and had experience building consumer apps from 2007-08 trying to build tech that was pretty limited
Felt like an advantage between large companies with proprietary data and tools compared to DIY
Met Elliott (MongoDB founder, from DoubleClick) – would ask best devs to work with Mongo and they responded “Don’t need”
DB expert – MySQL can work with everything but would miss the class of devs that wanted without planning for scale, app may not work
DB could handle scale, millions of users, transactional data by 2015-16, right place right time
Oracle as building a great database business and moved into application tier with their apps built on their db
CRM, HCM (Peoplesoft) to serve application – 1977 to true leader in databases in 80s, relational
Other timing – 1992, for instance, and it would not have worked. Cloud has been so open to these techs.
Cockroach for globally scalable, relational db – TimeScale for time-series IoT model, for instance after cloud enabled it
Specific use cases have more specifically-tailored results
Initiating and potential TAM Salesforce estimates from the start compared to now, where it’s much larger now than suspected
Now, enterprise software permeates into companies all over for IoT and consumer tech
Caterpillar, Pharma, Financial Services, Shipping companies are all buyers
Diva built a CRM system for healthcare vertical on general CRM, Salesforce – multibillion dollar company
Client facing software is very important – system that will be helpful and customers will tackle that and tell you directly
People come to work and complete a specific job or task – not to work or be an expert with your software
New tool into a workflow, only certain amount of walls to learn the software before leaving
Go slow to go fast – if you’re building a software solution in the start, build for 5-10 important users
Address the needs of those customers – generally applicable to the market (not just the single customer)
Won’t become an outside services or dev shop if you deliver services to the general customer
Workday and Viva early days – 50% of revenue were services since they entered enterprises (large installation of PeopleSoft)
On-prem CRM for Viva – lots of handholding, data migration and such
Duffel (Global Distribution System) for airlines selling to consumers
Convoluted system to sell and the flows is astounding – entrepreneurs in payments looking to innovate in these instances
Found airlines and approached them to “Shouldn’t it work like this?” to get your first partners/customers
Patient capital of “go slow to go fast” to super efficient business – spreadsheet vs software
Example at Greg Shaw – Mulesoft – burned $8mln from $100mln to 200mln in revenue and burned $4mln from 2-300mln
Inside Salesforce, they’ve grown top-line revenues further
Unlikely that someone else is building what you’re building
2004 – Salesforce selling CRM, main competitor was Seibel – Salesforce had ACV of $4k and 15 licenses at a time vs Seibel $100k/1k
Go after the larger competitors when you have thousands of customers and users ecstatic about your product
Won’t run into competitors directly, just objections to your own system, since it’s incomplete
Valuing you against their internal/custom solution – take time to create product maturity before prematurely scaling
If you’re not missing as an investor, you aren’t taking enough shots
1x your capital if you miss compared to if you pass, miss on 10x or 100x
At Benchmark, they’re making 5-10 investments per year, so it’s 1-2 per partner
Recruiting and sales – candidates have to feel very good as they go through the proces
Only way to scale the software business is to hire the best people to make the software
Hard to stand out in SF as an enterprise software integration problem (Mulesoft)
Competing with FAANG in a limited labor market, have to be able to recruit amazing talent
For start-ups, they have 2 advantages: really exciting for them to embrace remote talent (global market)
Running a remote company at scale has very little to do with the tools, and more so with the work culture that’s friendly
Everyone meets remotely on video, even in same room
Writing a lot of documentation, transparency about thinking in the wikis docs so anyone can catch up
Offline ad inventory is very efficient – account-based enterprise software ads at airports – targeting top of funnels
How do you transmit a culture that was highly efficient in 10 person to 20 or 100 or 1000 and further, if you’re doing 100% each year
1/2, 1/4, 1/8 haven’t been there for more than 1 year, 2 years, 3, etc..
