This is one interesting analysis by Fred Wilson in his AVC column posted in 2017. What burn rate is acceptable and sustainable? Understandably the discussion with founders and boards could be emotional at best when discussing burn rate. All companies and their backers want to get to the Unicorn status as soon as possible and no spend is enough to get there.
The Startup life full of challenges. Managing relationship through difficult situations that need discussions and decisions is critical. Not without reason co-founder conflicts seem to be one of the key reasons for startup failures. That made me reflect on how many of our difficult discussions with colleagues and contemporaries devolve into nothingness and how we can possibly change the approach to make it more meaningful. Giving feedback or discussing tactical issues at hand can be tricky. They tend to land up in debates, the need to defend ones position becomes imperative. It is rare to have an environment which is safe and open for the group to share openly and that’s where the Gestalt (language) Protocol comes in.
Jordan Valencia, Programs and Partnership Manager at Grab Ventures, in her latest article in Harvard Business Review talks about the need to focus on culture when companies are in the Hyper Growth phase. Defined by Alexander V. Izosimov in HBR in 2008, “Hypergrowth refers to the steep part of the S-curve”. The rapid growth comes with steep rise in employee count. This is where the challenges set in.
We knew it. The sellers don’t really know What Buyers Want. TrustRadius has conducted a detailed study on buying and selling of Business Technology and surveyed 941 people – 712 Buyers and 229 vendor marketers and salespeople and figured “they don’t see eye to eye!”.
“Victory awaits the one who has everything in order. People call it good luck. While defeat always follows bad preparations and people call it bad luck.”
Ronald Amundsen
Erling Kagge is the first man to complete the Three Poles Challenge. He walked to all the three poles. “- North Pole in 1990, the South Pole in 1993, and the summit of Mount Everest (the “third pole”) in 1994”.
Tomasz Tunguz is the one you turn to for analysis when watershed events happen. Salesforce Tableau acquisition is one such event in a string of similar ones (although the most expensive by value by far) playing out this month. It follows Google’s Looker acquisition and Sisense’s acquisition of Periscope Data.
Lindsey Rogers Cook, editor for Digital Storytelling and Training at the New York Times wrote this very interesting piece on How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets. One of the key reasons Journalists became journalists was because they were not interested in Math. Or so we thought. But it is now apparent that an increasing number of journalistic disciplines are dependent on data and those who control the narrative – governments, politicians and corporations all want to twist those numbers in support of their own agendas. It is akin to the earlier question of whether Journalists should learn to code. While the answer to that was a resounding “No” , those who did learn to code went on to “have mashed databases to discover wrongdoing, designed immersive experiences that transport readers to new places and created tools that change the way we work.”
It is clear. Everything legacy, every business, every process will be disrupted. So the choice is yours if you will be the one to be disrupted or you will be the disruptor. The disproportionate value that the disruptor harnesses is clear (Uber, AirBnB, Dropbox, Zappos). What makes someone to become the disruptor? Sometimes it is by accident, but more often than not it is because the disruptor decides it was enough of the status quo and acts.
When asked whether he saw any pattern in the recently listed software co’s wrt sales efficiencies Tomasz Tunguz found one –
“All of these businesses sell bottom up with small initial ACVs that grow dramatically. Atlassian, Zoom, Twilio, Slack, New Relic, Elastic. All of them target small groups of users within larger organization who introduce the vendor. Over time, usage grows, accounts expand. Some acquire through open source, others through virality (Zoom).”
I was reading this article by Jackie MacMullan on the ESPN site – on how elite athletes cope or learn to cope with high stress linked to split second (guaranteed) performance. What makes them falter (mostly overthinking that disconnects their instinctive muscle memory from the last at hand) and how they make a come back from defeat. The article is a must read to see how the top athletes develop regimes to tackle stress under pressure. And it should give Founders a lot of clarity about how to deal with stress in our own play fields.
