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Reflecting on the Year (Notes from March 23 to 29, 2020) December 17, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, social, Strategy, Streaming, Time, training, Uncategorized.
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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.

Gretchen Rubin, Happiness Project Author – Sept 2020

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)
    1. Data Collection – thorough data navigation skills
      1. Where is my data stored?
      2. How large is the data size?
      3. What quantity or quality do I need to launch?
      4. Who manages the data?
      5. When is it updated?
      6. Why is it relevant?
    2. Data Refinement – Large quantities of data are good, but high quality is better – invest in refining data
      1. Who has data insight or dictionaries/features?
      2. What data requires querying, feature engineering or preprocessing? By what techniques?
      3. When will the data be ready to move to next place?
      4. Where will it be stored?
      5. Why will it need to be refined?
      6. How can it be tested/validated for consistent performance?
    3. Data Expansion – With best data, problem may not be solvable. Integrations with APIs, feature enrichment.
      1. Who controls data access?
      2. What budget is available for obtaining more data?
      3. When do you stop expanding or iterating?
      4. Where can you get high quality data sources?
      5. Why are more data features needed?
      6. How do we decide what is most relevant?
    4. Data Learning – Models or features for insights for the product to accelerate the workflow
      1. Who determines the benchmarks for the model?
      2. What ML framework/algos are chosen for what you will predict?
      3. When do you decide that modeling results are ready?
      4. Where will you process the data locally or in cloud?
      5. Why does product/feature require ML?
      6. How much compute time or resources are available to model?
    5. Data Maintenance – Implementing into Production, while the data degrades over time
      1. Who is responsible for making changes to models with performance changes?
      2. What triggers/pipelines/data jobs implemented to monitor quality of data?
      3. If data falls below benchmarks, what do you action?
      4. Where do you commit time in schedule to monitor pipeline for qc?
      5. Why do your data modeling results decrease in quality in production?
      6. 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

Transitioning Broader (Notes from March 16 to March 22, 2020) December 8, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, community, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, social, storytelling, Strategy, Uncategorized, Venture.
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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.

Razor’s Edge (Notes from Feb. 10 – Feb 16, 2020) August 5, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Healthcare, Leadership, marketing, MLB, NFL, Uncategorized.
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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

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Daily fantasy football, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Healthcare, Leadership, NBA, questions, social, sports, Strategy, Streaming, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
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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

Prioritizing Personal Projects (Notes from December 23 – 29, 2019) June 1, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Leadership, marketing, social, sports, storytelling, Strategy, Time, TV, Uncategorized.
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We overestimate what we can do in a short time but underestimate what we can do in a longer period. This has been reiterated by Jamie Siminoff, Bill Gates, many others. It’s telling but a great mantra if you can zoom out and high level back off. Scheduling makes this so much better.

I have wanted for the longest time to get Spotify or another podcast to listen to me in the car and allow me to say something basic like “Make a note 30 seconds ago” and let me review the notes later. This could work for audiobooks or podcasts. Even allowing ebooks and articles to bookmark this type of stuff for where the page is would be useful. But maybe that’s through an API in the podcast or Kindle? I’ll have to see and report back.

In light of planning further career-wise, I have taken it upon myself to take on projects that I plan on making public for analysis sake. As an external consultant, much of my work has been NDA / kept private in general for good reasons (VC firms and start-ups are likely some of the more controlled privacy-wise). Some aren’t, and those are typically the ones that I’ve noticed have a much better, transparent brand or have less questions around their business models. A few things have stood out to me about predictions/forecasting, especially in annual or quarterly time frames that publications will release. I have focused on ML/Fintech/Edtech/Data companies over the last 5 years more heavily, so looking through the Fintech 50, Next Billion Dollar (Unicorn) Startups and Hottest 50 LA Startups. Outside the bay area / silicon valley, scanning through the different ecosystems can be an interesting landscape for focused, scaling and growing startups. LA because it’s still in California, somewhat close proximity but ultimately an alternative driving force than typical elsewhere (namely the bay).

So, I’ll have a chance to update my preliminary thoughts on the year-to-year changes – how many startups dropped off, which proceeded to move up the list, any funding raises, product progress or expansion. Hope you enjoy the notes!

  • Decade in Tech (Wharton XM)
    • 4G entering 2011 compared to 5G now
    • iPad introduction – better than netbook
      • Tablet rampup – Microsoft following with the Slate
    • Social media launching
      • Instagram launch in September 2010 – 2 guys at Stanford
      • Taking photo class from a plastic camera that a professor had given him – best, soft focus and filtered photography
      • Offering to buy Instagram in April 2012 for $1bn
    • Tesla as “gift of light” Model S – first time supercharging across the country
      • Musk took CEO role in 2008 (Model S 2012)
    • WeWork – likeminded individuals wanting to work with others outside of making money
      • Sharing space to be something bigger
      • $16bn in 2016 to pulling IPO in 2019
      • Strength as marketing capability, not necessarily management
    • Controversial events
      • Kendall Jenner at BLM Pepsi commercial
      • United – offering money for ‘volunteers’ until 4 people get off flight
        • $400 voucher and up to $800 – escalation, dragging the Chicago doctor kicking and screaming
        • Many other airlines improving overbookings
    • Ice bucket challenge for ALS – 70k tweets per day at peak
    • A/R rise as it started with Pokemon Go
    • Cutting the chord – rise of unbundling
  • Brant Pinvidic, author of 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More (Wharton XM, Career Talk)
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    • Mostly reminding people of what they’re doing badly / guilty – awareness but wanted to change it to make it productive
    • Help you get as much info in 3 minutes as possible since “elevator pitch” doesn’t really work anymore
      • Meaningful engagement or not now
    • Small ideas not actually small ideas – respect the knowledge of your audience
      • Your excitement is a long history of building information – feed them piece by piece
        • Ex – AirBnb for horses: people that travel with horses need to stick them where they’re going
      • Clarity as super compelling – complications are messed up
    • Don’t open with the hook – audience needs to build into the potential
      • Katy Perry example: more Guinness book of World Record accomplishments, for instance
    • Selling a show in 12 minutes in Hollywood as junior producer between Simon Cowell and Mark Burnett – had gotten down on himself
    • People looking for hook – less dynamic personalities (biotech, oil & gas) that pulls the nervous energy out for why it will be great
    • Bringing an idea to life on post-it with just a few words – see the value come together
      • 25 bullet points to pitch his show as well as he did (core piece of information)
    • Halfway to understanding what the hook is when you can place the hook
  • Jonathan Lai (@tocelot), cnsmr team; Joel De La Garza, CIO at Box (16min on  News #17, 12/20/19)
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    • Star Wars trailer premier in Fortnite – JJ Abrams coming out of Millennium Falcon and asked to choose which trailer
      • Interactive and persistent collaboration with Avengers and now Star Wars (lightsaber)
      • 12 million people showed up for Marshmello’s in-game concert (of 250 million users)
    • Scarcity in a world of abundance – getting people there
    • Brand advertisers have a limited set of options to reach Gen Z – no display ads, billboards, maybe Snapchat or TikTok
      • Hundred hours of watching YouTube or Twitch or in-game events that eventually go out after to share
    • Fortnite’s Chapter 2 server downtime of 3 days as “Black Hole” that went viral and video
    • Security and backdoor encryption – creating escrow keys to get backdoors
      • Can’t create backdoors undermines the trust in general, even if good guys
    • Any discussion around weakening crypto doesn’t make sense
      • Conflation between a few things: we have systems that are built and they should provide backdoors/access to law enforcement
        • Backdoor to phones, for instance
      • Phone uses strong cryptography and backdoor there – focus on cryptography
      • Phone and put in safe – nobody talks about the steel of the safe – access
    • End-to-end encryption vs getting phone stolen, for instance
      • Roger Stone investigation: WhatsApp and Signal to communicate but iCloud turned on which saved all messages anyhow unencrypted
      • Metadata and other encryption can tell you far more than even the messages themselves
    • If you build devices, how much gov access do you want to provide?
      • Joel (grad student, involved in CDN – bad actors, like pedos, would use and work with Interpol to find them)
  • What to Know about CFIUS (a16z 12/23/19)
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    • Committee on Foreign Investment in US on Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, updated in September ’19
    • Katie Haun interviewing Michael Leiter (law firm Skadden Arps) about function to review any foreign investment in US business with natsec concerns
      • 13 agencies ran by Dept of Treasury split between 2 camps: want foreign investment and concerned about security (intelligence, NSA, FBI)
      • Semiconductor moving from US to Japan, for instance, that would limit Japanese investments
    • CFIUS limiting in 2006 for Saudi Arabia and Emirates and now is Chinese investment in the US
      • Changes in technology, expansion of data and things that weren’t present even 10 years ago
      • Tech, data touch, real estate, work with US gov or anything else (dog food sold to SEALs)
    • Everyone working in fintech, credit reports, broad financial data will have more than a 16-digit credit card number and will be subject
      • 1 million people for arbitrary amount of data
    • Prior to CFIUS reform, if Alibaba acquired someone, it was up to both parties to submit to CFIUS – vast txns were never seen, no req
      • Both parties come together, transaction description, foreign acquirer, motivation, business reason
        • Good, very bad (president can veto using Article 2), can impose mitigation for sec risk (board of US citizens, data controls, etc)
      • Pieces of reform that are not voluntary – fines and compliance possible
      • Mandatory if company operates in sensitive sector listed, or produce/design export control tech
        • Includes encryption, investment over some size – mandatory filing
        • High-end types of LIDAR – controlled vs standard for automobile, not controlled
      • Could range from (ER99 not, or export-controlled) – computing power, battery storage, sensors
      • Software tends not to fall under CFIUS unless encryption
    • WSJ civil military cooperation – some stuff is mandatory and more stuff will be
    • US business – interstate commerce, could be French office with US office in US – CFIUS gets to look at US element of transaction if French company is picked
      • Green-field investments – foreign investments can be made and won’t be looked at, really
      • Ultimate parent and ultimate ownership of acquirer or investment (private equity, capital)
    • More than 9.9% equity or some other controlling interest – board seat, for instance
  • Josh Sapan, CEO AMC Network (Wharton XM)
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    • Challenging to get through people’s gateways to get to audiences
    • Base incumbent business for United States – affiliates, selling ads and that represents their financial fundamental part of company
      • Video prices coming down in different options
      • Spending less money on AMC Networks in the skinny bundles
    • Toughest marketplace for Netflix to deal with – Indonesia, as CEO said
      • Vertical scaling vs horizontal
  • Adam D’Augelli (@adaugelli), Partner at True Ventures (20min VC 12/16/19)
    true-ventures-logo

