Sebastien Michaud

Lauri “Deep relationships”

1. Invest in your first impression: part 2.
   
   
   • If you’re doing in-person events, make sure you have an ‘outside person’ with a face that fits.
   
   
   • If you can’t achieve this, lean-in to being different. Polarise the customer base, and get the obstinate old guard out of the way so you don’t waste your time. There is probably no value in conversing with a grouchy

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hiring is hard , hiring for a start-up is even harder, and trying to do both of these things in a corner of the world that has suffered decades of brain drain is harder still

First principles is a problem-solving technique where you break down complex problems into their most basic and fundamental parts. Instead of building on existing assumptions and knowledge, you start from the ground up, questioning everything and identifying the core components that cannot be reduced any further. By understanding these basic... See more

• “When we think about vertical SaaS startups, it is important to remember that there's nothing inherently magical about vertical SaaS - the success has come from either building a tool that is incredibly complicated and hard to replicate and entrenched or from building a core platform that can own a control point from which you go out and add

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This sounds so myopic in hindsight that I’m almost embarrassed by it, but, at the outset, I didn’t even have a view on whether or not I should pursue venture investment, and I had no real concept for how I wanted to design a business—at least not beyond its engineering function.

To me, this type of software is distinctly missing: software for play that is not designed to engage users strictly within their game, but which is designed to be a prop for a world created by the users themselves.