From the Investors
Geoff Ralston of Y Combinator explains his formula for prioritizing product decisions based on ‘breadth, depth, and cost’ in “Startup Priorities“
Phin Barnes of First Round Capital offers a strategy to ‘compromise and optimize your decision making according to the way you stack rank cost, time, and quality’ in “Ro-Sham-Bo Startup Strategy – The Rock, Paper Scissors Way to Make the Best Decisions for Your Company“
Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures advises founders to offload Low/ Medium ROI tasks to their team after hitting ‘Initial Traction’ in “At Even $1M – You Need to Stop Doing Low ROI Things“
Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital details what he believes are the three drivers of private market ‘valuation mark-ups’ in “Why Private, Late-Stage Valuations Are Skyrocketing“
Sam Altman of Y Combinator notes China’s economic growth vs. the United States and says, ‘the US should try very hard to find a way to grow faster’ in “China”
Alida Miranda-Wolff of Hyde Park Angels encourages founders to ‘know your value and measure traction according to what it is’ in “Identifying the Right Metrics to Measure Traction”
Josh Guttman of SoftBank Capital reviews the real estate technology market and lists his ‘near term opportunities for innovation’ in “The Impending Opportunity in Real Estate Technology“
Emergence Capital unveils their fourth fund of $335M, resulting in just under $1B under management, focused on investing on enterprise technology in “Announcing ECP IV – Enterprise Next”
From the Operators
Philip Kaplan of DistroKid points out the difference of being ‘totally into the thing you’re building’ vs. being ‘totally into just building a thing’ in “Founder/Product Fit“
Jenn Maer of IDEO relates brands to people and reminds companies that ‘[personality] contradictions make us unique’ in “Tension: The Secret Sauce of Brand Building”
Jason Shen of Percolate recaps ten things he’s learned in his first four weeks as a Product Manager in “Thinking Out Loud About Product Management: Early Observations as an Internal Tools PM”
Arnaud Sahuget and David Sangokoya of GovLab present an – in depth – framework to identify data levers, facilitate conversations, and research open data in “A ‘Calculus’ for Open Data“
Richard Brown of IBM UK uses analysis and diagrams to explore how the blockchain can be the base technology for ‘smart contracts’ in “A Simple Model for Smart Contracts”