From the Investors
Mamoon Hamid of The Social+Capital Partnership shares his 42 page presentation that visualizes Slack and Yammer’s growth and details SaaS fundamentals in “Software-as-a-Service Secrets to Raising Venture Capital“
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures expands on Brad Feld’s post with simple equations for calculating the ‘40% rule for SaaS companies’ in “The 40% Rule“
Lenny Pruss of RRE Ventures explains why he thinks ‘building software that just works’ to give customers value as fast as possible is a winning strategy in “The Most Important SaaS Metric Nobody Talks About: Time-to-Value (‘TtV’)“
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures finds that yearly increases in salary rates and office prices have doubled the cost of operating a startup since 2009 in “The Rising Costs of Scaling a Startup“
Jeff Carter of West Loop Ventures details advantages and disadvantages of twelve different sources of funding for a startup in “Where To Find Money If You Are a Startup”
Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures offers his framework for thinking about frequency, the density and pain of a problem, and the ‘friction of a solution’ in “Finding a Problem Worth Solving”
Brad Feld of Foundry Group believes that we should enable, not try to control, innovation in “Death of Distance and the End of Time”
Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures acknowledges three products using machine learning technologies to cite examples of its progress in “Machine Learning Intelligence Progress is Accelerating”
From the Operators
Camille Ricketts of First Round Review features Tasso Roumeliotis of Location Labs’ ‘culture-driven’ strategy to maintain capital efficiency in a startup in “How This Founder Turned Slow Burn Rate Into a Big Exit“
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic describes his ‘environment-driven approach’ to understanding and solving a problem by identifying and fixing the components of that problem in “Advice and Fallacies”
Ben Yoskovitz of VarageSale advises entrepreneurs on how to think about conducting experiments and the ’empathy stage of a startup’ in “Experimenting with Product, Price, and Market”
Recording Artist D.A. Wallach outlines – in detail – current problems with ownership and royalty management and how ‘cryptocurrency can revolutionize the music industry’ in “Bitcoin for Rockstars“
Marcelo Calbucci of EveryMove guides founders in ways to hear, see, and understand multiple perspectives of their own product in “The Art of Forgetting Your Own Product”