From the Investors
Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz explains how PCs, clocks, radios, cameras, etc., are being subsumed by smartphones and Internet of Things devices in “The Home and the Mobile Supply Chain“
Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures encourages founders to ‘really know what to measure as a definition of success’ to avoid building ‘shelfware’ in “Be Honest About Whether Your Product Really Makes a Difference“
Aaron Harris of Y Combinator provides founders with a framework to ‘make the [cofounder] relationship manageable’ and reasons why it can be hard in “Cofounder Management“
Ryan McIntyre of Foundry Group advises founders to put their ‘game face on’ when pitching their startup to ‘maximize the value of the feedback’ in “Pitch Your Company, Don’t Present Your Company’s Pitch“
Jonathan Friedman of LionBird Ventures looks to ‘close the gap between how entrepreneurs present their plans vs. how VCs analyze them’ in “LionBird’s Internal Startup Assessment Template”
Brad Feld of Foundry Group guides founders in understanding the dynamics of working with a larger company as a small startup in “How Does a Small Company Make a Big Company Successful?”
David Waxman of TenOneTen Ventures points out what he believes are downsides of an inflated valuation in “Valuation, The Ultimate Vanity Metric”
From the Operators
Paul Adams of Intercom opens up – in detail – about Intercom’s process for building product and managing their product team in “Lessons Learned from Scaling a Product Team“
Aswath Damodaran of the Stern School of Business explores three characteristics of disrupted companies and five stages they go through during disruption in “The Dance of the Disrupted: Observations from the Front Lines”
Kight-Mozilla Fellow Francis Tseng revisits a ‘hugely efficient, if not largely unappreciated mode’ of user interaction – keyboard shortcuts in “The Invisible Interface”
Sean Johnson of Digital Content details the ‘aspects of [growth marketers] that aren’t specific to a particular tool or job function’ in “Creating Unicorns – The 6 Essential Growth Competencies“
Josh Anon of Visioneer Studios shares what he has learned raising funding for a non-tech company in the tech ecosystem in “So You’re Not Building an App?“