This is the third year in a row that I have enjoyed writing and reviewing my annual “Geeky Predictions” — in case you’re curious (or bored?), you can also check the previous editions of the predictions (2017, 2016) and reviews (2017, 2016) . I think 2018 will be the year…

Last year it was the first time that I published my predictions and reviewed them publicly. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of thinking over and subsequently reviewing them. So here I am again, this time reviewing 2017, just before writing about 2018. It seems like this time I was more…

Introduction As the tech lead of a startup, a founder-CTO faces many tradeoffs allocating his time. The “business founders” want you to be shipping more features — the visible roadmap. But you need to balance that with many other responsibilities: Recruiting, managing and retaining the right team. Making tech choices, considering…

The New Search for Hard Problems — How Did We Get Here? At a very high level, the job of a founder primarily revolves around finding and solving a problem that can lead to a significant and sustainable business. In the startup world, the solution to that problem often involves the use of technology to enable a new product, process, business model…

Exceptional investments == Taking risks AND Being right AND being contrarian Investing in startups is quite different from other forms of investment. I’m not the first one to point this out and I won’t try to compete with Sarah Tavel (1) or Andy Rachleff (2) in explaining why VC is so weird. …

Investors in SaaS are lucky to have plenty of metrics to measure, because those metrics are good proxies for important business decisions. When do you hit product market-fit? How do you grow in the future? How much capital should you raise? You can look at metrics to answer that! About…

At seed-stage, you don’t have many customers. You’re trying to get whoever comes into the front door. Thus, it might sound crazy to “reject” or “fire” some potential customers … But at this early stage, it’s very important to find the “right” customers for you. You want somebody who is…

Pricing is one of the biggest levers that you have in SaaS. The recurring nature of the business model makes any price increase, decrease or discount an important decision. But at this early stage of your company, the goal of your pricing is not to optimise to make (THE real)…

The market for developer tools is a deceptively large one. More and more great companies being built in this space — and Point Nine is proud to be investing in some of them like Algolia, Contentful, and Sqreen. In this series of interviews, we’ll explore the early days of some…