Why does strategy tend to stall when the rubber hits the road? Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer of Cockroach Labs, shares an essential guide for creating a resilient strategy that’s still standing next year.
530 votes, 63 comments. My co-founder and I, a senior Amazon research scientist and AWS SDE respectively, launched Marqo a little over a week ago - a…
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The Flexport CEO on why it takes so long for your package to arrive.
There are a few cloud kitchen restaurants that deliver food that is so shit that I want to know which other brands are being run from the same kitchen so that I can avoid them all.
Plus! Watercooler Shows; Smart Thermostats; Substitutes and Complements; Monetization; Apple Ads; Diff Jobs
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It’d be much cheaper than lithium battery storage.
We work with our NFX Guild on this mental model for greatness from day 1. Now, we are sharing it with the rest of the startup community.
Pinky Cole's Slutty Vegan brand has grown from an Atlanta-based restaurant chain to burgeoning national brand — and she's just getting started.
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Brian McEuen, and I'm the founder of On Brand. We help guys shop for clothes online by curating personalized selections as if they were walking into their very own store. We're like Spotify for clothes! Another way to…
Google is promoting the growth of open source tools for designing semis. The science fiction version of this story leads to everyone designing chips, the reality is going to be much narrower, but s…
The most significant bottleneck in the adoption of healthcare technology to date has been distribution. Over the last decade, generations of digital health companies have struggled to reach escape velocity—not because their products and services weren’t transformative, but…
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup…
Many startups scramble to create a "minimum viable product," or MVP, to get a version of their product to market quickly for testing. It’s a great way to cost-effectively test a website or app with real users. But be careful, if your MVP is too minimalist, it could torpedo your…
A close look at the costs that go into running Cushion and the reasons why we use specific services.
I usually tell people that everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned by F’ing up at my first company.
Hubstaff founder Dave Nevogt shares how to test your startup idea by analyzing model, market and concept.
Building a two-sided market is probably the hardest thing you can build as an entrepreneur. It's so hard that a few weeks ago, I organized a Marketplace
You can follow my latest writing at ScreenshotEssays.com
Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.
A few weeks ago, we shared some key startup metrics (16 of them, to be exact) that help investors gauge the health of a business when investing in it. But to repeat ourselves for a moment: Good metrics aren’t just about raising money from VCs … they’re about running the business…
It’s no secret that investors don’t like hardware businesses. Despite the eternal frustration of startup founders, investor distaste in physical product businesses is actually entirely logical. It’s nearly impossible to build a venture-scale business by selling dumb plastic…
In response to yesterday’s post on management design patterns, many readers asked for examples of best practices. So I’m going to write about the management best practices I have been taught and I have observed in startups. This is the first post of that series. The first…
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
Two proven sales experts on how to build a process and team from the ground up to consistently boost revenue month over month.
Goods versus Services: The next trillion dollar opportunity Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but less so for services. In this essay, we argue that a breakthrough is on its way: The…
We're funding too many unsustainable companies.
I’m a startup product growth guy with a social gaming background. I currently work as VP of Growth at Relcy, a mobile search engine. A few companies I’ve worked with on growth in the past (HIRED $702…
There's lots written about how you should build software, but few concrete examples of the messy reality as implemented by startups. Here's our process.
During my tenure at LinkedIn, I’ve held a wide variety of roles and responsibilities within the company. Some are fairly public (as described on my LinkedIn profile). Others are the the typ…
The “unreasonable effectiveness” of data for machine-learning applications has been widely debated over the years (see here, here and…
Culture isn’t about whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 500 giant. It’s about values and mindset. It’s about how you approach the decisions you make.
Apologies in advance: If you’re fluent in the language of accounting, please skip to the bonus Verizon iPhone feature at the end. What I’m about to describe will strike you as oversimplified and…
We’ve noticed a common problem: founders don’t know what “good” looks like in a term sheet. This makes sense, because it is often, literally, the first time in their careers that they’ve seen one. This puts founders at a significant disadvantage because VCs see term sheets all…
We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may…
What happens on the other side of the acquisition doesn't get much startup press
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
I found a great domain name for sale on @undeveloped. Check it out!
In the Creative Founder, students are paired semi-randomly, and then spend a semester trying to get to product-market fit. I always start them with market selection. A market has three key elements…
Plus: Hydrogen pipelines, Advanced Market Commitments, and what made solar energy cheap
CDBaby* is an online distributor of independent music. Founded by well-known entrepreneur Derek Sivers, the service became a huge hit with independent
Dyson almost launched a robot vacuum. Back in 2001, after three years in development. Its first effort, shown to the British public in London looked nothing (and we mean nothing) like the eventual 360 Eye unveiled today. Sixteen years is a long time in tech. The DC06, as it was…
With this many ideas to choose from, you have no excuse not to get started today with your own service business.