    • Investments in Fitbit, Peloton, Hashicorp, Splice, Ring, Automattic, Tray.io
    • Instructor at Uflorida in Business Finance, founder of Perfect Wave Records (donations)
    • Full-time in June 2010, 10 people total about to invest in second fund
      • Met them through vstocksolutions portfolio company (had worked there internship)
      • Reached out potentially – didn’t know where to start at intersection business/finance/tech – UF not as well-known
      • Phil had offered a role – we like you but haven’t hired someone as junior so come and we’ll see
    • Joining as a young one – new firm where you have a ton to do and roles not really defined, structured
    • Thinking about portfolio construction and business models (under-represented in vc discussions)
      • Fund-level returns for partners – funds at True are around $300mln with specific institutional capital at pre-seed, seed
      • Investments $500k-$3.5mln targeting 20-25% ownership, $2mln for 22.5%
      • Self-selection bias for why they have a better way for them
    • They back founders early, invest $1-3mln and try to own 20-25% where the downside is 1% and it will be a maximize risk for timing
    • 28 people twice, 8 people three times for the founders they’re backing now
    • Amy Errett – starting Madison Reed, wanted $2mln to get off ground for equity
    • In ’06, convincing founders to try not to raise as much
    • Lead investment amount – meaningful bias for single lead with deep pockets
      • New group of firms that will work with emerging founders where they can bring others in, potentially
    • Ring or Splice are interesting businesses now, but in earliest stages, True able to support them through risks at start
    • In each fund, make 45-50 initial investments and reserve heavily
      • 1 or 2 founders, investment in company, will generate the whole fund and 6-8 will be fund-level return (25%+)
      • Inputs to each investment: founder taking tons of product, market size market-risk at their price and raising their type of money
    • Culture at True: decisions done by protagonist with support of 1 or 2 others in nonconsensus way
      • Support for whole team and company – investment loss as part of process for repeatable out-performance
      • 1 of 10 says the company fits the model, bring on team and then get excited
    • Investing at seed stage – 65% near or at company inception, 1 to 3 founders super early
      • Board is access to True, investment team and founder network – monthly call for an hour or so, call me when you learn
      • Board coffees – 15min conversations on this – enable for speed
      • Take board seat at series A – 90 minutes every 8 weeks, roughly, when they have multiple investors, etc…
    • Select funds – pitch to founders: be here day 1, continue to invest as you go further, what’s best for company
      • He was on board at Ring during acquisition – partner John still on at Peloton
    • Learned a ton from Jamie Siminoff – how fast you can grow is much faster than you think
      • Taking asymmetric risk early on within business is valuable – ex. DoorBot – Jamie rebranded
        • Ring.com domain found, was going to raise $3.5 mln – ultimate cost was $1mln ($200k on that day)
    • Favorite book: Doing Capitalism in Innovation Economy by Bill Janeway and Carlota Perez Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
    • Biggest challenge in role: Doing more doesn’t correlate with improved performance – Mitchell and Hashicorp had left a portco and later invested in him
      • Steve and Splice – met in Bogota at a conference and happened to meet him in NYC for breakfast after
      • Don’t know which activities are the right ones
    • Knowing more about a market – false sense of security to catch up with knowledge
      • Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable – academic paper – markets in many unknowns where knowing more leads to worse decisions
    • David Scott at Matrix – software metrics and repeatable business growth
    • Randy Glide at DFJ Growth – embraces risk and has a human approach
    • Andy Wiseman at USV – small significant syndicate being a great co-investor
    • Pat at Sequoia – depth of knowledge on being a great board member and partner to CEOs
    • Recent investment: MemBio – mission-driven bio and positive impact creating red blood cells outside the body

Listening and Encouraging (Notes from December 16 to Dec 22, 2019) May 21, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, DFS, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, Leadership, NFL, NLP, RPA, social, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized.
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Sometimes it doesn’t work. Asking the right questions to people in conversations to get a sense of what they’re truly passionate about gives me hope for those that may eventually try something different, new. However, unless I followed up repeatedly, most people let their passion slowly pass, or just remain in thought.

This is a big part of how I learn, engage and stay passionate for the things I’m curious about. Other than being scared of stagnation, hearing people come up with ideas, test them, build and hopefully succeed repeatedly gives me an energy to try to convince others to do the same. I understand the difference between being told of something that has been mulling around in someone’s head or even light discussion among friends compared to prototyping or validating with potential customers or asking people in the field if something’s viable.

A few examples of ideas people have told me they wanted to start and hadn’t (yet some that I believe have done well, just have room in the market) include an HR in Tech stories podcast, traveling medicine / tourism aggregator, and a d2c ecommerce diamond shop (which I’ll go into more detail), more social podcast sharing among friends, and still a market-taking happy hour app (yes, I had to insert my own – I’m leaning toward Glide.app through Google Sheets).

For diamond shop – this was by someone who graduated with entrepreneurship degree, had a validation for the idea and then was told by others it wasn’t worth doing because it’d be high cost. Granted, that was a few years ago, but it would’ve been hackable then. It’s certainly easier now with ecommerce shops via Facebook/Etsy/Shopify and other support, not to mention the audience you’d be in front of. The premise is that a diamond historically took the role of what a pearl represented because of the hardness – you could pass this on as an heirloom to further generations, and you know it won’t be breaking. It’s yours. There’s a legitimate attachment there that defines a core part of the worth/value. For the idea – it’s increasingly cheaper to 3D print a model you can build/customize on CAD (or related tools). This would be printed in plastic that can be melted to be replaced by silver – these rings would be sent to customers that are ordering (possibly with a small down payment / shipping covered, ie $5-20). It’s a model of what the ring would look like, just without the diamond part – but as far as sizing/size/bulk and the other key parts of the ring, customers can try them on and feel it. There’s an emotional attachment here that should occur. If they’re loving it, or have requests for changes, they can do that. Possibly a back and forth could take place, but once it’s settled, the wax/plastic mold can be printed as they would normally do a custom ring and use the materials that have been requested. We’ve removed the in-shop aspect and made it personal, simply by removing much of the fixed costs and labor costs that would go in to this. She was an expert in jewelry and had years of experience. Someone just told her no. 3D printing is now a hobby and can be done there. Many jewelers have other shops do the molding. I’ve been thinking of helping her start by just simply creating a mockup of the site. Can certainly figure out the rest.

Anyhow, let’s see the notes.

Week of December 16, 2019

  • Tyler Willis (@tylerwillis), angel investor (20min VC 2/16/16)
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    • Raised with seed companies at Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures
    • Port co’s include Lyft, Patreon, Change.org
    • First co that he was on founding team on was acquired by Oracle, then had a friend raising a seed round for concept in CV
      • Preproduct, premarket where he did a small investment (decided it was bad to keep all eggs in one basket)
      • Decided to invest in Patreon, Loungebuddy (Airport lounges) and ShopApp inside of Shopify
    • Rocketship – valuation doesn’t play a role but ID opps for big (10x path, seed > 10k)
    • Customer acq and growth as a lightweight process to get a core part of the company
      • Optimizing for experiments – 1 week to test compared to 8 week deployment
    • Founder type – uniquely insightful to the place they’re in
      • Bias for people when he can sit down and get a high-octane thinking / smarts – hard to hang out to the rocketship
      • False dichotomy of domain expertise – could have learned wrong lessons or may not know anything in enterprise, for instance
    • East of Eden, Innovator’s Dilemma as great books
    • Favorite investors – Naval, Sam Altman, Gus Tai at Trinity Ventures
    • Favorite app – Omni (stuff storage), Delectable (learning about wine)
  • Ash Fontana (@ashfontana)- GP Zetta, Leo Pelovets – GP Susa Ventures (Venture Stories 12/17/19)
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    • Getting pricing power – need to find balance between incentivizing founders and price, but not a big deal
      • If they get 80% of company, 20% for founders – may not keep them looking ahead
    • Company and VC differences – companies have different roles but VC has very similar, solitary roles
    • On non-investing side, COO or Head of Ops to run operations but not particularly CEO or investing side needed
    • Working with best founders, LPs aren’t as important (but they are the primary VC customers)
      • None matters unless you have results for LPs and providing value – founders need the platform or help
    • If you were an LP, what would you want to be in: YC, First Round or Benchmark?
      • YC for Ash – lots of opportunity for capital deployment at many different levels
      • Benchmark for Leo – very large differentiated returns, ~30x according to Leo (YC may be 5x-7x possibly)
        • More variance because of smaller portfolios in Benchmark
      • YC may be beatable but it would be in losing their way as a general accelerator
        • Ash brought up operational risk for LPs – more points of failure because of all the touchpoints
    • AngelList as trading to be profitable and dynamic system for new things
    • LinkedIn as insurmountable lead in enterprise/business space of social network (as opposed to consumers)
      • Hard to disrupt with multiple verticals
    • Requests for startups: data generation/building data (synthetically) – ex w/ params
      • 10k examples of chairs that are brown that have 4 legs, in low light, at this angle
      • Weather climate, also
      • AutoML – making it easy for non-specialist engineers to experiment with ML
    • Leo Requests: ISA with bundling with coaching, training, VISAs – realigning incentives
  • Ben Tossell, founder Makerpad, Sahil Lavingia (@shl), founder GumRoad (Indie Hackers 11/11/19)
    5db04ceea0aa2b500db953c9_makerpad-sharing-image

