From the Investors
Babak Nivi of AngelList announces the unrealized return for all 2013 syndicate investments is a 46% IRR and 2.4x multiple, the launch of their Access Fund, and new ‘premium recruiting product’, A-List in “Announcing Top Quartile Returns for Syndicates”
Sam Altman of Y Combinator interviews Elon Musk to uncover his view of the future and what he believes people should work on in “How to Build the Future: Elon Musk”
Jenny Lefcourt of Freestyle Capital shares advice, from her perspective as a serial entrepreneur and VC, on fundraising, pitching, and prioritization for founders in “Focus Lessons to Supercharge Your Startup” (audio)
Teddy Citron of Greycroft believes maturation of the social network landscape has created opportunity to attack specific vertical segments in “The Spawn of Facebook Groups”
Greg Sands of Costanoa Ventures outlines the different characteristics of the four archetypes he uses to evaluate technical founders “What Investors Look for in Technical Founders”
David Skok of Matrix Partners demonstrates how to identify and solve blockages in your customer acquisition funnel to increase sales in “Customer Acquisition: Maximizing Your Funnel”
Frederik Groce of Storm Ventures provides insights on how newer generations of sales professionals should adopt a “Millennial Sales Formula” in “Dear Dad: Selling to Millennials”
From the Operators
David Cancel of Drift explains how to categorize the feedback that you’re getting, then how to take action and measure the results in “A Simple Framework for Handling Customer Feedback” He also talked about Customer Feedback with Dave Gerhardt on the Seeking Wisdom podcast:
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Chris Messina of Uber provides a lengthy and thought provoking perspective on what Apple is really doing and why some people just don’t get it in “Why Silicon Valley is all wrong about Apple’s AirPods”
Kyle Williams of Dogpatch Advisor offers a way to structure your SDR teams and how to partner them with AEs in “A Framework for SDR:AE Mapping”
David Hershenson of TOPO releases key findings from the 2016 TOPO Sales Development Benchmark report in “Strategic Sales Development”
Scott Britton of Troops walks through how his team validated whether or not they should build a product in “6 Lessons Learned Using Preselling To Guide Product Development”
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Why IRR Is The Most Important VC Performance Metric (That’s Also Nearly Impossible To Use)
tl;dr: IRR is theoretically the best way to measure the performance of a venture capital firm. In practice, it’s far harder to use effectively than you might expect.
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