Topic
finance
- Lines Not Dots
A classic from Mark Suster on patience and pattern recognition for investors: The first time I meet you, you are a single data point. A dot. I have no reference point from which to judge whether you were higher on theā¦
- A Brief History of Construction Startups
The construction market for startups (one that I'm fairly involved in, but only as a segment of our market) has been a historically tough nut to crack for technology companies. This is a great breakdown from Brian Potā¦
- Weekend Reading: DeFi, Worldbuilding and Antifragility, and Shiny Exteriors
š¦ Understanding Financial Institutions Arnold Kling has an interesting point this week in reference to decentralized finance. He argues that for DeFi to work, we need folks that understand the moving parts on two comā¦
- Weekend Reading: Bubbles, the Magic of Hobbies, and Legitimacy
šÆ Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z's new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects: Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at lā¦
- Visa: The Original Protocols Business
This was the first episode I've listened to of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's new podcast "Business Breakdowns". He and Alex Rampell dive deep on the history of Visa and its unique business model. Alex saw Visa's business fiā¦
- Ben Thompson Interview with John Collison
This week Stripe launched two new major products in their ever-expanding mission to build the economic and financial backbone for the internet. Ben Thompson was one of two (along with the Wall Street Journal) to haveā¦
- Widespread Looting
Arnold Kling has been a great follow lately. On the Fed's stimulus plan for COVID economic shutdown: I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to coverā¦
- Funding Models for Science
The topic of funding has been kicking around with the coronavirus. Fastgrants launched a few weeks ago and has already awarded grants to 97 different research proposals. Roots of Progress breaks down various funding mā¦
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
āš¼ The Enemies of Writing A great piece from the Atlantic's George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from oā¦
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchinā¦
- SaaS Valuations Look Good
Some interesting data on the current state of public SaaS company performance: SaaS multiples look steady: of the 82 SaaS companies we follow, the average public SaaS business is trading at 10.03x revenue while the meā¦