When do startups begin to lose traction?
50% do not get to Round 2. 90% are gone by Round 3. In a report, CBInsights analyzed 1100 startups ( that raised seed rounds in 2008-2010) to answer exactly that question.
Why we do not focus on Sales?
If you are following the startup discourse on the net with many very knowledgeable founders and VCs and others weighing in for revenue, the primary obsession seems to be with funding. Yet anyone who has raised and spent knows that money in the bank runs out at some point unless it is backed by revenue.
Using Quora to promote your Startup
You are the founder of a novel new Startup. What is the best way to get the word around. Because you need to be visible and known. Of course you can spend investors money (or your own) run PPC ads, buy booths in conferences etc. But what if you do not have a lot of cash? Content marketing could be your answer. Hubspot has championed this idea and branded this as Inbound to great success. Where does one get started?
The Youngest (Self made) Billionaire ever
That’s right. Earlier than Bill, earlier than Marc, she is undoubtedly a child of the technology era. Yet she has nothing to do with tech.
Mental Models for your sales hiring
Tomasz Tunguz wrote this lucid post on using mental models for Sales hiring at Startups. The first is that of looking at the experience of the sales person through the lens of Market Leader or Market Challenger. Selling for a Market leader is considerably easier and allows sales people to leverage the brand. However selling for a startup is very different and involves educating the market and convincing the buyer to abandon the market leader in the process of buying the challenging solution,
How did Unicorns look like as startups?
This is a question that comes up often and Ali Tamaseb, partner DCVC, spent 300 hours analyzing public data, talking to founders and combing through Crunchbase and PitchBook on exaclty this topic .
Sarah Lacy’s ‘good bye post
Sarah Lacy wrote the much read and celebrated cover story on Kevin Rose of Digg.com for Business Week. From there she went on to launch one of the early experiments of independent investigative journalism with her site Pando, breaking a lot of journalistic ground.
When Netflix started up
Startup stories, specially of the big ubiquitous brands like Netflix it makes for a great read. Co-Founder and first CEO Marc Randolph wrote ‘That Will Never Work’ – the behind the scenes account beyond the popular legend that Reed Hastings founded Netflix after Blockbuster charged him a $40 late fee.
Learnings from Steve
Steve Jobs was the Founder’s Founder and continuing my post earlier this week about Guy Kawasaki here is another article by him in Cnet from way back in 2011 where he writes about his learnings from Steve Jobs. Here goes (and I love the way he launches into the list with one you can practically imagine Jobs speaking out loud).
4 point formula to get attention from a VC
Girish Mathrubootham is the Poster Child of VC funded Indian SaaS industry. He raised $400m from marque investors like Sequoia, Accel, Google and Tiger Global. SaaSBooMi, the Asian Saas meet for founders is, well, booming. This year it is slated for 24 & 25 Jan and yours truly will be there (thanks to Suresh Sambandam, CEO Kissflow).
