Startup Advice
sari and
Startup Advice
I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
Dan Rosetwitter.commost founders tend to remain high-level when the topic of culture comes up. For starters, there are tons of reads on why culture matters, but strikingly few on how to actually architect it. “We all understand what it means to some extent, but it's rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product/market fit or founder-led sales, but... See more
Run This Diagnostic to Thoughtfully Build Company Culture
Emil Michael (ex CBO at Uber)
open.spotify.comHere are (some) steps founders can take to get reporters to write about their companies (a thread). (Caveat: this thread is not exhaustive and really applies only to me)
✡️ Jon Shieber ✡️twitter.comHow do you become a 100-year company?
Taste is a double-edged sword. Because it is ephemeral, you’re untouchable if you have it. Competitors won’t be able to copy it—what is there to copy?
Taste is a double-edged sword. Because it is ephemeral, you’re untouchable if you have it. Competitors won’t be able to copy it—what is there to copy?
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Designing products for a single person
In business, there are countless examples of products invented for a single person that then became mass-marketable. Here are a few of my favorites:
In business, there are countless examples of products invented for a single person that then became mass-marketable. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Baking soda —invented in the 1800s by British chemist Alfred Bird so that he could make bread for his wife, who was allergic to yeast.
- The typewriter —one of the
Casey Rosengren • The Power of Designing for a Single User
The “bedroom startup” approach, an audience-centric model
Say you have 100,000 DAUs and a retention rate of 80%, and for every five users, one of them tells a friend each day to download your app (and they do it). You get 20k new users per day just from word of mouth. In this equation, Xn is the number of DAUs today and Xn+1 is the number of DAUs tomorrow:
If you start... See more
X n+1 = (X n * 80%) + (X n * (1⁄5))
If you start... See more
Sean Colombo • The Secret to Duolingo’s Growth
Fantastic startup advice from Marc Andreessen 15 years ago. https://t.co/slnUkIGB5j