Most portable of early stage investing – Bill Gurley’s blog on CAC and LTV
Going down unit economic traps are widely applicable to all tech businesses, consumer, enterprise, etc
Can’t drive spreadsheet growth with CAC/inorganic growth for LTV numbers
Product engagement – customers in consumer and enterprise
Benchmark as 5 equal partners at the firm, no juniors or others
Don’t have a NEXT topic that they have to move on to because of this, so open-ended discussions can go very deep
Wide networks so they can get useful people to talk
Probably not a question that they can’t answer
Adam Draper, Founder & CEO of Boost VC (20min VC 2/24/16)
Seed stage accelerator, blockchain and VR
Before Boost, angel invested in 20+ co’s, including Coinbase, Plangrid, Practice Fusion
Geography – heart of SV and ecosystem of entrepreneurs, recently adding V/R to build
Founder of Xpert Financial after UCLA graduation, helping later stage companies raise capital in private markets
Made every mistake – funding, hiring, firing, product
Helped early-stage companies build product and raise capital, including for a friend – wanted to mentor in bulk
As a family, helping people get to where they want to go
Meeting a lot of people while raising money and helping – took him 12 months to raise his fund
$6.6mln after reaching out to 3k, 350 meetings and closed ~35 – basically rule of 10
Had 52 investments in blockchain accelerator (had about ~120 companies) among currency/contracts-based work
Been in industry for 3 years, seeing mature products and higher quality
Mentioned MuggleNet as his favorite blog and TechCrunch
JoyStream by a solo founder, trying to merge BitTorrent / BTC
Coronavirus (a16z 16min on the News #21, 1/29/20)
Judy Savitskaya – 2019-nCoV – 10-20% common cold vs epidemic ones would be severity
Sequencing this virus has been incredibly quick (within 2 weeks of genome) whereas it’s taken longer in past
If someone in SF said they had a cold at a general clinic, they could decide if it’s this or not
Figuring out treatments and protocols based on genome and live medicine
Spike proteins used to enter into lung cells didn’t look as bad as SARS, so they thought it was fine
Turns out that it’s actually very similar to the protein
Nobody really knows – animal sources of viruses (evolving away from human hosts, time in animals)
R0 – number of people you’d expect to get sick for every one person that has it
Breaking down variables in R0 – how well does virus transmit itself (easy in air, for instance)
Is it good at infecting cells? What’s the population like? (Chinese New Year and traveling often)
If virus is not that deadly, additional time in the host that can get infected (individually, if deadly and fast, population better)
Increase in genomic medicine – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations gave out 3 grants to pharma co’s totaling $12.5mln
12-16 weeks time to develop new drugs based on the new sequence
Epic Battles in Healthcare, FICO Changes (a16z 16min on the News #22, 2/6/20)
FinTech GP’s Angela Strange and Anish Acharya
Starting with what is a FICO score – 5 factors: payment history, credit utilization, length of history, new credit, credit mix
FICO 2, 3, and 10 now as FICO comes out with reweighting
1 trillion in credit card debt now, so people refi from 25% to 12% loans, but it doesn’t change user spending habits
Better job of incorporating debt over a long period of time
Designed in 1950s to create a proxy for willingness to pay, originally – now, it’s mostly lenders that have their own algorithms
Good lenders will use FICO as a factor but they have their own robust models
Hacks such as adding kids as authorized users
Old time, 50-100 years credit decisions made on generations, kids play ball with bankers, etc
Bank of Italy (now Bank of America), would make loans to Italian immigrants that other banks wouldn’t lend to
2 drivers – willingness and ability to pay
International vs US – in US, most decisions decided on score/report, not alternative data
In international countries, great way to bootstrap a lending business as a proxy for consumer
Difficult to introduce alternative data in the US , cash flow streams for instance
Epic’s CEO (EHR information on data) letter sent – with Julie Yoo bio GP
Rule that’s been around for 1 year in context of a longer standing law
Opening healthcare records from ONC (Office of National Coordinator for CMS), gov agencies overseeing healthcare spend
21st Century CURES Act – Upton and Waldon – means by which we implement the act (healthcare costs will rise, care will suffer)
Contending with nonprofit orgs with slim margins
Uniquely stored in healthcare data is the doctors’ context (and dialogue) – for what reason would you need the context vs “code”
Connecting data between APIs and interoperability – major concept
Clause in rule about screenshot sharing – contractual obligations not to share screenshots
In trying to see a workflow in a system to connect yours efficiently – one of Julie’s customers at EHR company got hand-slapped for sharing
Annual meeting with OMB and ONC for driving sharing and interoperability – Epic wasn’t there – everyone else, systems, plans, incumbents, big tech, EHRc
HHS secretary was saying that scare tactics won’t affect what they’re looking for
Introduction to ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 (FYI 1/13/20)
James Wang interviewing Cathie Wood, CEO/CIO at ARK Invest
Building on other years – DL, EV, 3D printing, autonomous ride hailing, automation, genome sequencing, digital wallets and Bitcoin
