From the Investors
David Teten of ff Venture Capital presents his slideshow of research on the ways large corporations can identify the ‘next generation of disruptive companies’ in “How Large Corporations Can Learn from the Innovation Economy”
Ali Hamed of CoVenture and Arteen Arabshahi of Karlin Venturesunveil their research around what’s changed about marketplaces, what infrastructure is being built to support new needs, and gaps in what currently exists in “The Future of Marketplace Infrastructure” (slide deck)
Bill Gurley of Benchmark reflects, with adoration, on his memories of Dave Goldberg of SurveyMonkey in “…Be Like Dave”
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures compares the efficiencies of bottoms up and top down companies across four dimensions: revenue growth, gross margin, profitability, and capital raised in “Which Is a More Efficient Way to Build a SaaS Startup – Bottoms Up or Top Down?”
Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures explains why he says, ‘unicorns are the only way for VCs with funds more than $150 million to survive’ in “Why VCs Need Unicorns Just to Survive”
Brad Harrison of Scout Ventures calculates an example company’s valuation ‘using different prices per class of stock’ to discount current ‘unicorn’ valuations in “Are These the Bubbles You’re Looking For?”
Hunter Walk of Homebrew recounts the salary strategies the YouTube team took when he was there, as a ‘radical step’ to address base salary calculations in “The Time When YouTube Eliminated Pay Bias for Its Product Managers”
Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures admits ‘I am not a fan of committee decisions’ and details why he values ‘high-conviction’ over team consensus in “My Number One Advice for Startups or VCs: Conviction > Consensus”
From the Operators
Author Leslie Berlin dives into the history of Silicon Valley to support her point that ‘Silicon Valley will continue to rule’ the tech industry in “To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past”
Eric Jorgenson of Evergreen educates founders on the topics of ‘cost leadership’, economies of scale, operating efficiency, ‘tight scope’, and more in “How Cost Leadership Builds Powerful Businesses, and Why It Always Matters”
Morgan Brown of GrowthHackers pulls together what believes made ten ‘rocketship’ companies so successful and reverse engineers their growth engines in “Ten Things I Learned Studying Ten of the World’s Fastest Growing Startups”
Claus Moberg of SnowShoe tells his story of the challenges he’s faced from the first SnowShoe Stamp prototype to the current state of the product in “Hardware is Hard”
James Cohane formerly of Axial outlines what he calls the ‘definitive definition’ of Business Development in “WTF is Biz Dev? (aka What is “Business Development?”)”
Serial Entrepreneur Steve Blank features Thibault Duchemin’s journey building Transcense before Lean LaunchPad up to launching a product to ‘bridge the deaf/ hearing communication gap in “How One Startup Figured Out What Could Really Help Deaf People”