From the Investors
Semil Shah of Haystack Fund finds there’s a slight decrease in the number of experiments being funded and details five possible ripple effects in “Reflections On The Startup Funding Climate As We Slip Into Summertime”
Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital thinks pipeline development charts should work a bit more like a cohort analysis that allows you to follow a customer cohort’s development over time in “A better way to visualize pipeline development? (WIP)”
David Cohen of Techstars chats with Harry Stebbings of The Twenty Minute VC about scaling Techstars Ventures and investing in Uber, Twilio, and SendGrid in “20VC: David Cohen”(podcast)
Jesse Middleton of Flybridge Capital Partners reflects on his first two weeks as a new General Partner and where he says his focus on investing in “A Few Thoughts”
Michael Seibel of Y Combinator expands on knowing when you’ve found product market fit and when to keep looking in “The Real Product Market Fit”
Michael Berolzheimer of Bee Partners announces the closing of Bee’s latest fund, Bee Partners II, which was oversubscribed at $30M+ after initially targeting $25M in “Pre-Seed VC, Bee Partners, raises its “Series A””
Alida Miranda-Wolff of Hyde Park Angels goes inside how deals are done from the entrepreneur and investor perspectives in “New Investment Series: Luxury Garage Sale“
From the Operators
Greg Elfrink of Empire Flippers provides foundational knowledge for anyone looking to learn the basics of the SaaS business model in “The SaaS Business Model Explained”Andrus Prude of Pipedrive outlines ‘table stakes’ marketing tactics he’s used over the past ten years in “10 Highly Practical Startup Marketing Tips”
Suhail Doshi of MixPanel offers what he learned about funding at the beginning of Mixpanel, when things were their bleakest and they were working sixteen-hour days in “How to Resist “Dumb Money” When You’re a Week Away from Startup Death”
Joel Carron of Mode Analytics reveals how a customer success analyst came up with a new way to measure and think holistically about customer service metrics—by conceptualizing them as a cube in “A New Way to Measure Customer Service”
Entrepreneur Jon Westenberg talks about long term commitments in “I work on a 5 year time frame. Anything less is a loss“
Here’s What One Hot YC Startup Learned Raising A $1.4M Seed Round
tl;dr: Raising early-stage capital today is more challenging than you might expect, even with traction, hype, and a strong pedigree.