New ones – streaming media, aerial drones and biotech R&D efficiency
Streaming media – changing behavior patterns should catapult the industry, roughly $80-90bn, projecting $400bn+ in next 4 years
Most people couldn’t understand why she was buying Amazon at $5bn cap at her old firm (when no profits)
Believed about their revenues would increase CAGR at 25% for 20 years, deep value play (exp growth wasn’t understood)
Terrible sales out of box retailers – want to survive and go to online
Gaming could consume media, so is value in content or platforms (say, Tencent showing the way, maybe) – larger than box office now
Every time music has come out, it has cannibalized the other, older parts as replacement
Gaming was different – expansive, explosive market as stacking (mobile only added to consoles and others)
Aerial drones – early side of S curve still – released a paper in 2014 suggesting that if FAA would allow Amazon to deliver parcels over 10 mi
Amazon, at that time, could have done it profitably for just $1 per parcel for 5 lb package, for instance
Food delivery now, air taxis / passenger drones and given battery tech, could save 20k lives associated with heart attacks – drone faster than ambulance
Projecting $275bn food delivery (3mi Delivery for cars is about $4.85 – $5) – drones could do it for $.20, profitably
Biotech R&D Efficiency as converging Nextgen sequencing, AI, CRISPR editing
Impact on pharma and biotech sector
Fewer trial failures with DNA sequencing and companion diagnostics for trials, time to market decrease
Human trials, CRISPR is curing things such as Beta-_ and sickle cell (2 people)
Value-based pricing could be installment payments, for every year you live – reduction of trials and drugs to market, higher pricing utility
Margin structure could follow more of 1980s and 90s (mid20-30s) – innovations were exhausted from there, but now should be innovative
CRISPR and gene therapies are delivering great results, cures and evidence of these
AI and software side with mundane, life science has supported SaaS company in Viva – extremely motivated for productivity structure
Most AI companies doing R&D drug discovery are early, M&A ripe – tech in Alpha Go search problems, for instance
Analysts can’t just be healthcare, have to be technology as well – permeating every sector
Over past year, innovation has been highly valued in private space – too few opportunities with too much capital
Private is valued much higher – seeing some disappointments, public markets should be ripe (P/E ratio is not ideal)
5 year opportunities, not 1-2 timeline and finding out how much growth they’re going to deliver
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Nope, I’m asking. Not telling. It’s constantly a challenge.
Let’s see. A will to win. Certain things provide you a much clearer picture of an end goal. In life or careers, there is often always a next step for those that are driven. I know many people that have said it’s not a linear path, and therefore you see steps/ladders that may be uneven. It’s hard to take that into consideration to pursue action, then, especially if you’re back at square one. It must be some secondary motivator that keeps us looking forward.
I have an idea page of things I want to pursue. Talking about potential pursuits may be a first step. Talking with others, another. Writing them down allows a concrete step toward accountability. Then, what’s next? Talk to potential customers, people in the space, people that could be of interest. Design something, wireframe or code out a rough sketch. Maybe it’s something to see how much of a concrete idea it is. Ideas sometimes just need another opinion to spur passion – whatever can provide the spark to go further.
With a next step in a career, an idea written out for the next step can be a good thing. Approaching mentors or potential mentors or bosses (strategically) may be that step of accountability. The more people involved, the more likely that path could be disrupted as incentives to provide clear steps wane. The earlier you find that out, the better. It’s unfortunate but situations and circumstances can change on a whim for anyone, so it compounds with involvement of others. I’ve seen that time and time again with friends.
Now, I hope I didn’t discourage with that last paragraph. That wasn’t my intention. So, here’s some good news – work has become increasingly global with the progression of the internet / web, more so this year. There are more people online sharing, collaborating, open to discussion with minimal work except seeking the communities out. Tools are better organized and more broadly applied to help, and more people are generally sharing their experience for us to pattern match or adjust. Action is the step. Or asking what the action may be. Take it together.
Coach Paul Alexander, Josh Hermsmeyer (Wharton Moneyball 1/22/20)
If you pit OL vs DL – OL is more reliable, similar to pitcher vs batter and pitcher wins
Beane in Moneyball – didn’t have money to spend so he wanted to get shots at college players since they were less random
PFF using survival curves (as time) for measuring lines (from PFF data scientist Timo Riske)
16 of 17 INTs for Mahomes has been < 5 rushers
Coach – more hand-oriented now in passing game than leg-driving or shoulders for the evolution of run blocking
Josh – turned his attention to music and predicting the first song for halftime show
Prop from last year – how long will the national anthem last?
