On building of All Trades
Hindsight is 2020
I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.
See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics — a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.
That’s the tricky... See more
I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.
See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing a business in 2023, and in that article I referenced this very same seismic shift in startup dynamics — a shift that, no surprise, began all the way back with the pandemic in 2020.
That’s the tricky... See more
Joe Procopio • Starting a Business Looks Drastically Different in 2024
How startups changed since 2020:
-Consumer fell out of love with technology
-Business & Venture OverIndexed on AI
-Money went from Tight to Scared
What’s happening now:
-self founded, funded & reliant
-Profitable out of the gate
-solving problems and building with slower burn rate
-Innovating strategically alongside technical innovation
How do generalists help? Taking a broad approach gets you further faster
As an extension of this “don’t hire until it hurts” philosophy, Foster notes that Zapier was very hesitant in the early days to bring on anyone with management experience (even though the founding trio themselves didn’t have any). “Our first people managers were just me, my co-founders, and early employees that we promoted into those roles. We were... See more
The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building — 8 Lessons from Zapier
Early stages require both execution and strategy, the doers and the managers. Find both.
The median bootstrapped B2B SaaS company currently spends around 90% of its annual recurring revenue on costs—25% on go-to-market strategy and execution, 24% on research and development, 15% on administrative and miscellaneous expenses, 13% on website hosting and implementation, and 10% on customer retention. Each of these categories of cost is now... See more
Will Manidis • Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups
On the evolving spend of startups
the people who can start things will be the major beneficiaries in the coming years, because the barrier is no longer knowledge or skills, it’s courage.
Superhuman
“We are only leading when we are centered on making others better.”
Superhuman
intentions are just as powerful as goals, if not more so. While a goal is a specific target, a clear destination on the horizon, an intention serves as a guiding light, softly illuminating our path as we move through time and space. Goals can sometimes make us feel like we're wearing blinders, zeroed in on a singular endpoint, which can lead to... See more
What Matters Most?
For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?
Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more
Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more
Sari Azout • Can I Ramble for a Sec?
Founders need a new way of thinking, of building, of support that allows them to drive systematic, methodical and meaningful change.