From the Investors
Joe Lonsdale of 8VC addresses how to think about the value of experience at a technology startup, the seniority of a company’s team, and when it’s the right time to make certain executive hires in “Bring in the ‘Adults’?”
Stefano Bernardi of Mission Market Ventures offers his take on who’s pushing the boundaries of funding innovation in “The 26 Most Innovative Venture Capital Firms”
William Mougayar of Virtual Capital Ventures categorizes the characteristics of an Initial Cryptocurrency Offering into four dimensions and wonders if ICOs are necessary in “How to Evaluate an Initial Cryptocurrency Offering (ICO)”
Steve Guengerich of Capital Factory goes in-depth (55 pages) on why the startup ecosystem is a new, important layer of the R&D network that every large company should add to their innovation spend in “A Study on Corporate Innovation”
Guy Turner of Hyde Park Venture Partners highlights Annual Contract Value (ACV) as the single most powerful lever in driving exponential growth of a SaaS business in “Bend the curve with Average Contract Value (ACV)”
From the Operators
Grant Miller of Replicated recognizes there are likely dozens of nuances of SaaS that founders may not know, so he put together a monster ‘Enterprise Ready SaaS feature guide’ in “Changing the Enterprise Software Narrative”
Des Traynor of Intercom publishes a lengthy essay on why ‘only the paranoid survive’, why you can’t ignore technology trends, and how to keep your product alive in “Your Product is Already Obsolete”
Nancy Go of Wayfair shares how brand marketing is really sales at scale, and details how to think about this approach to distribution and communication for young companies in “For Startups, Where Does Brand Marketing Fit?”
John Egan of Pinterest dissects the problem around percentage gains and why Growth teams should avoid using them to when it comes to assessing the overall impact of an experiment in “The Wrong Way To Analyze Experiments”
Julia Mitelman of OneLeap acknowledges that our lives are curated and uncovers how the people behind the roles that shape our world think in “The Product Manager vs. The Strategist”
James Muir of NextGen Healthcare reflects on the fear of asking prospects to buy too early or being pushy and the fear of sales rejection in “Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 42”
A Brief Glance At Ridesharing Revenue Multiples
Ridesharing unicorn Ola is rumored to set to accept a down round. Mattermark dug into historical Lyft and Uber results to find out why the company is about to take a haircut.
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