    • No-code vs code – building a solution to a problem without being technical
    • First web-sites like Dreamweaver and tables for no-code – like WYSIWYG
      • Halfway things like WordPress where you can customize or use framework
      • Building a newsletter, can use Substack, for instance – Marc Andreesen
    • Sahil’s opinion that we’re unlikely to see a billion dollar start-up without a code base
      • But likely to see many creatives build on their own, have the options
    • Choice of no-code compared to code – using Circle as their integration testing methods
    • Nontechnical founders that had cofounders for developers or finding for cheap
    • Ben as bringing up Lambda School (Airtable, Slack, Zoom, Notion) and Makerpad member who was just starting to say it’s breaking
      • $150mn in Series A to get to worry about things breaking first
      • “What’s my Airbnb version look like?” but should focus on the first $10, 100 before there
      • gumroad-logo-retina
    • GumRoad as being built in a weekend – not competent enough for him to do no-code
      • Ben argued it was easy to do in no-code but they’re each discussing the same thing from different experiences
    • Queries on data for code – tools like Clay/Retool where you can work together – can run queries easily
      • No-coder does query and can recognize it to manipulate
    • Powerful for on-code is git and version controls – clear log of security, feedback, quality of code
      • Apply it to other things – pull requests/merge (conflicts)/conflicts in document setting on Notion, for instance
      • 100+ tutorials in MakerPad now – what’s interesting or grab attention
    • No-code as Patreon/Cameo/Airbnb/Uber where the overhead for coding sucks so much value from (Patreon at $30-40mln burn)
      • Creator would be interesting with price-motivating factors because you could have a more affordable option
      • “What’s the point of trying if I can’t even get to the ceiling?”
      • Meetup clone – need the “this is how you build it” – go look at the tutorials
    • Not enough answers for “Where can it go?” because they haven’t seen enough
  • Niccolo De Masi (@niccolodemasi), CEO and Chairman at Glu Mobile (20min VC 2/18/16)
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    • Kendall and Kylie game (#1 at app store at time), Kim K game, Deer Hunter and others
    • Was CEO at Hands on Mobile as well as CEO at Monstermob Group Plc
    • No money to be made in games in 2003 because they were for feature films, polyphonic, true tracks and he ran a public co before selling in 2007
      • Raised money to get bid for Glu from Hands on Mobile but got a call from Egahn Zander to transition to paid from f2p as CEO
      • Original IP value with games specifically for mobile on hardware
    • How will you make money in late-stage startup for future? Next year or two vs past.
      • Forward looking and professional managers – no founders anymore. Built from 350-850 people.
    • Moore’s Law as quite predictable but believes there are different models, utilities, and price models
      • Last gen console power in pockets now
    • Barometer of quarterly calls driving placements and interim 6 week calls for how they’re doing
      • If transparent in bad times, you may have quick punishment vs window-dressing
      • Rewarded more quickly in the upside, as well – private markets vs public markets
    • New startups as worth more than incumbents – bay as more regular here
      • Well ahead in private markets compared to public markets (his counter – at least they have earnings)
    • No BD or CorpDev – scour market and wait for inbounds of compellingly priced assets (often distressed), significant private markets
      • When Glu is $6-7, they can pick up companies easily but not so much at $2-4
      • Savings to be had for core customers when they have scale within Glu (mentioned PlayFirst)
      • “retirement community for young people” – startups subsidized, food, clothing and sharing app
    • By 2020 – more discipline in different sectors potentially – overvalued will have to come in line
      • King that was acquired by Activision Blizzard – consolidation forced by VC funding and people flow
    • Better to be #1 in smaller market than #10 in a larger one – be great w/ you’re good at
  • Tim Draper (@timdraper), founding partner at Draper Associates and DFJ (20min VC 2/22/16)
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    • Original suggestion for viral marketing in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market
      • Standard marketing technique now
    • EE at Stanford before going to Apollo Computer as assistant to President before HBS
      • Came out and wanted to be a VC (grandpa/father both were VCs and didn’t want to do it) – wanted to be a consultant / cheerleader
      • Helped him having an entrepreneurial base but some can certainly do it if it’s your goal
    • Borrowed money from gov to get started – knocked on doors with software on them
      • Most VCs needed others to help fund a company so they worked together – moreso now for angels, but not necessarily VC because of money
      • VC has gone global and has enjoyed that expansion – affecting the whole industry
    • His son’s accelerator, Boost, focusing so they can accelerate any business – he enjoys investing in 2-3 people with a good mission
      • Get people set up in the right way – medical, eshares, network accounting, and other operational methods
    • Favorite pitch – Nicholas Zenstrom at Skyper – most smooth, effective way and he’d agreed before calling and changing business model
      • Enthusiastic, quiet confidence for the enormous successes – Robin Lee (Baidu), Hotmail’s founder, Martin Everhart (Tesla)
    • Draper Uni of Heroes (entrepreneurs/founders) creating school during crash for better people
      • Give these people the confidence + tools while ridding them of shielding
      • DraperUniversity and StartupU – great marketing for school
    • Bitcoin interesting for a year ahead of the time, and then post-Mt Gox hack it went down only 20% so he jumped in
      • Micropayments, fees in journalism and podcasting as well as ending credits and cross-country
    • Enjoys hearing Andreesen, Moritz, McClure at 500 Startups, Plug-n-Play as first incubator, Ron Conway
    • Reflects on The Startup Game (his father’s) and Rothschild’s Bionomics and concept of evolution of econ and bio
    • Recent investment Laurel & Wolfe (interior decorating as best furniture for crowdsourcing) – closed update Dec ’19
    • Also invested in Favor, marketplace food delivery – acquired by HE Butt Grocery
  • Brandon Deer (@bdeer26), VP of Ops & Strategy at UIPath (20min VC 12/20/19)
    og-image-orange

    • Using RPA combined with business processes for automation
    • Using Gary Kasparov’s loss to IBM in chess before saying it’s no longer a chess or human – combination where average + average is optimum
    • Having growth and breaking things
  • Wharton Moneyball, Ken Pomeroy and Brian Burke (@bburkeespn) (Wharton XM)
    • Discussing the biggest predictors, NCAA basketball or in football
    • Pomeroy and how he’s adjusted his football predictions

Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, cannabis, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, gym, Leadership, marketing, NFL, NLP, questions, social, Strategy, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
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It had been a long while – 9? months since taking more than 1 day off extra and closer to 20 months since I’d had a week off in a row. I visited the Big Island in Hawaii and stayed primarily on the west side of the island. Gorgeous weather and awesome beaches will bring me back, hopefully shortly.

I want to write a bit further about the escape, but I also want to get these notes out, so I’ll write further in later this week – Thursday.

Enjoy these notes on some of the fascinating people of Eniac Ventures, other investors, founder of EasyPoint, ReSolve quant, research professors, former professional football player and a Nascar driver.

  • Hadley Harris (@Hadley), Founding GP at Eniac Ventures (20min VC 2/3/16)
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    • First mobile venture, Soundcloud, Airbnb, Vungel
    • 2x entrepreneur in mobile – Vlingo (acq by Nuance for $225mln) and Thumb (acq by Wipulse)
      • Was one of first employees and execs running marketing and bd while working with product
    • Worked at Samsung and Charles Rivers Ventures
    • Studied engi & math as undergrad @ Penn, joined MSFT & Samsung
      • His 2 really good friends at Penn and him came together for Eniac in 2009
      • Mobile – next place for computing – cleantech was hot at that time, as well
    • SF was 50%, NY as 25% and the rest was elsewhere – won’t lead but will do a pro rata and be key in fundraising for next
    • Living & breathing the co – coming to right valuation, inevitable for down or flat rounds
    • 18-24 months from seed to series A or pre-seed to seed – funds becoming more institutionalized
      • Leading rounds for Eniac at $1.2 – $2mln
    • Favorite book: Freakanomics, read it in one sitting
    • Tools: gmail, relayedIQ for deal tracking, as todo list, also
    • Don Valentine – godfather of VC, great investors but great entrepreneurs and fund raisers
    • Favorite blog: Nuzzel – curation of reposts
    • Underhyped: mobile enterprise; Overhyped industry: big fan and he does work in social, but lot to weed through
    • Most recent investment: Phhhoto – knew the founders, they’d known each other for a while, great design and numbers – self-funded
  • Zach Resnick (@trumpetisawesom), founding EasyPoint (IndieHackers #130, 10/28/19)
    easypoint2