Over time, singer spent on song increased (ARIMA model) and he looked at male and female but female was longer at end
Gladys ended up going over
Billboard is predicting JLo’s most popular song – 20% as Let’s Get Loud or On The Floor (books, too)
Acts don’t often start with the most popular song, they end it
Setlist.fm as going through common starts
Game plan to push as many in the box with the numbers advantage, force Jimmy G to beat them
Some quantitative coaching models at PFF and other places
Mostert as the 2nd fastest athlete in NFL at the line, behind only Lamar Jackson, by mph
Helpful to sit behind someone as QB? (Jimmy, Rodgers, Mahomes) but counters as Peyton (thrown in), Steve Young
Qb as living embodiment of the system, not necessarily ‘system qb’
When do we get a handle on a QB?
Owners as billionaires that earned money in a different industry and hope to be able to transition to teams
Experience may or may not come – putting right people in there, getting lucky with all of the processes
Little edges, enough chances and them adding up together to finally have success while living through the ups and downs
Ian Levy, Michael Hill (Wharton Moneyball 1/29/20)
Super Bowl week, Kobe Bryant death – Shaq statement and Kendrick Perkins clamoring for hatchet to be buried with Kdurant
MJ’s 3 and 2 years off and then another 3 – only had Scottie as the overlap of players
Kobe – 2 rings but 3 straight finals with Pau, sans Shaq, Lebron – taking some poor players and winning rings
Teams and styles that have changed to give credit to the great ones
Sac down 17 points with 2min 49 sec – broke a streak of 8,378 straight games of losses
Dr. Shaili Jain, Prof of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, PTSD Treatment, author of “Unspeakable Mind” (Wharton XM, Future of Everything)
Father was a war vet & born in India, Shaili grew up in England and what she ever knew
Muted emotions, insidious infiltration of how people work, play and create beyond mind and brain
Infiltrates organs, independent risk factors for heart disease, cancer
Too many factors, 1/3 genetic (not on marker-level, though) to determine PTSD levels or exposure
Dose matters – more deployments = more likely, and cumulative effects
Average clinicians outside of VA have a tough time to diagnose & treat whereas vets and exposed know where they can see it
Adherence is much lower in people with PTSD and this is massively under-recognized
Last thing people want to do is talk to therapists – avoided trauma or be cut off, isolated
Health problems often make them lose control
Hippocampus is smaller in those with PTSD (not sure if it’s cause or effect), amygdala (part of brain that controls danger)
Lot of work done in epigenetics, learned behaviors and environment (followed moms that were pregnant during 9/11, escaped)
Work done by Rachel at Mt Sinai to follow their children based on biomarkers – PTSD in them/child
Her take – future is in prevention on three levels – primary, secondary and tertiary
Primary: prevent the traumas and crimes
Lots of people were starting programs that FELT like it worked w/o evidence or metrics for them
How do you train women to defend themselves effectively? If you have it, you can scale and replicate. Still need $
Secondary: before and after trauma – “Golden Hours” – can you intervene to prevent onset of PTSD?
Showing up in ER, instead of waiting for weeks/months/years when they show up to a therapist
Group out of Atlanta’s Emory University in the ER that did RCTs to show those that got prolonged exposure medicine improved
Cortisol recipients had less PTSD compared to those that didn’t – brain can heal quickly, comparatively
Tertiary: integrated care – 10 years prior, she ditched her other-campus psychiatry office to primary care
People show up in primary care, not often in specialty offices, attack head on
Treatment – first line, standard therapy would be talk therapy (prolonged exposure, EMDR – eye movement desensitization & reprocessing)
Focus on dismantling trauma, discussing the event
Biggest body of evidence for this being successful as first-line treatment, discussion capability without emotional/physical stress
Exposure exercises – measurable body response
Meds as second-line treatment (prozac and friends)
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It’s impressive for how much consistency matters, as long as you’re open.
Sometimes, it’s every week. Maybe it’s daily. Maybe more than that? Is it a post? Is it a photo? Tweeting 10x a day? There is probably some magic number for each frequency, based on platform and content that, over time, eventually takes off. I don’t think it’s spelled out because there are likely ranges for each. That’s the beauty of the internet, now. Niches are actually very large – and if you’re consistent in posting about something you enjoy – eventually, if you landed in a sweet spot, you may be rewarded for it. The opportunity arises where you land on an audience of a community you enjoy being a part of – and now you can share at will. It becomes easier to be public.
Maybe the ease by which any of us continue down this path is rooted in the writing or habit itself. Maybe it’s your work. Maybe how you spend your money. A tool you use? Something you picked up knowledge from friends or a trend you happened to stumble on in a podcast that piqued your interest. Any way you draw it up, if you can repeatedly talk about it and enjoy it, it stays the course. If you’re public in a manner that others can find you, you can reach that audience.
