Ted Glasnow

Flexport’s best sellers had the courage to say no to transactional deals and embraced if/then statement to encourage long term engagements with customers to service more share of wallet in the long-run 

Type of company: Paid-growth driven businesses; Most common North Star Metric: Growth efficiency

Getting press is rarely the way to get started

If you get everything else wrong in pricing, but you get your value metric right, you'll do ok.

Every start-up has less resources than they need, so strategic planning is essential at all stages

What to look for Pre-Product:

1) Visible excitement

2) People are willing to pay for it now

In the early days of Figma, we talked with practically every designer we knew. In search of more feedback, we turned to Twitter which I realized we could use to determine the most influential designers. After getting the data, I further filtered the list to people that were personally inspirational to me. Then I cold emailed / found introductions... See more

What matters much more is two other questions: 1) Your value metric 2) Your ideal customer profiles and segments

It's...not just unions, but the municipalities, the planners, the permitting offices, the inspectors, the cities. They're all going to have an opinion and a view on us. We'll be under the radar for a little bit, of course.