Should You Stop Working on Your Startup?
This is the toughest question founders face, and given the current funding environment, I'm being asked it a lot. When I was a founder, I never had a good way to think about it. Due to sunk cost fallacy and survivorship bias, answering it for yourself is both
Dogmatic vs Scientific Founders
All founders are optimists. If you don't think things can improve, you wouldn't build anything new. Unfortunately, optimism is necessary but insufficient to be a successful founder. A founder’s success often depends on their source of optimism. Dogmatic Founders Dogmatic founders are optimistic in the
Why Office Hours Are Effective
At the end of every batch, we ask founders "What was the most valuable part of the program?" The answer is always Office Hours. If you've experienced it, it's obvious why but I wanted to see if I could explain it to people who
Common Startup Pitch Mistakes and What to Do
Iterative Winter 2024 is having it's Demo Day on tomorrow (Wednesday, 8 May). To help companies prepare, we've host pitch practices every few days where companies pitch to other founders, Brian and I. They get immediate feedback, learn from each others pitches, iterate over a few
What to Look for in Your First Technical Hire
I’m looking for a technical co-founder or hiring my first engineer. Since I’m not technical, I don’t know what qualities to look for. Any advice?
Top Posts and Book Recommendations of 2023
It's the end of the year and everyone's doing it so I thought I'd share my top 10 posts of 2023 and my top 5 book recommendations. Top 10 Posts I wrote roughly 15 posts in 2023. Mostly on Linkedin and a few made
Convincing People to Work at Your Startup
A signification portion of a founder’s time and energy is spent convince people of things. They could be investors, potential users or prospective hires. I’ve talked a fair bit about the first two so I thought I’d spend some time talking about the last one. The challenge
Is Your Startup Solving an Important Problem?
A startup exists to solve a problem. In fact, the problem the startup is trying to solve is the most important thing about the startup. It dictates the market size, the product, the type of people the startup needs, etc. Therefore, for a startup to be successful, it needs to
What Iterative Looks for When Investing in Founders
Maybe the most common question I get is what do we look for when deciding to invest in startups? The answer is surprisingly simple at high level but exceedingly nuanced in practice. At a high level, we (and I suspect every investors) wants to invest (1) in a startup working
The Difference Between Bad, Good, and Great Startup Engineers
Given something that needs to be built.. A bad startup engineer will immediately start to build it. There’s very little consideration for how it should be built, ways it could be built and what the trade-offs are. You say make a button that when pressed does X. They make
Should You Continue Working on Your Startup?
[Update] I wrote a new post on this topic here. A persistent question founders ask themselves and probably the most difficult to answer. Here are the 3 questions I ask myself when trying to answer this question and what to do about it. Is it growing fast? Growing fast is
Does Story or Traction Matter More When Fundraising?
Fundraising is one of the most difficult things a founder has to do. And I suspect, given the current market conditions, it’s even more difficult now than in the previous seven to 10 years. A common question we get is: “Which is more important: strong traction or a strong
Learnings Compound, Money Doesn't
Things that compound are significantly more valuable than things that don't. For startups, when you learn something about your users, that learning helps you every time you design a new feature, run a new marketing campaign, etc. for the lifetime of the company. For startups, $ does not compound.
Increasing a Startup's Chances of Being Successful
For a startup to win, it needs a sufficient number of successes along the way. The obvious question then becomes: how does a startup generate the maximum number of successes? Let's define a success as anything that when accomplished, moves your startup closer to winning. It could be
Founder Simulations
Great founders have this uncanny ability to run highly accurate, localized simulations about their business in their heads. What's surprising is none of them could do this when they started. What's the benefit of being able to mentally run accurate simulations? You can predict the future.
How to Think About Product
For many, being a founder is the first time they've had to think about product strategy. Here's how I think about it. All products can be broken down into growth, activation, retention and monetization. 1. Growth – Are more and more people using your product? It'
The Importance of Slope
A benefit of studying mathematics is, you learn how to describe things and their relationship relative to each other. For example, if you want to describe a line, you can with the equation y = mx + b, where b is the y-intercept and m is the slope. I know what you’
Starting Iterative
Brian, Hsu Han, and I are starting a YC-style accelerator called Iterative, focused exclusively on Southeast Asia. The first batch starts on 1 June 2020. If you’re working on something, you should apply. Here’s how it works: 1. Invest $150K Upon Admission – Iterative will invest USD $150K upon
Origin of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup
Decide.com was acquired by eBay on September 6, 2013. For those unfamiliar with Decide, we invented technology that predicted the future price of consumer goods. Thinking about buying a Samsung television? We’d tell you whether the price would drop in the next two weeks. We helped you decide
Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup
Decide.com was acquired by eBay on September 6, 2013. For those unfamiliar with Decide, we invented technology that predicted the future price of consumer goods. Thinking about buying a Samsung television? We’d tell you whether the price would drop in the next two weeks. We helped you decide