It feels like we have plenty of solutions to get this out – it takes the effort of an individual or group of individuals to be motivated enough to repeatedly produce that content. Thankfully, I write a bit here and on Twitter, mostly. Should be more consistent myself. Used to be a part of a weekly podcast. Now I feel like I have ideas to push others – without accountability, it falls off. Groups and communities like Indie Hackers, No-code and Makerpad or other niches on Facebook/LinkedIn/Slack/Discord, Substack or even WordPress here provide that. Seek your people out!
CES 2020 – Screens, 8K, 5G, Cars, Micromobility, Smart Home (16 Minutes News by a16z 1/18/20)
Flexible screens in phones (Samsung), folding – around a business as billboard
Fold and unfold – suboptimal experience for usage of the phone outside of big screens
Phones as biggest volume driver in displays – grow market
Should make folding PC was next step – Dell, Lenovo, Intel (B5 is half A4 – tablet-sized to 11 or 12″ notebook)
Mainstream high-performance folding screens and touch surfaces – everywhere you go
Screens and production process now on Moore’s Law, as well
Production too fragmented, software in tv slows down innovation
8K will happen but it will cost more
WiFi 6, 5G at current and new mm
20 carriers are spending $100bn extra a year to roll this out
Last mile is the battle – IEEE for WiFi – commodity access points, sim cards
Cars stealing show – Sony, this year
Power battery – USB-C is now the AC input of the home
Batteries and storage for energy will be everything very shortly
Rob Salvagno, VP of Corp Dev at Cisco Investments (20min VC 12/30/19)
M&A efforts, investment capital, lead Meraki ($1.2bn acquisition) and AppDynamics ($3.7bn), along with recent Duo ($2.3bn)
Prior investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette
Went to Stanford thinking he wanted to be a doctor, Netscape went public in early days there and wanted a way into tech
Wanted to go into investment banking or consulting – entry into tech was IB, first in SF then in Sand Hill – analyst at DLJ (president at Oracle’s first analyst)
Very transactional without any role or ownership – sent resume into resume @ Cisco . Com and got his role
Investments or M&A, bringing perspective – boom over past decade but we lived through 2000-01 and 07-08
How’s this business model stand up without capital flowing? How’s the CEO going to perform in challenging times? Growth multiple of 20-30x
Capital efficiency: attractive of business model – will look at valuations
Cisco wants to know if they create value in business, what are the levers for that – distribution channel, product within their architecture
Can improve operating model in a few ways – accelerate profitability with Cisco (growing at 30%, but maybe 60%)
Cisco starts with their measure of CorpDev – can they get company to do something that they wouldn’t be able to do with them
Companies think they can often do things on their own – Cisco recognizes the broader source of innovation within VC and outside capital
Strategy first and deal second – work hand-in-hand with biz unit to collaborate with teams inside to shift pov for where to go
Acquisitions can get them there – magic happens with the business units inside Cisco
Motivation for investment wants to make portfolio companies successful to help Cisco
Believe opp to invest in best-in-class company in market that is interesting – tight partnership over 2 quarters or 3 years, shared expectations
High multiple transaction to be avoided isn’t necessarily true
If you’re GM of Cisco Security Business – outside innovation as strategy is fundamental for the business
If you decided acquisition makes sense, have to position it for success inside Cisco from financial, opex, funding position
Levels of approval to CFO, CEO compared to billion-dollar acq with board (mentions AppDynamics acquisition within 3 days of their IPO)
More PE firms getting involved into tech companies is better for the business and more innovation
Multiples that are unprecedented for PE firms
SDRAM, iRAM – 10-12 startups for big market and seemingly new oppy
Cisco had an internal company and went out to talk to startup called MetaCloud
Market started to take off and they looked at M&A – scan of industry, acquired
Cisco has done 200+ acquisitions, knows their mistakes
Platform to accelerate founder visions, they’re also enabled – David Yooliwitch (Founder of OpenDNS, former Cisco investment)
Acquired, 100mln company but David became head GM of Security of Cisco – multibillion
Difficult with Cisco – going from hardware to cloud – belief in a successful transition
Changing about tech industry – entrepreneurs not getting best advice when they need it (first time vs multiple, etc..)
CloudCherry – acq in collab – customer journey and future of work – predictive analytics on contact center (how to deal with customers)
2nd acq – Voicea – AI and ML on top of Cisco portfolio (ex WebEx – transcribe, meeting notes, flag action items agreed and integrate into workflow)
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