    • Iterating your way to founder-product fit, currently at 10 people, 5 full-time, $600k ytd with 15% yoy organic growth
    • Traveled, worked and lived abroad in Jerusalem before school, infected with wanderlust
      • CC churning and manufactured spending while he was learning at school in Ohio – VISA gift cards to $1k
    • Banking often makes more money on the chance that you’ll become a customer for other areas of business (mortgage, checking account, brokerage, etc)
    • Started when he was 19 – would give advice to parents/family/friends on the year before getting an hourly rate for paying customer as consultant
      • Enjoyed his help, he liked helping others – he was getting $1k/mo from hourly before going up
      • Consulting clients – he was helping optimize for business or vacation trip for the points
    • Started Land Happier to solve a problem of having everything in one place
      • Cultural norms, transportation, 6 other things for information in a fun and compelling app product (MVP on app store)
      • Wasn’t solving a problem that nobody has, but nobody would pay for – product/founder fit wasn’t there, either
    • What he wants – enjoys negotiating, strategic thinking, interesting conversations and sales moreso than product focused than customer focused
    • While working on Land, he productized his consulting – generally was helping family friends that were parents’ age
      • Amount of effort he was putting in compared to the value wasn’t the same – not high enough
      • Started to focus on small business or medium enterprise owners to put spending on the right cards and get 6 figures on spend return
      • Focused on people he knew through referrals, points optimization plans for small owners – acquisition and spending for more value
    • Early stage owners – hey, this isn’t free
    • Playing poker for relatively high stakes – teaching important principles, statistics, risk management and psychology
    • Consulting to productized consulting service – had a family friend with small business who would see a $50k in increased return on spend
      • He could do a quick analysis and understand business more, try to get a customized points optimization plan for points
      • Small business owners are leaving 1.5%, maybe 2.5% on the table – using points better for things you already want to do
    • Providing value but people didn’t know what it is or weren’t hurting – show them math for 5 figures within a year saving
      • Guarantee: if you sign up points optimization plan, if he doesn’t get you double what his fee is within first year, he gives money back and $10k
      • Making people aware of the problem was going to be a lot of work – never really got off the ground for outbound
        • Was just a way to make money, not necessarily grow it really fast – customers’ needs
    • Concierge service now (v3 EasyPoint) focusing on business and first-class international long-haul service
      • Over whatsapp and telegram groups – makes a flight request and they get back to them 24/7
      • They use miles and points that they buy from clients and then use those to book for others
      • Brokers buying all kinds of points and miles – so the arbitrage there contained issues with ToS and such
        • They’re buying transferable points like Chase / AMEX directly to frequent flier accounts
    • Working for someone else – interned with The Points Guy and when he was looking at doing it, he posted on the Facebook group
      • Cameron, now their COO, was very good – would he want to have his hires over for dinner?
      • Team of 10 now: Cameron manages concierge, growth marketing (5 on team, looking for Asia now)
        • Part-time business development consultants, full-time that have been searching
      • Revenues and loans for growth/cash flow, venture debt and possibly equity raise
    • Concierge service with product-market fit and being focused – enterprise value of $100mln probably but not billions
      • Not much needs to be tweaked for core product – fund raise would be for a different product
        • Help consumers decide on if they want to use their points or cash when booking – trying to automate this for concierge/back-end
        • Chrome extension and booking engine to use or not – this may be billion dollar opportunity
  • Andrew Butler, ReSolve’s Head of Quant Research (Gestalt University, 10/2/19)
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    • Machine learning in markets: Silver bullet or Pandora’s box
      • Unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning differences in application or finance
    • Student of mathematics, physics in undergrad, keen on not memorizing a lot of stuff – enjoyed the applied side
      • Oil reservoir simulators that modeled tidal flow in Bay of Fundy, wind turbines in giant field for optimization
      • Next step was working on a sub problem of simulators – complex, computationally expensive and trying to optimize NPV in 60d oil field
        • Navigating the nonlinear, nonconvex solutions – how to make a reasonable model approximation by sampling sparse reps of simulator
    • How would simulator/emulator apply to financial world in momentum and moving averages
      • Sample distribution would fit well to out-of-sample distributions in physical world but finance wouldn’t – nonstationary
      • Caused him to use simpler models, momentum models (and transformations) and ensembles of simple factor models
        • Mean-variance optimization, error maximizing, in-sample won’t perform well out of sample
    • Wanted formal training in financial engineering, so went and got a MFE
    • Practitioner compared to theorist – after a conference talk, his construct was mean-variance was same as regression
      • Subspace reduction and regularization as identical terms for mean-variance
    • Machine Learning as 3 subspaces
      • Unsupervised learning -> clustering and dimensionality reduction
        • Targeted marketing, customer segmentation and in finance: signal processing, optimization or portfolio construction
        • Trying to uncover relationships/groupings/clusters contained within a dataset
      • If total error is dominated by bias, it’s likely overly simplistic – X as model complexity and Y as Total Error (Bias / Variance)
        • Increase complexity, bias term can decrease, increasing the variance (instability/overfitting)
  • Kelly Peeler (@kellypeeler), founder / CEO NextGenVest (20min VC FF#034, 2/5/16)
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    • College Money mentor, empowering students to live full lives, history of financial crisis for motivation to start
      • Went over to Iraq, started and enabled some companies to build there in 2012
    • Went to JPMC after graduating to make some money before starting NGV for students
    • Financial organization to financial efficiency – going from Mint (organizing money for a user’s financial lives)
      • Now people need efficiency – time priority, optimizing time through automation and personalization
        • Leverage trust to improve time in the background (automation and not wanting to have to look)
    • High school trust and students have nobody they can trust for guidance – 8% trust banks and financial institutions
      • If you can build a product/service, on your way to building trust
        • Save users time, money, customized experience
    • Serving their customers with SMS and Snapchat – smarter push notifications for the right service in the right way
      • Couldn’t customize communication inside an app, so they did channels that they chose
    • NGV clubs at high schools across country – new high schools brought in, engagement and grassroots
    • First product that they brought on was for the financial literacy test that 17 states need
    • Favorite book: The Thank You Economy – best people outhustle to get more customers
    • As visual person, can focus on 1-3 things at a time – preps in the evening, large index cards
    • Adam Nash at Wealthfront – build trust with dynamics of product and the culture of company
    • Spent too much time at focusing her weaknesses but has tried to get better on that side
  • Sam Yagan (@samyagan), Starting OkCupid, Sparknotes (Wharton XM, Marketing Matters)
    • Turning down consulting job for OkCupid start – told he was crazy but wanted to take the chance
      • Free model and how do you value customers but competitors were Match and eHarmony
      • Had to get enough people on all sides of the market and then could use the data to help
    • Internet wasn’t designed to take an expert’s ideas and just use those – bigger than that
      • “You know what you want.” We’ll pull it out and figure it out.
      • Google comparison – index all the pages and figure those out to place on first page
      • Creating a platform to ask all the questions and focus on them
    • Sold Sparknotes in 11 months, took OKCupid 8 years (sold to Match, was there for a year)
      • Got the job running the company for another 3.5 years as Match CEO and created Tinder
  • Rob Gronkowski (@robgronkowski), All-Pro tight end (The Corp, 10/1/19)
    • A-Rod investing into Rob’s brother’s, Chris, company Ice Shaker
      • Were able to put money in, along with Mark Cuban, when they were on Shark Tank (all brothers)
      • Rob, upon retiring, bought Arod out of his shares in the business with Chris
    • Fitplan – Arod gave Rob a discount on the shares in Ice Shaker and he just wanted Rob to look through his company
      • Rob invested with Arod – parents were in business (gym equipment for retail/commercial for 28+ years)
    • Kraft being an owner for the team and being around the game – interested in everything
      • Rare to see owners in the locker room and talking with players – many players say they’ve never seen others
      • Brady, Kraft and Belichick as being the greatest people and diagnosing problems/plays and adjusting
    • Rob wants to travel – done a lot in the US
      • Traveling a week from that day to Israel with CEO Barry of CBDMedic there
    • Being reckless as single Gronk in the NFL (loves Camille now, though)
  • Horst Simon (@hdsimon), Chief Research Officer at LBNL (Curious Investor 9/3/19)
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    • Difference between ML and programming – validity of an email, for instance
      • Computer looks for “@” and domain name, iterative of if-then’s, marking valid or invalid
      • ML – give details of valid and invalid email addresses and have the computer figure it out with a statistical model for rules
        • Relationship between information
      • ML more as being able to see if something is a cat in a picture – hard to program that
    • Helped establish the Berkeley supercomputing center – big role all across the world now to complement theory by simulations
    • More data than ever before, 90% of digital data created in last 2 years – more in 2018 than all of human history
      • Finance can’t generate more data like autonomous cars, for instance (100 cars means 100 more data points)
      • Markets/economics are dynamic – return predictions of signal:noise approaches zero
        • Driven by economic features of markets – competitive, profit-seeking traders that act on it
      • HFT as real barriers to entry so they’re less efficient and more predictable, potentially
      • Quantitative traders don’t use raw data – they use transformations such as log of equity, cross-sectional rank of book to market ratio
        • Neural network tries to find what the best transformations are (X -> Y and explore all the connections)
    • Bonds example: predict if issuer will default or not with firm information using random forest
  • Rajiv Shah (@rajcs4), Data Scientist @ Data Robot, Adjunct Prof UChicago (DataSkeptic, 10/22/19)
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    • Started engineering, studied philosophy and law, PhD in Comms before doing research as academic
      • Worked at State Farm and Caterpillar before going to Data Robot
    • Deep learning applications in motion data like NBA player data, motion tracking arms and legs (PoseNET, for instance)
      • Nature paper published that used deep learning to study after-shock patterns for earthquakes
    • Going through paper – simple starting point or baseline model was skipped – how much value is really added, then?
      • Looking at the 6-layer problem – approach wasn’t unexpected when using keras to add layers
      • Results generated: AUC of 0.85 compared to naïve benchmark of simple, physical model – AUC of 0.58
      • When he reproduced it, test set results were higher than training set – yellow or red flag for model
    • Group partitioning – 130 earthquakes happening right after each other, near each other and related
      • Make sure the information for an earthquake/customer doesn’t get split between training / test sites to avoid leakage
      • Basic grounding of fundamentals for setting up initial training data, partition based on time to avoid that, as well
    • As community, ensure that there are best practices and guidelines – reproducibility as a large problem lately
      • How to police boundaries for the general field – influence of institutions in publishing (for this, Harvard/Google/Nature mag researchers)
      • Good from them: the data and model for the code was freely available and he could do it on his laptop / notebooks
      • Academics from the earthquake field reached out to him with some qualms and he’s partnered with them for a blog on efforts
    • Interpretability focus trade-off with accuracy – that he’ll speak on at Open DS Conf
      • Lots of tools for explaining models with transparency now, though
  • Julia Landauer (@julialandauer), NASCAR driver (Stanford Pathfinders, Wharton XM)
    • Being on Survivor (suggested by a friend while Soph in college), racecar driver
      • Picking Stanford because of so many people that were awesome / ambitious
      • Mentioning Andrew Luck saying that this was why he chose it – people wouldn’t particularly care
    • Driving at such a young age and in Manhattan – not getting a license there until 18 on campus
    • Having to pitch and learn how to pitch at a young age for sponsorships, running a team and the cost, even at minors – $500k+
    • Some 12 female drivers and being competitive

Find Your Own Value (Notes from Nov 4 to Nov 10, 2019) January 21, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Blockchain, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
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One of my favorite pieces and follows on Twitter of the last 3 months has been Tyler Tringas, founder of Earnest Capital. He came to realize that there existed a massive opportunity to fund companies that may not require or need the VC model of capital infusion – just a starter amount to do testing, easiest when people look to make sales and revenues early (maybe not the model for certain industries – marketplaces/user-dependent network effects not-withstanding).

Wild for micro and seed funding, when companies have yet to establish a true product-market fit or business model each time, typically stick with one financing style. I wonder how much innovation has been restricted by the funding style. There are advantages and disadvantages for each of those. But I’ve yet to come across more than 2-3 VC’s (out of 1000s) that do multiple and have a separation / adjustment. Makes sense from the LPs sense, but not necessarily if you want the companies to be SOMEHOW getting to a growth/scale that fits.

Less Annoying CRM Tyler King was cognizant about the capital and efficiency standpoint in business – everyone that doesn’t create value seemed expendable. Those that did will make it. I find that an important takeaway and general attitude toward either doing your own thing or being a part of a bigger company.

Hopefully each of these excite everyone enough to check the fantastic people/content out further!

  • Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas), founder of Earnest Capital (Indiehackers #131, 11/1/19)image02

    • Funding for entrepreneurs, founders, outside of the ecosystem – profitable and sustainable
      • Not competing with other options – just found a large group of bootstrappers that aligns with the goals
      • RBF doesn’t work for some
    • Green field space in the past – no competitors and could gobble the market – big risk early but if it’s worked, it can be massive
      • Launching and building became cheaper and more niche for diversifying the opportunities – limiting VC scale
      • When he sold his first business, he handed over his Stripe account, Github and Roku
    • Software companies – no retail shop meant your option was “raise money” = “raise venture capital”
      • If you were doing a bakery or something, you had a plethora of options
    • 5 years ago, he was one of the loudest critics and blogger
      • If he was bootstrapping, can you work backwards and what would you have wanted to work with
        • Is it actually a fit for you
      • No board seat, mentors for long-term
    • Raise money when you believe the money will unlock value in the business
    • Had Storemapper – where he figured out what he wanted to do next
      • Derek Sivers – Tarzan move – need the second vine before letting go of the first vine
      • Pivoted to finance to do finance models behind wind/solar farms
      • Then to micro SaaS Indiehacker before noticing people struggled to get businesses off the ground early (his $50k cc debt)
    • His basic bet is that it’s not an iron law of physics that 90% will fail
      • His fund will fail if it is an iron law – and his investors are aware of this
      • He believes the VC model is circular in that if you require growth is 11% a month for 12+ months, more likely to become unicorn
        • But if they don’t hit that, then they’re failing
    • Really interested in niche markets for a piece of software that serves a market – eg Hostify, Endcrawl post-production credits, etc
  • Tyler King (@lessannoyingcrm), cofounder of Less Annoying CRM (Indie Hackers #128, 10/21/19)
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    • Bouncing between companies after college, had joined a startup that grew after Series A, only to be acquired
      • Everyone was fired except for 5 cheapest employees (including him)
    • Marketing channels not working – word of mouth, sometimes paid ads, Google AdWords or Facebook
    • Customer support – competitive advantage as going slow, not being held to revenue standards
      • Can focus on customer service and product features
  • Maren Bannon (@maren_bannon), cofounder & Partner at Jane VC (50inTech Podcast #11)
    https3a2f2fblogs-images.forbes.com2fcarisommer2ffiles2f20182f102fjane-vc-logo-text

    • Cold-pitching VC – for cold emails, take time to research the investor and explain why they’d be interested
      • Adjacent industries, past role in competitive area, resonating project
    • Nailing the one-liner / 10 second offering in a sentence
    • Bullet points, succinct including certain things
      • Traction for user/revenue/notable customers
      • Advocates, angels with industry expertise
    • Why you? Brief description for the ideal team.
    • Include an ask – why are you contacting? Advice, seed round, etc…
    • Include right materials (letter can be brief, but more info attached or deck or 1-pager)
  • Ok Boomer, Microtransactions (16min on the News by a16z #13, 11/3/19)
    • NYT Taylor Lorenz – (perennially behind others but gets credit for the writing of it)
    • Taking on a meme, protest for what’s rigged – Gen Z affected by Boomers “hurting us”
      • How memes can turn into clothing, sales for songs, be further monetized
      • Social media generating social phenomenon and transactions and merchandise
        • V1 was ad-based, then quasi-based for sponsored ads (protein powers and such), direct transactions for monetizations
        • Can get demand and feedback for multiple types of merchandise before launching and sending out efficiently
    • In China, commerce is already in the app – button after 2nd loop you can complete purchase inside the app
      • Close the loop on-platform in China
    • Marketplace on games for platform – supporting size/scales that fraudsters can open up accounts and quickly find monetization structure
      • Build false economy and cash out quickly – advanced fraudsters for automation, maybe with virtual trades and purchases
      • If it’s $10k, they’re wrong – probably multiple millions, if not more
  • AI in B2B (a16z 10/23/19)
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    • Oleg Rogynskyy from People.AI, for sales and marketing
    • Very few users that give you private, anonymized data is much harder to make them comfortable with this data
      • How valuable is the promise you’re making to customers vs the cost to achieve it
    • For entrepreneurs: if there is human activity that generates data for how they do it that isn’t being captured, there’s a ripe opportunity
      • Shipping containers, wind farm, location of Uber driver – reliable data, aggregate and figure out what may be the next best action would be
        • Significant growth and acceleration for these actions once network effects apply
      • More sensors, edge computing, salespeople, drivers in network – more data collected and more patterns you can see
        • Smarter the graph becomes, better the predictions may be allowed to become – then, more money and lures in other network participants
      • Wind farm operators: know it will break after it breaks but someone in comes in that was there collecting data ahead of you, they are up still
        • Competitor automates process, you can go to same vendor and catch up but if you miss AI, you can’t catch up
      • Oleg mentions that he thinks AI is zero-sum and that the Fortune 500 will look very different in 10 years
    • All customers benefit from generalized data – first customers have to do a lot more than others
      • People writing contracts: only sell to me, but customers would be relics
    • When the data model changes, systems of records die – Andreesen
      • Hierarchical first, then on SQL, then cloud SQL and Salesforce
        • Next gen data model should be graph – federated shared graph model – instead of you pulling data and searching, it will push to you
        • Personalized actionable insights – pushed through the channel you’re most likely to engage with – maximum focus
      • Level of intent for the user should be known – don’t have to expose the complexity but you can be shown and execute that
    • Difference between autopilot and co-pilot
      • As human, something mundane or repetitive – automating the functions to make it more efficient use of your neurons
      • Augmenting ability to make decisions – racecar that may know what’s around the curve, making us super-productive – more human
    • Needs to be 10x on the platform vs off the platform if you’re afraid of the set-up
    • Sales & Marketers specifically
      • Shifting how they work – day-to-day: 1/3 of time on manual data entry, 1/3 on prospecting (classic problem), 1/3 on face-to-face doing selling
        • First should be gone, 2nd should be done with help on ML and AI for value-add prospecting and automate outreach
        • Face-to-face: Machines can’t replace this but may be able to help out
      • Training on the end point – best way to sell, unbundling learning management system
    • Wants to do bottoms-up but currently top-down – through standard procurement channels
      • Users will demand data-hungry approaches and solutions – apps that built AI on user data but not merging with enterprise data
        • Have easier time for value adding in these cases because you just want data to increase (single player can do single player)
    • Biggest surprises: inside sales for Oleg starting in 2006 pounding phones, went out and did a software change before downturn
      • Learned timing matters at that time.
      • Then started Symantria – sentiment analysis API in 2011, size of market matters – 20-30 companies needed it (80% of market)
      • Remembered that he was put into a conference room with COO (head of sales), cleaned Salesforce and within a month it was in ruin again
      • Couldn’t understand sales team when he took over, why it wasn’t ramping up quickly, losing deals, hiring more people but productivity was fine
        • Supposed to have data in CRM but never had it
  • Martin Mignot, Investor at Index Ventures (20min VC 2/1/16)index-ventures-768x469-1

    • Investments including Deliveroo, Blablahcar, Algolia, SwiftKey, others
    • Worked on 50 transactions like CodeAcademy, FlipBoard, Soundcloud
    • UBS Investment Bank on TMT team and co-founded beauty subscription company called Boudoir Prive (acquired by BirchBox)
      • Comes from entrepreneur family and action/doer and the creative
      • VC seemed to be between acting and thinking part of the job as he’s followed it for 10-12 years
    • Split on idea of career VC without operating experience
    • 3 ways to look and slice companies: at Index, they have thematic and geographical approach since they need to have ppl on ground in Europe
      • Stage-focused: seed / growth
      • Thematic: fintech, adtech
      • Geographical: Germany, France, London, Amsterdam and building the network there with angels, seed funds
    • 6 hour drive test or drunk test with founders – no formal founder test to determine invest-ability
      • Are they able to attract and hire the people they need
      • Trying to decide if the risk is worth reward – not beholding themselves to a valuation cap if they believe
    • Favorite book: I have America Surrounded by Tim Leary
    • Investor who has shaped his theses is Fred Wilson – being right, companies and sharing insight, communicating as USV and himself
  • Elaine Beak, consulting and HBS (Career Talk, Wharton XM)

    • She wasn’t too scared but whenever she had problems, the solutions would arise
      • For others, the security blanket is the scariest for most people when she tries to help them on decisions or convincing them
    • Writes her books in 2 weeks each – written and published 80+
    • Word of mouth, should have 6 months saved up, and have 50 people that you can contact for saying you’re going out on your own
    • Following own rules:
      • Billing clients the same day that you finish a project.
      • Clients may have 30 day billing window, so if you waited 2 weeks, they’ll forget or not be as appreciative.
    • Don’t discount, add to the service instead – charge more
      • Bad reputation for discounting.
    • Go for the big fish – large companies but the time to get smaller companies is the same for larger. Repeat business is there
      • Repeat business and more of a budget to continue work.
    • Learn to say no. Non-paid speaking engagements should be limited.
    • Manage your time well – make sure it pays off.
      • Find ways to automate things – invoices, payroll, accounting, responses to common questions
        • Make a standard paragraph or find an app/template once you have these
    • Project will end but not relationship – stay until the end and do a good job for the client.
    • Incorporating, LLC for sure

Love Hearing Some Aspirations (Notes from Oct 14 – Oct 20, 2019) December 19, 2019

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, NLP, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
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Happy holidays, everyone! Hopefully you’re staying warm/dry – whether that’s inside or just generally in a better location. I’ll say I already wish that I purchased into that ski cabin for the holiday since we’ve had a bunch of rain over the last few weeks in the bay area and now fresh powder in the Sierras. But alas, I did not. Next time, next time.

I’m going to keep this brief, but primarily because I have fallen behind in writing and it pains me weekly. Habits break and that may need to be bumped up in the new year – try out substack or something similar. But, I think I’m finally going to launch something that I’ve been meaning to build. CV / Image recognition sourcing into a database to keep track of something that plays a prominent role for many. We’ll see if I can get the prototype usable and I’ll update here.

Aspirations – I love talking and listening to people who have big dreams. I think there are many who hold themselves back for all kinds of reasons. If I catch wind or hear it, I will push you to start – something, anything – for your sake. It’s rewarding to have to dive in and try it out. Maybe it falls off after 6 months. Maybe you run out of money that you allotted to the side. Maybe, you succeed. Or learn  enough to accidentally fail upwards into a better / concrete idea. I hope for it all when people have these ideas. It’s inspiring – helps me go through my own models for how I interpret my world if I have to wrap my head around how friends/colleagues/Tweeps view their own. And how things can become better. Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to do with many ideas. Is it a cool new thing? Is it something you wish you had? Is it an observation that you want to test? Build. You won’t regret it if you don’t in the grand scheme, but if it’s a big enough itch, it’s worth the learning experience in a world where not enough of us do (but it’s not for a lack of time).

Hope you enjoy the notes.

