This year, my two cats were diagnosed with cancer in quick succession. Then I learned, quite suddenly, that I only have one year left til I’m 40. It’s enough to put a guy into a reflective mood. Shortly after my first cat passed away (may he rest in
Startups go through three phases. In VC parlance, these phases are “seed,” “venture” and “growth.” The seed stage is the search for product-market fit. During this phase you might raise money in rounds with names like “angel,” “pre-seed,” “seed,” etc. You might have a small team or not; a product
My favorite Silicon Valley truism is: The team you build is the company you build. (Credit to Vinod Khosla.) Very soon after founding, most of the work at the company will be done by people who are not you. You will succeed or fail based on the quality of their
It’s pretty surprising how often I have calls with founders where the real problem seems to be a simmering mistrust between them and their board members. Typically they’re calling because of an inflection point: Should they take an M&A offer? Should they try to raise or
For years it’s been fashionable for investors to compete on the basis of being “founder friendly.” This is of course a messaging strategy: Investors succeed by returning lots of money to their LPs, and a subset of investors do so by winning deals on the basis of having a
Business success is mostly about timing. In technology, an underlying innovation drives a decade-long wave of business outcomes built on that innovation. The internet became generally available in 1991 and drove a wave of Internet 1.0 outcomes that accelerated until the 2001 crash. The iPhone launched in 2007 and
Far and away, the most common question I get is about my partnership with Tom. It’s flattering, especially when founders you admire want to hear about how two old east coast friends with one B+ exit to their names do things. It has its moments of agony too: “They’
Late-stage startups are reflections, writ large, of their founding teams. All the strengths and weaknesses, quirks and peccadilloes of the original team become durable advantages and systemic issues at scale. Founders who are community-builders by nature grow to have scalable, defensible community management functions. Founders who have no idea what
It is probably not a great idea for the boss to publicly have favorites, but I was known at Periscope Data to occasionally blurt out that the support team was my favorite team. Well, they were. I probably got away with it because support is such a typically underloved function
In Startup = Growth, Paul Graham plots the life of a startup as an S-curve. In the first phase, you are exploring to find product market fit. Then you find it, and start growing exponentially. Finally, at some point, growth tapers and becomes linear or even flat. As PG explains, the
At my first company, I internalized the standard advice to never think about M&A. The consensus was, and is, to just keep growing the business and good things will come. I did that, and I was lucky that good things did come in the form of a $130M