Startup Systems

Because big businesses aren’t built on gimmicks. You can blitz your way through Sand Hill Road and spike up the App Store charts on gimmicks, but you can’t actually use them to replace Gmail, or Salesforce, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram. Even seemingly instant successes can’t become lasting companies without putting in the... See more

You can do what's called the board mission pledge where the people on your board are required as a condition of being on your board to pledge that they'll use their business judgment under Delaware law to support the mission, not just the narrow interest of shareholders. You can build, we call it an LTSPV, which is basically a financing instrument... See more

The teams are currently structured by function (product, R&D, design, business, etc.), and different teams think about different layers of the company and stack. But all energy is directed toward improving the core product. We design objectives that translate to common top-level metrics and improve the user experience holistically. For example, all... See more

First Round Capital’s PMF framework consists of four levels: nascent, developing, strong, extreme

1. Level one: Nascent product-market fit. Likely a pre-seed or seed-stage company. The goal in this stage is to find three to five customers with a problem worth solving, engage with them, deliver a solution, and validate that solution. [examples: Vanta,

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Sometimes, it’s possible to reduce the bad parts. But that takes considerable focus, effort and commitment. It’s not free. You can’t expect them to go away on their own.

It might not seem like a feature to you, but the bad parts are often the flip side that allows the other part to exist.

And sometimes, the bad parts are built into the system

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Conventional hiring processes are designed to recruit the most skilled people to fill a specific role at the right price. The experience can feel dehumanizing — it’s laden with unwritten rules, negotiation, posturing, and indirect communication (if you’re lucky) through recruiters.

The process, at its core, is a transaction of resources. It’s not... See more

Eight marketing maxims

• Trust is worth more than attention.


• Helping people get to where they seek to go is more effective than hustling people to persuade them to go where you’re going.


• Choose your customers, choose your future.


• Tell ten people. If they don’t tell the others, make a better product.


• Creating the conditions for the word to spread is the

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I started this company in one of the recessions and had seen suppliers and customers go to the wall in droves. To me, getting more customers and more orders meant safety and security.

To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.