  • Patrick / Raamayan, Cofounder of Unify (Wharton XM)
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    • Global meditation, achieving state of flow
      • Could be gym, yoga, prayer, running
    • If you have an hour, you have 15 minutes
  • Brianne Kimmel (@briannekimmel), Worklife Ventures (20min VC 10/14/19)
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    • Backed by Andreesen, Chris Dixon, Zoom’s Eric Yuan, and friends Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Matt Mazzeo
    • Teaching General Assembly while operating in performance/growth marketing role at Expedia before Head of Social Media
      • Go-to marketing bootcamp (SaaS school now)
      • SaaS school taught my brand name heads at SaaS top places
    • Started with $25-50k angel checks in Webflow, Voiceflow, Airgarage and built a track record
      • Wanted to build a SaaS-fund to focus on go-to-market from bottoms-up
      • Enjoys building and structuring companies to get into the Venture-sized outcomes
      • Having a fund that’s open enough to maybe do private equity after stuck between $3-5mn ARR
    • Optionality for early stage, inflection points, maybe getting growth PM to scale into CEO
      • $150k checks incrementally grown from $25k
    • Proliferation of funds and capital – investing from own, micro-VC and angels platforms
      • Scouting for VC fund – operators at hot tech company
      • AngelList and Carta as platforms for own angel funds or boutique arrangements (flexibility with checks, numbers, still operate)
    • Celebrities/athletes using investments in startups to match their brand or expand it
      • Intersection of work and life – seeing Faire and Shopify give access to a huge new audience
    • Angels with leverage in cap table – “perfect one” and she grooms founders for this
    • Worklife – services and programs to unlock human potential at scale
      • Hypevsaas – traditional language for b2b is dead, according to her
      • Great saas being built by operators spinning out of consumer tech (Airbnb, Coinbase, Uber)
        • Scaling too quickly where they end up building their own tools before open sourcing or monetizing
      • With self-serve SaaS companies, many APIs and workflow tools, are easy to build – what’s the competitive advantage
        • Your access to tech, building closed products (specific users in line with product vision)
      • Opposite of Hypevsaas as “Scrappy SaaS” – going away slowly, race similar to consumer product for paid marketing
        • Freemium to quickly launch/build but products too easy – race for free users and attempt to monetize later
        • Mirrors side hustle or application as experiment with a possible traction
    • Consumer-grade experiments where users pay from day one – mentioned Superhuman and Rahul’s talk
      • SaaS school discussion about video game design and hook
    • Pace as most recent investment – accessing software with lower monthly rate because they access the contracts
  • Justin Kan (@justinkan), Founder / CEO of Atrium (20min VC 6/21/19)
    atriumlts

    • Full-service corporate law firm for startups
    • Started in 2004 with online calendar a la Gcalendar called Keeko, got into YC
      • Failed and sold it on ebay eventually
    • Then started Justin.tv – terrible idea that mostly failed and eventually made it into a streaming site to do Twitch
      • Sold in 2014 to Amazon, started another company called Exec in 2015 – errand service
      • Became a partner at YC but realized after a few years that an investor full-time wasn’t for him
      • Forced, as a startup founder, to learn things (hadn’t been learning as an investor)
    • 2017 – remembered how painful it was learning things – thinking of ideas
      • Conversation with a partner at a law firm in the city – asked her why they didn’t use any tech themselves
      • Full-stack corporate law firm in US – high growth companies that they’re building for last 2 years
    • Had used legal services no matter what they had – big transactions pay attorneys regardless, stable market
      • Will exist in a downturn because things don’t just stop
    • Remembered that every summer at the start of his startups, he would want to quit – think of new ideas or new things
      • Once out, he’d think he didn’t want to do it again, until it brought him back
      • First 3 months – thought he was great, figured it out due to 10 years’ experience, until stress came back
        • 6 months of stressful period – figured it out that he was still fine, reputation/old job
        • Self-improvement and growth had to come from culture
    • Hard to detach yourself from company as entrepreneur
      • Has attachments and notifications to make sure that he’s being present
      • Having goals in life, company, entrepreneur – board game metaphor – friends play and being engaged
      • Put away a game – do you remember or care what happened?
    • Started seeing a therapist 7 years prior – coach for dealing and discovering about what you’re going through
      • Cathartic, in his opinion – not alone and can talk to people
      • 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Steve from Reddit
        • Radical responsibility – nobody else will come to save you, nobody to blame
        • Radical curiosity – whenever a new situation comes up, you approach it with what you’re supposed to learn
    • Don’t have to suffer for doing a start-up – not saying “Don’t work hard”
      • Building up skills, expectation for suffering isn’t the case
      • Atomic Habits by James Clear for him following working out each day
    • Zone of Genius – cares and loves to focus on, delegate rest
      • At Atrium, focus on business strategy, selling, culture
      • Build the team for the rest of it
    • Much better at recognizing patterns after investing 100 companies
      • Implementing in company, business models and market dynamics
      • Bad – investor attitude (approached Atrium like this)
    • Atrium – up to 150 employees in SF now – happy and proud for the culture and growth
  • Eric Kinariwala (@ekinariwala), founder / CEO at Capsule (DealMakers 10/15/19)
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    • Rebuilding pharmacy from inside out – raised $270mn from TCV, Thrive Capital, Sound Ventures, Virgin Group, M13
    • Wharton undergrad, network from there as financial services, banking and decided to go to west coast – Stanford
      • Started at Bain Capital in Boston after graduating – worked in a hedge fund group investing
        • Retail, healthcare, tech – blending framework around business strategy, what makes it a good business
        • Judging management and the synergies – learning how to invest, as well
      • Making right judgment calls – tight feedback loops
    • For Capsule, had moved back to NY, got a headache – called doctor and had a prescription ordered
      • Pharmacy is $350bn – most frequent interaction in healthcare
      • 2nd largest category of retail – 70k stores
      • Got headache and went to go pick up his meds but couldn’t find it, then they were out of stock and it was awful
    • Hard to get advice from the pharmacy, don’t know the price until they go to pay
    • Everybody touching the pharmacy has a headache, typically
    • 3 pillars of Capsule: modern technology platform, emotionally resonant brand, pharmacy how your mom would treat you
      • Prototypical pharmacist as founder, 2nd was highly experienced technologist, 3rd woman that spent building consumer brands
    • Business model – “10x better” than current existing – technologically enabled pharmacy – app with 5 pieces of information
      • 2 hour delivery windows, know price of medication, doctors know what you’re doing
      • Why are there so many pharmacies? Put money spent on rent back into beautiful design and technology to be seamless
    • Launched in 2016, first customer in May – first challenges in early days
      • Strong word-of-mouth from friends, doctors who had learned about Capsule – telling patients and vice versa
      • Early pharmacist was well-versed in regulatory environment for anything that could’ve been broken
    • He had raised in May ’15 to get started – raised $70 million to start
      • Ideal profile / entire business model needs to be aligned with values: objectives, values, strategy and metric
      • Asking to join and leaders need to have alignment in the same way – even the board – share vision and how / why you operate
    • Team is bigger than 250 full-time, all in NYC now – encouraging people to read ahead of joining, also
      • Checklist Manifesto, On Wings of Eagles, Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, and Who by Dan [Geoff?] Smartt
    • For the future of Capsule – most important thing in your family’s life as healthcare (although I’d argue bank or something)
      • 5x more pharmacy visits than doctor (sheesh) – wants to make it mobile-first and on the home page of phone
    • Piece of advice for his first day: be more confident earlier
  • Gimlet 1: How to Not Pitch a Billionaire (Startup Podcast 4/5/14)
    gimlet-and-spotify

    • Pitching Chris Sacca – meeting at a hole-in-the-wall sushi place for lunch in LA
      • Deck as a crutch and did it outside the lunch – no slides
      • Most people consume audio in radio and are leaving to digital – audio dashboard, podcasts music all there
      • Wants to start company for the content for moving into the digital future
      • One question he asked: what’s the unfair advantage? Explained how to make money (ads, listeners)
        • Freemium – offer an extra for the listeners who want to pay.
        • He answered: making freemium model work – had to tighten it up
      • Chris Sacca – took 2 minutes and did the pitch
        • People willing to pay for this stuff – Planet Money where they gave $600k to buy tshirt with our logo
          • Integrated directly that we can replicate
        • $1.5mn to buy 3-4 guys for podcasts in next 12 months, can get to 300-400k net subscribers
          • Can get to breakeven on ads alone, CPMs where they are – more integration and episodes will be ultimately scale
          • 12-15 podcasts and we can do it
      • Then countered with the audio is a niche market – nonprofit and audio moving toward shorter content
    • Met him on a Planet Money story when he was going over patent system and how it was slowing innovation
    • Strategy/ideas at Google, writing seed investment check in PhotoBucket – didn’t have it, though
      • Just $50k and wrote 2 credit card checks – enjoyed the feeling so much he left Google
      • First investment was in a colleague, Evan Williams, for Twitter as a full-time angel
        • Wrote the check for $25k – was a lot of cash to him, needed it to work – wanted to help out, evangelist
        • Started buying more shares and doubling – believed in the company
    • Kickstarter, Uber, Instagram, etc… looks hard at the conviction of the success
      • Missed on DropBox (Gdrive was going to crush them), Airbnb (someone will get raped or murdered, can’t work)
    • Told him to come back, tighten the pitch and then do it for Chris’ partner Matt who was from the media world
  • Pankaj Risbood (@risbood), founder at Zendrive
    logo_vertical-drkgry2x

    • Discussing leveraging data and making it a platform instead of an app
      • Dealing with partners to ensure they can improve value
    • Mission Street project – 6 months driver flow before and then after shutting down
      • Reducing poor driving / improve driver safety and it was fairly obvious
    • Can deploy this in the form for insurances, as well
  • Jacqueline Courtney (@jac_courtney), Founder of Nearly Newlywed (Wharton XM)
    47315_0

    • Pitching on Shark Tank to grab attention
    • Starting as seeing option in fashion tech for underserved market
    • Tough for Amazon to compete because of the marketplace factor and users are only in for 1 sale, 1 wedding
      • Taking 40% of the sale but trying to maximize the amount of cost for many
      • Realized photos that were posed / models with dresses didn’t sell as well as real wedding photos
        • Started asking customers for them this way
  • Noah Auerbahn (@noahauerbahn), co-founder and CEO of Robin Healthcare (Lindzanity 10/2/19)
    5d00b6c5f8049e595a67e73d_logo-robin

