Topic
startups
- The Gradient of User Value
Saw this from John Carmack today on X: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”. I love this. If you just keep persistently pushing up the gradient toward more v…
- Netflix Couldn't Build Netflix
David Carboni makes a great point in this piece: successful powerhouse businesses, paragons of scaling up (your Netflixes, Googles, Ubers, et al), could never build the disruptive, fast-moving products that made them…
- Chaordic Organizations
The late Dee Hock, founder of Visa, was a business legend in many respects. Like many of the most revered founders, his ideas were years ahead of their time, and his writing is clear, concise, and super interesting. H…
- The Challenge of High-Capital Startups
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a "fire sale." This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps al…
- Notes on Operating Well
Sam Gerstenzang wrote an excellent piece a couple weeks ago with operating lessons for growing companies, driven by his learnings from the product team at Stripe. Personally, I've got a decade or so of experience as a…
- 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 the…
- 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 Pot…
- Jobs Clubhouse Does
If you're on the internet and haven't been living under a rock for the last few months, you've heard about the startup Clubhouse and its explosive growth. It launched around the time COVID lockdowns started last year,…
- Weekend Reading: Guide to SaaS, a Few Rules, and Starting a Company Now
📕 Stripe’s Guide to SaaS Stripe Atlas has a great batch of guides on various parts of company-building. 📜 A Few Rules Some great random clippings from Morgan Housel. I’m currently reading his latest, The Psychology…
- Strategy for Startups
In his article "Strategy Under Uncertainty," Jerry Neumann contrasts the traditional Porter model of business strategy with one more suited to startups, the former being modeled around mature organizations operating i…
- SEO for Startups
I rediscovered this great piece from Patrick McKenzie, an SEO primer for startups, but actually valid for anyone trying to generate traffic, interest, and business from the internet for anything at all. The first cut…
- Weekend Reading: Raising Less, the Adjacent Possible, and Fire and Motion
🧰 There Are More Uses For A Screwdriver Than You Can Calculate Biologist Stuart Kauffman on biological functions and the "adjacent possible": The unexpected uses of features of organisms, or technologies, are precise…
- Weekend Reading: Timeful Texts, Sumo Startups, and Canva Backlinks
🕰 Timeful Texts A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas…
- Novelty and Heresy
Paul Graham: Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates. There is a positive side to this phenomeno…
- Entrepreneurs, Then and Now
I always enjoy conversations with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. This interview (conducted by Slack founder Steward Butterfield) reviews their experiences as founders back in the pre-bubble era and compares and con…
- Status as a Service
This post from Eugene Wei has been making the rounds in tech. It's a lengthy article dissecting how status is really the secret currency of success for social products — not individual utility or entertainment. He dra…
- How Airtable Became a Unicorn by Reinventing the Spreadsheet
This post from Hiten Shah tells the backstory of one of the more interesting startups these days, Airtable. Like the title states, the objective of Airtable is to build a no-code system for data management and applica…
- Keith Rabois on This Week in Startups
When I first heard about his company Opendoor (a real estate startup with the goal of creating faster liquidity for home sellers), I started following Keith Rabois. His Twitter account is a good follow. This discussio…