Back in my day, we had web pages and URLs. And you had to look for stuff.
“Who needs to know about this?”: Communication as you Scale [Molly Graham/GlueClub] – People forget all the time that your company values can stay the same as you grow but the activities and practices required to achieve them successfully often have to evolve. Some things you leave behind, others your pull forward in a modified fashion. Here Molly makes the claim that ~50 people is a major transition point for most startups and that COMMUNICATION is the most important/quickest to break at this inflection.
What follows is a fantastic guide to how to think about communications; what you need to implement; and evaluating success. Seriously, read it.
Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It [Rivka Galchen/The New Yorker] – Takes you inside a class at the University of Chicago where each lecture focuses on a perceived existential risk to humanity (AI, Climate Catastrophe, Nuclear Destruction), with a scientific approach. I was also surprised to find that the term ‘existential risk’ as an academic concept only dates back to a 2002 paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom (although obviously theorizing about doom scenarios is, well, timeless).
The Last $250k [Charles Hudson/PrecursorVentures] – A notable pre-seed investor, Charles is remarking on the clarity of action which comes when you’re down to your last $250k of capital and wonders why we don’t/how we can operate with that focus while there’s more money in the bank (so as to not have to get to your last $250k).
“For the type of companies I work with, that $250K usually translates to 4-6 months of life, barring a fundraise or other capital infusion,” Charles writes, then noting that it’s not about effort – most everyone is already working very hard. But rather:
- The most important things to work on become incredibly clear
- The data needed to validate the company’s hypothesis becomes much clearer
- There are things that the company was doing that they stop doing because those things don’t really matter given the gravity of the situation
Why we changed prices 3 times in 1 year [Matt Hodges/Equals] – Oh I love the art and science of pricing. It’s just a truism that most startups begin pricing incorrectly – either choosing a structure that ends up not being properly connected to the desired motion of their business (per seat vs usage based vs tiered, etc) and almost certainly higher or lower than where they’ll end up. The way I think about it is pre-PMF your pricing should be rational but not a barrier to adoption, and post PMF you should be pushing pricing up to find where your true limits on value exist.
Equals is a SaaS reporting and analysis startup that walks you through their pretty wide ranging journey to figure out how they should charge. Spoiler alert, simple was best and they turned off self-service.
Investing in the Age of Generative AI [Kevin Shang/East Wind] – Everything anyone writes about AI investing is simultaneously out of date and prescient. Although I guess you can also be out of date and incorrect, but if that’s the case I would be sharing with you here. Here Kevin believes “Regardless of how venture firms choose to ‘play’ this cycle, this almost feels like an existential moment for the venture industry.” And translates that into strategies based on firm size/focus.
Enjoy!