Well a lot of diverse stuff. I found this interesting list by Amr Kafina a indie web developer who sourced the list from mostly public domain and aggregated the public recommendations from founders. Then he built a site where you can search these by Title, Author or the Founder who recommended that book and a link to the Amazon page for the book.
A good place to start reflecting on the state of startups is to analyze the state of VC investments in 2019. As expected possibly the most succinct and comprehensive overview is available in this post by Tomasz Tunguz. The investment in quantum and the number of rounds have declined in Q4 – although it is possible that all deals have not been announced yet.
YouTeam — Dev Teams Marketplace, a YC co. listed the VC’s making Series A investments and companies those garnered them. Seems like Biotech and Pharma are the largest beneficiaries (in terms of number of companies in top 25 – which is what they listed – as well as the $ raised). All data was sourced from Crunchbase.
This is the last post on Startups in 2019 and what a wonderful journey it has been in sharing my learning s everyday for this entire year. So as you brace yourself for the next let me share a post from 2018 by Y Combinator where they listed areas of interest with their own RFS – Request for Startups. Y Combinator is in a unique position to see hundreds of ideas taking shape and the gaps that remain.
We all make them every day. And most of them are ugly (browse Slideshare for a bit and you will see). I speak with companies and founders, head of sales and CEO’s they all lament about how difficult it is to turn around a slide deck yet Guy Kawasaki gave the formula long back. 10/20/30. 10 slides, 20 mins and 30 point font size. Who is listening?
There is no question that in the pre product market fit days the Founder has to do the selling, however the problem is much more complex than we give credit for. I found this series of articles by Martin Casado, General Partner at A16Z, which is absolute gold. Do you remember prepping for questions like “why is your solution better than everyone else?” or building the competitive quadrant pitch decks? Martin writes – “founders fill it in with a comparative set that’s often populated with so-called competitors that aren’t likely to be included in an actual sales bake-off ….so what you’re really positioning against is the status quo.”
That’s the math that David Cummings wrote about in his post of November 23rd. It is quite simple. If you have $1m of new recurring revenue you are likely looking at a 800k gross margin. Invest half in Marketing and half in hiring two sales people. They will add $1m in new recurring revenue. Rinse and repeat.
Sammy Abdullah Co-Founder of Blossom Street Ventures wrote this overview of Startup CEO salaries which is educative as well as indicative of some trends. He painstakingly gathered and analyzed data as disclosed by companies while filing for their IPO’s and this is what it revealed:
How do you go from 50 customers to a 1000? Let’s make it more interesting – how do you go from 50 customers to 1000 in 18 months?
Now that I got your attention I would love to point you to this great session at Saastr 2019 by Romain Lapeyre, Founder & CEO of Gorgias – a customer service platform for e-commerce stores. I will not dilute the focus of this piece by talking about the $14m round they just raised, but would rather focus on the task at hand.
Do you spend time thinking about your startup’s culture, your managerial priorities and how to deal with people?
Kim Malone Scott is the author of Radical Candor and led products like AdSense, YouTube and Double click online sales and ops at Google. She recounted her management lessons from her work at Google, Apple, Dropbox Twitter and 3 failed startups in her post in the First Round Capital blog.