    • Robin as virtual scribe that sits on doctors desks and records video/audio from room – sits in exam room
      • Started with orthopedic physicians – 6 sub-specialties and they cover all of them so far
    • Met Gary, Howard’s partner, when Noah was 21 and starting first company – ExtraBucks (cash back coupons)
      • Came up with at dorms in USC, raised enough money to move to SD with his cofounders
      • Were cash flow positive and had Gary and Alex as advisors – realized he didn’t want to be in ecommerce forever
        • Decided to sell and exit once they questioned it – had raised around $1million, no venture
    • Believed college as what you make of it – did entrepreneurship / business in undergrad but taking it and questioning how to apply it
    • Education, energy, and health were the lists of what he thought may have the most impact – health was the biggest for him
      • He would hire MIT PhD and UCLA MD to come to his office and tutor him – “pretty affordable, like $70/hr” to teach at pace you want
      • He wanted massive optionality within healthcare – not just ecommerce, if he wanted to do pharma, biotech, find the right entry point
      • 100s of research posts, 100s of conversations, started going to conferences (where he met his cofounder)
    • Entire system – center of the system is the exam room – decisions get made there, so he wanted to build something interesting inside of that room
      • Patient, doctor, and EMR (not interested in sharing data)
        • Found out that there was a scribe in 5% of rooms and he asked why they aren’t remote or something
        • Lower burnout rates, better throughput and service, notes/quality control could have issues
        • Decided to tool in a good UX, ML additionally
    • Wanted to do something big, had to raise money eventually but “How many assumptions could he kill or the idea before saving time?”
      • First paying customer, had $40k, webcams, notes (his cofounder doing them), device streaming and did it at his mom’s vet clinic (non-HIPAA)
        • Built own tech, had some handful of paying customers – had taken some friends/family $ that missed on his first company and then real
      • Didn’t anticipate hardware but couldn’t find something that could be used for solving this
        • Security cams aren’t great because of acoustic but could stream all the time
        • Conference ones which aren’t designed to run all the time – ran own software on it, but lot of work to keep it working all the time
        • Sonos speaker guys were helpful in producing what they ended up building (optional video)
    • Device has about 2% of people where they don’t consent – video/audio and can be more in tune with the patient
    • Having offices in SD, Berkeley (his reverse commute from SF) and Austin – where most pre-med scribes are for them
      • Mentioned 30% Stanford Med graduates don’t end up as doctors – go into tech
  • Morgan Housel, co-founder of Collaborative Fund (Lindzanity, 10/9/19)
    deuobz-u8aarwgs

    • Howard’s favorite thinker/writer/storyteller and his interesting career arch – key to writing is writing
    • Effective long-form is rough but when it’s good, it’s bar-belled (10 seconds is better than longer reading)
      • Only books he got through were Shoe Dogs and Agassi’s book – Munger’s “Don’t be burdened by bad books”
    • Cramer’s “Confessions of a Street Addict” as good, as well
      • Coming from nowhere, knew how to write briefly, Howard as superfan – first modern financial professional that had personality
      • Howard feels like it’s an underachievement – Morgan said he’s not a great investor – so much trust built up that he should be running a massive firm
      • Access to people, financial celebrity
    • Fascinated by Motley Fool – when Morgan had hedge fund, had CNBC but Dave and Tom Gardner – hats on, promotional and StockTwit before
      • Went for mom and pops – tremendous marketers, but made mistakes
    • 2007 – dawn of financial disaster, studying econ at USC (his plan was p/e and ib) but finance was terrible
      • Didn’t think highly of Motley Fool – had gone through Yahoo finance boards and saw his friend, Sham Gad, at USC was writing for them
      • Thought he’d do Motley Fool shortly as contract, couple months, and was writing an article a day – (plan was initially p/e but they couldn’t bring him on)
      • For him, he was supposed to be banking industry, and writing other stuff as well – economy and macro issues (unemployment, fed reserve, budgets)
      • No explanation for decisions being rational – before, during, after no good explanations – psychology of investing
    • Psychology of investing will always be there – different layers of edge and vs technical side – can be base of pyramid
      • Smartest analyst or data miner but without greed/fear, nothing would matter (Howard moving to angel – forced to go with it, prices were his weakness)
    • Time split for Howard – 50/50 between public/priv (prices keep him up to date on news)
      • Selling at Uber at $10bn because he wasn’t allowed to sell at $1bn – he was in with David Cohen’s $4mn fund, $50k at $4mn valuation, so he had $2k
      • Sold a lot early and then sold at $40bn and that’s where it is now – public would’ve been very different
    • New banks may be what Andreesen is doing – start as VC & get larger, for next 20 years
      • Citadel starting as hedge fund from dorm and now top-tier investment bank, doing everything – exchange, conglomerate
      • Partnership that can have trading stocks, wealth management, lean beast with trust/access – 2.5% fund without GS
      • Private becoming so large because of the liquidity area there
    • Josh as being equally funny and smart, not caring about markets – gave a sponsor to Morgan and Jesse Livermore (pseudo) and Twitter explodes
      • Motley Fool for 10 years, contractor for 7 years – LA first and then Seattle, then Alexandria for 3 years – only time he’s had a desk and office
      • Wife went to grad school in Baltimore to move them out that way
      • Motley Fool as bigger than you think – P/E mistake, big tool and screwups to learn a lot about mistakes
        • Joining Collaborative Funds (Craig Shapiro splitting time between NYC and SF) was easiest decision, but leaving MF was hardest of his life
    • What really can set you apart is not writing a check anymore – everyone has a checkbook
      • What do people know about you? What do you stand for? What is your vision?
      • If he could write what they wanted to read, it would draw back some attention to what they’re doing and standing behind.
    • Went to plenty of conferences, 4-5 a year and learned to speak – had a CFA Institute where he was the interviewer
      • Did keynotes for Motley Fool, video made it to Washington Speakers Bureau and started to do that
      • Several dozen talks a year now – wasn’t the plan original (2016 as first year)
        • Doesn’t sketch out an idea, write out an outline – just knows that he enjoys some part and how to contextualize it
    • Spends majority of his time going on walks to “write” – tough for him to grind the gears
      • 95% of his investing is house, checking acct and 3 Vanguards funds – saving dollar-cost-averaging there, since he isn’t really writing checks
      • Thinking about “enough” – 8% is fine, 10% would be nice but not worth stressing (says opposite of type A)
        • Odds are low to beat market, same with running – 3 miles is enough for him, doesn’t need to do half marathon
        • Biking for 1 – 2 hours, knows the burn, won’t need to do more
      • Why Howard says Andreesen’s model likely to make a difference
        • For Howard – indexing, 90% there and 10% to try to beat
      • If it bothers you, why are you torturing yourself? If you need to scratch the itch, take a small enough.
      • Hates idea that Vanguard gets to pick the 500 companies for him, not a fan of $5mln raise if you can do on $1mln
        • Similar to Risk gm – don’t start Europe, east Aus is better
    • Indexing as Robinhood vs Vanguard – somewhere in between (not robo), but just de-selecting the companies you may not want to invest in
      • Feel better, maybe hold on more during drawdowns – incentivize riding the wave
      • Example from Morgan about mom hating Monsanto (then he pointed out she owned some – she wanted to sell)

Paralysis of Planning (Notes from Oct 7 – Oct 13, 2019) December 12, 2019

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Leadership, marketing, medicine, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
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Hello everyone! It’s been forever – a few weeks. That wasn’t my intention and my head’s been spinning around topics. However, nothing was clearing up idea-wise, at least enough to fit something in. As writing is an intentional habit of mine to try to memory-dump and stay organized, the slowdown has been a poor fall off from my routine. We’ll get it back.

I forget where I’d read it first, but there are some long-form bloggers who said just writing to write daily has helped them get to coherent, well-written posts about once a week. I may try a medium there and plan to write 3-4 days, even if it’s brief. Let’s see what comes of that (on initial thinking, I’d like to get 1 or 2 of those data-focused).

Last week, I attended #HustleCon in Oakland, which is focused on entrepreneurs (mostly non-technical) and the strength of pattern recognition and actions on ideas. A few of my prior posts have mentioned the flood of information available, so long as you have a plan to go through it. It’s likely why I found it funny to hear various founders with their “definitive” takes on fundraising, hiring and culture building processes. It’s possible the thing they all agreed on was just to focus on the product/customer feedback. The rest was completely in the air – some swore on fundraising and it was easy, others thought it was only necessary to scale to size they wanted later, some wanted to just get large customer traction, etc…. There’s no single track except your own past experiences. That’s the one track for ‘worked’ vs ‘doesn’t work’. Everything else has examples on both sides.

The commonality aside from product/customer-focus was in reflecting on actions – can you test an idea? Can it sell? Will there be a proper response? Is the response as you expected? Iterate from the basic idea that you had to begin with and see if you can’t improve it further. I am starting to agree that there are many ideas that fix many things we each interact with – our experience (usually bad) influence our ideas to improve them once you have that “I wonder why it can’t be easier – or why can’t it be done like X”. Acting on that idea to see if you can fix it is at least better for you and a handful of likeminded people – “2x improvements”. The iteration to move from that to providing an easier/painless/smooth/updated experience is the rest. And that determines success/fail of the business (if there was one). That’s a large jump but one that I may unpack in the future.

I think the notes below contain a solid mixture of hope for the future, business building, medicine and exploration.

