The 3 Things We Look For 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?
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 the best indicator you might be onto something. How fast
Is Story or Traction More Important 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 > $
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. In fact,
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 improving a
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. If you want to
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's an indicator of whether there's
Making Your First Technical Hire
I was recently asked me the following and thought I'd post the response it case it was helpful to others. Q: 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? Great
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’