We analyzed 500 Startups’ Batch 12 portfolio, and ranked the top 10 based on our Growth Score in “Top 10 500 Startups Batch 12 Demo Day Startups – Sorted By The Growth Score”
From the Investors
Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures offers an algorithm for founders to use when putting together their fundraising plan in “Fundraising Roadmap Algorithm”
Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures highlights the possibility of ‘creating new experiences and solutions by composing services with APIs’ in “No Stack Startups (the Technical Side)” (slide deck)
Mike Rothenberg of Rothenberg Ventures describes the entrepreneurial approach he took in starting his firm and how failures along the way were opportunities to reset in “Blue is Where You Should Be”
Ben Narasin of TriplePoint Ventures and Michael Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers use data to prove out their opinions that founders are better CEOs than professionals, generate more value in IPOs, and more in “The Importance of Founders”
Christina Bechold of Empire Angels sees that market timing may be the biggest challenge for a startup’s traction and/ or product market fit in “Minding Your Startup Metrics”
Donna Harris of 1776 explains how Kidde encouraged policymakers to pass laws mandating the installation of CO detectors and alarms – resulting in a new market and skyrocketing revenue in “Hacking Regulated Markets to Drive Scale”
Piotr Wilam of Innovation Nest guides European founders around the question, ‘To go [to the US] or not to go?’ in “European Startups in US”
Nadia Eghbal of Collaborative Fund reflects on her time at Collaborative Fund and announces that this is her last week at the firm in “Es Muss Sein”
From the Operators
Sara Chipps of Jewelbots outlines the challenges of proving traction with a hardware product and how to use crowdfunding to show early traction in “So You Want to Build a Hardware Company, and You’re a Software Engineer… (part 4)”
Nate Kohari of TaskTorch shares his perspective of selling his company AgileZen and says, ‘eventually, we’d come to learn how wrong we were’ in “Take the Money and Run”
Shri Bhashyam of EquityZen provides a list of paperwork related to equity compensation he thinks, ‘you should always have in your personal records’ in “The Equity Documents You Should Always Have on File”
Margaret Gould Stewart of Facebook believes ‘we need to put our products in service of people, and not just in a functional way’ in “Why Beauty Matters: Unexpected Learnings from a Refugee Camp”
Brian Fitzgerald of Tinkergarten looks back at his journey running a side project that is now a company with thousands of members in “How a Side Project Became an Obsession”