  • Trae Vassallo (@trae), founder at Defy.vc (Wharton XM)
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    • Looking at focusing in early-stage connected software companies
    • Avoiding stigma of young and white and male – although that’s lore/myth, despite what we see in SF
      • Founders as average age of 40
      • Very diverse, including in their portfolio co’s
    • They lean on founders who they may have backed before
    • Attending Stanford for Bach, Masters and MBA
      • After undergrad, interned at Boeing for summer before realizing corporate wasn’t really for her, true engineering
      • Had more of a design mind – Ideo (design firm) kept intriguing her in SF
    • Niche for funding between big moves and some that don’t want massive venture deals – thought it was common enough to fit
  • Seyward Darby (@seywarddarby), Editor-in-Chief at The Atavist (Wharton XM)
    atavist_logo_2015

    • Discussing paper
  • Amazon to Deliver Healthcare, Google Quantum & VR/AR (16 Minutes on the News #10: 9/29/19)
    • Cost of employer-based healthcare just passed $20k annually for the first time
    • Often hear about “At least Amazon doesn’t deliver healthcare” – their position in the market is the source of fear
      • Haven’t hired nurses or physicians, partnered with Oasis
    • What would counterpart for realities of healthcare working
      • How do you integrate into supply chain of broader healthcare landscape (Amazon as just inserting into primary care, not others)
        • Primary care is a minor part of total spend
      • Game for startups is to get distribution before incumbent gets innovation
    • Oculus – advancing AR/VR very quickly – selling as fast as they can make them with Quest
      • Hand-tracking is working much better, technological advances
      • Verifocal lenses – different ways for seeing 3D
        • Big Screen as watching 3D films – true eye separation, although in VR, you don’t see great depth
    • Eyes trade off high resolution (central) compared to the outside which would be low res
      • Mobile GPU for glasses as less powerful but improving compared to ones that are plugged into the pc
      • Enough users where developers can be incentivized
    • Quantum computing as here – yes, but not broken for cryptography
      • You can run a computation / calculation on quantum computer
  • James Beshara (@jamesbeshara), cofounder at Tilt (20min VC FF#031, 1/22/16)
     crowdtilt-to-tilt-image_28305

    • Micro-crowdfunding platform, founded dvelo.org for crowdfunding loans and donations to poverty-alleviation
      • Then moved to friends funding
    • Khaled as co-founder – said “he’s the luckiest thing that happened to company”, introduced by a friend
      • 26 yr old running strategy at Rackspace – needed someone to develop because he didn’t have the development skills
    • College kids as the largest demographic here – wanted to make crowdfunding very easy
    • Fundraising process for the two of them, trying to get investments from real estate, oil & gas, hardware – didn’t understand
      • Were in ATX and had to do value prop for 90 seconds – duh?
      • Got into YC and grinded until that point, even for raising $500k
      • Helpful for Series A – growth graph that they didn’t have for seed
    • Destination in mind for investors – standalone, durable company (likely public)
    • 5 years away – building crowdfunding platform and taking it mainstream
      • Update: Didn’t make it.
  • Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson), founder of OS Fund and Braintree (20min VC 1/25/16)
     braintree_logo

    • Bought by ebay in 2013 for $800mil, and launched OS Fund with $100mil in personal capital to benefit humanity
    • Extend human life, replicate visual cortex, reinvent transportation and food
    • Key question of building technology and the world we want – governmental systems improvement
      • Balancing returns – money is a tool of power and influence
      • Can be decades and he’d be fine with it
    • Interested in materials science and rearrangement of atoms – raw source inputs, business services and how to consume them
      • His portfolio is mostly genomics and synthetic biology
      • Has a sizable chunk of experts that they get advised by on specialties
    • Blockchain technology – thinks of the start to the printing press
      • Tools of creation and platforms of creation are hard to predict what would be next
    • Fav book: Shackleton’s Endurance Voyage, favorite person: Craig Ventur
    • Most exciting recent investment: Ginkgo Bioworks
  • Kamran Fallahpour (Director at Brain Resource Center in NYC) and Geoffrey Woo (CEO, Founder at HVMN) Brain Hacking (Wharton XM, Dot Complicated)b593e157-b9cc-4762-b437-ff43ca3f731e-1498462151992

    • Bryan Johnson on Brain Hacking and founder/CEO of Kernel, not a matter of if / when
    • Coming to Brain Resource Center: both children and adults, ADD, ADHD, brain injury, migraines, anxiety
      • Families with kids with attention issues or doing fine but want an advantage
    • First do a brain mapping using EEG – over- or underactivation
    • For Geoffrey, he had friends after Stanford trying to make machines or robots smarter, better and more efficient
      • He wanted to wonder how he could get humans to perform better – tinker with the body
      • Cognitive functions as being why we’re above the animals – n=1 experimental starts
    • Pubmed research articles on nootropics, reports on Reddit for chemical stacks, substances that were supplements or foods
      • Prescription or off-label, scheduled drugs legal or illegal
    • Improved sleep as best biohack, exercise for cardiac health and now regular exercise/weightlifting as brain cognition
      • Neuroplasticity growth and improving brain functions – any way to stimulate the brain, puzzles/language/out of comfort zone
      • Plateaus when looking at neural feedback
  • Andres Barriga (@andresbarriga), cofounder of Portola Growth Partners (Wharton XM)
    • Chilean venture capital after business school in the states
    • Growth in LATAM – primarily western countries and then up to Mexico for growth
    • Talent is starting to be attracted to possibilities
    • They got 3 US funds to invest
  • CRISPR! Policy, Platform, Trials (16 Minutes News by a16z #11)
    • CCR5 gene as preventing HIV
    • Alliance of 13 companies in the space to not do germline editing, but would still do therapeutic somatic cell genetics
      • Genome that runs the body and the one you pass on to generations – germline
      • Somatic cells will not be passed down to future generations (eyes, liver, etc…) and germline would
    • 1970s had discovery of recombinant DNA – tech to cut/paste genes
      • 1980s had genetic applications outside of the body – initial cut healthy copy of gene and put into virus and stick into humans
      • Late 90s – patient Jessica Zellwinger – can’t randomly do gene splicing
      • Talons – gobbler proteins – zinc fingers took forever to remove mutated genes but would take PhD students months and $10ks
    • Emergence of CRISPR as way to treat disease, in short order
      • Gene therapy, CRISPR, engineered cells to treat cancer, for instance
    • Legislation in California – preemptive for what could go wrong and how to be productive
      • What if the kit is used improperly
    • Applications – ex-vivo vs in-vivo (outside of bodies compared to in)
      • Vehicle/delivery compared to the load – which is ex-vivo and can be Quality Controlled
      • Eye as initial in-vivo CRISPR use since eye is immune-privileged (bacterial components of delivery)
      • CAR-T therapy for cancer patients – usually send cells to get edited and then put back in
  • Sarah Hum (@sarahhum), founder of Canny (Indiehackers #124 10/7/19)
     logo

    • User feedback tool, feeling the pain of the data and trying to combine customer data
    • Just crosses $50k MRR – team of 5, transparent and paying team with money they make
    • Digital nomad – she was in the same place in SF with her cofounder – quit her full-time job but wasn’t making much
      • Team of 2 was easy as she traveled initially, couple

      • Indiehackers Courtland with his brother – know how to argue and disagree
    • Had done quite a bit of hackathons – worked at Facebook for 1.5 yrs before starting
      • Worked on Messenger as product designer – felt limited by what she wanted to do
      • PD is ~20%, she’s learned about marketing and pricing and sales otherwise
    • Started Product Pains as a community for people giving feedback over things – didn’t monetize initially
      • Had a community of 5000 people that primarily did consumer products
      • Rebranded to turn it into b2b and monetize – could change products with Product Pains (give them feedback, for instance)
      • Andrew had worked on team working with React – teammate had asked him after he left about what he was doing
        • Started using Product Pains to get information about developer pains – still a big mechanic
    • Eventually they had companies join Product Pains who asked if they had a widget
      • Didn’t have widget initially, but they asked if they built it, would they pay for it? Basically said yes – $19/mo
      • Had been 3 months after she quit to rebrand and launch as Canny
        • Had to get a pricing page going for payments
    • Get Satisfaction around 2008-2009 as Yelp for customer service / user feedback that got a ton of investor money
      • Raised $10-20mln and cratered in a short amount of time
    • Launched Canny on Product Hunt as a good initial feedback and went to Oct ’17 for profitability (hit Hacker News)
      • May / June talked about digital nomads – week or so before leaving and took off – first little tour of US and then went to London
      • 26 cities in 2 years, Seoul as reliable cafés and wi-fi – Nomadlist and about a month in each place
    • Writing 200 words a day – blogs every week then are almost 1400 words
      • Levers to grow a business (via Patrick Cambell, CEO of ProfitWell)
        • User acquisition – blogging, product via word of month
        • Monetization – pricing, how often to charge, how to upgrade, paid plan, etc
        • Retention – how long do people stick around
    • Pricing strategies: haven’t tried freemium
      • SaaS, thought about – started initially at $2/mo (cheapium)
        • They’d have to chase people for this
      • May be a good time to try again – never set it and forget it – should be able to charge more for it
      • Tried to charge based on people as what they thought it was the business / how much willing to pay / user base
        • As they figured out the market niche, they landed on the best to target
    • Having monthly goals and try to develop features or business things to help achieve those
    • Hiring – her never being a manager
      • Helping people do what they’re supposed to be doing and supporting their jobs
      • Openness as key – working together much of the day and being on the same page, feeling good
      • They do 3-4 meetings a year
    • For 1-2 years, they have quite a bit they want to build, features to grow bigger
      • Can see Canny working for larger businesses that have reached out – catered to small/medium-sized so far
      • Giant impact with very small teams
  • Amir Haleem (@amirhaleem), founder / CEO of Helium (talk on AVC / USV port co)
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    • Former esports champ in 90s, during dial-up days
    • Dial-up days – most competitive time for internet access, separation of those that provided services
      • US Robotics for modems, ISP like Speakeasy, telephone co like Verizon
      • Once internet got adopted and page loads enlarged, they merged
    • No option to use dial-up, cable appeared – “Internet got terrible”
      • Cable provider merged with ISP – physical lines vs provider
      • Comcast in SF as his example – local loop – LLUs – similar to telephone providers originally
    • Google Fiber – became extremely challenging for them to dig – cities wouldn’t let them dig, so they converted to wireless
      • 75-85% of customers use whatever the cable company gives them
      • Hardware in home – LoRa network or “sharing” hotspots to clog networks
    • Cellular market as too expensive soon, maybe contraction
    • Net neutrality – internet access as common carriers (2015)
      • FTC won’t mandate to cover common carriers
      • Net neutrality was only rules that were in place to rule against – until it died and how we govern ISPs
    • Cool companies in the decentralization of the internet
      • Orchid: tor-like system and rewarding nodes
      • FileCoin: store files anonymously, encrypted and hashed out
      • Brave: forced https and ads blocked, Tor as tab version
      • Helium: how to decentralize wireless links to base, especially with 5G and unlicensed spectrum
        • Blueprint of mesh of open technologies owned and operated by those that own and use the internet
    • Helium: IoT of low power sensors, tracking devices, network devices for access by others
      • Fundamentally do it and reward people with coins for holding it and for others to use it
      • Talking about using applications for the IoT world
        • mentioned the fires in NorCal in ’18 and not being able to tell the air quality within 20 mi radius
        • IoT seems to be ripe for improvement but hasn’t seen the network yet
  • Dennis McNannay, CEO & founder for Curadite, Inc (Wharton XM)736x196xcuradite-logo_long_gry.png.pagespeed.ic_.gqdo0yxdcw

    • Bioscience focus on medicine adherance