From the Investors
Eric Paley of Founder Collective expands on reasons why venture capital may be the wrong path for some entrepreneurs in “Venture Capital is a Hell of a Drug”
Nabeel Hyatt of Spark Capital examines why so many startups get wrapped up in the appearance of success, versus the hard choices necessary to actually be successful in “It Takes Time”
Sean Percival of 500 Startups writes about how to help others dealing with depression in the startup industry in “Founder Real Talk from the Edge”
Rick Baker of Blackbird Ventures lists the seven reasons why his team has invested in only 29 out of 2,102 startups since the firm started in “Lessons from Saying No to 1,983 Startups”
Top Tier Capital Partners finds that a portfolio of seed and micro VCs can provide an alternative way of gaining meaningful access to what many consider to be “hard-to-access” VCs in “A New Approach to Defining ‘Track Record’ for Micro VCs”
Will Little of Prota Ventures discusses the best approach for founders to take when building a financial model in “Startup Financial Modeling, Part 1: What is a Financial Model?”
From the Operators
Hiten Shah of Quick Sprout offers three lessons that SaaS founders should learn from David Cancel of Drift in “Learn the Ultimate Truth”
Andy Raskin walks through how Zuora’s deck leads prospects through five key elements in “The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen”
Julia Chen of Appcues outlines examples of how freemium apps can convert users with well-designed upgrade prompts in “Understand the User Journey”
Hampus Jakobsson reflects on how and why his team decided to shut down their SaaS startup in “How We Debriefed When Our Startup Folded”
Divya Ganesan from Chargebee writes about SaaS customer development and the process involved in building conversations, with lessons from the pioneers in “Customer Development & The Anti-Library”
Lincoln Murphy says those who think near-zero churn is unrealistic are trying to justify negative results by blaming customers instead of owning their failures in “Excuses and the Myth of Near-Zero Churn“
Ecosystem Growth Hacking: A New Approach To Corporate Venture?
tl;dr: You’ve heard of corporate venture capital before, but did you know some funds are going small and close to the metal by targeting developers to build on their platforms?
