Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
The thing about smart people is that they tend to think that if they think really hard about something, they might figure it out, when the truth is, in strategy (and life in general), there is never one right answer.... See more
Strategy requires making choices about a future that is not yet known. I’m one of those people that tends to over-intellectualize
Sari Azout • Both are true
Product-market fit progresses in levels . It’s not a binary state where you have it and you’re golden, or you don’t and you’re not on the path. But it’s also not a vague spectrum or fuzzy sliding scale, where you can’t be sure where you’re at.
The 4 Levels of PMF
Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, and there’s probably a finite amount of energy available for these focused choices.
That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.
For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique... See more
That’s why our digital habits matter. Not to save us five or ten minutes a day, but to save us from a few hundred unimportant decisions that break our flow.
For example, if instead of trying to come up with a unique... See more
Digital shortcuts and cognitive load
Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:
- Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are
Fictive Kin • Pmarchive · How much funding is too little? Too much?
- 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,
Lenny Rachitsky • A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)
The demands of a startup are dizzying. To anchor yourself, you must schedule time to write things down.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review
Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.
If... See more
If... See more
Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
“Working on a startup is like riding a broken bicycle. You have to both ride and fix it at the same time.”
How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer
First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly... See more