One of the highest-stakes decisions that founders make is hiring board members. I use the word “hire” on purpose, because that’s…
A few times a year, I’m sitting with a founder talking about their company, and I realize that the core problem they are dealing with is that they don’t have the right people working on it.
Why does that happen so often?
My first year as an angel
After founding three companies, one through IPO, the last two in education, I’m taking a hiatus and focusing on angel investing in…
I have used email for more time than most founders have been alive. I split people into three camps. Those who generally respond in under 5 minutes, those who respond in a day, and those with problems. In my experience, it’s…
I spend most of my day working with startups on product-market fit because PMF is a clear northstar metric for seed companies and if they achieve it, good things happen on most of their customer metrics, almost always leading to a good…
One of the things about being a founder is that you have to wear many hats. For sure your highest value ones are making decisions on how to navigate to product-market fit and then keeping the company focused strategically as it grows. My opinion is that companies which aren’t…
As a founder of a young company, you can waste a lot of time, and end up with a lot of bad investors if you don’t understand the stages that investors pay attention to in your company. There is a match between each stage and the type of investor that’s likely…
My life as a seed investor is in some ways very simple. I have to decide how far a company is from product market fit and if I see a way to help them get there. My experience is that if a company finds product-market fit (PMF), all of their other metrics look good —…
Pre-crastination
It is telling that we have a word for putting things off — procrastination — but not for solving problems as soon as you can. I would like to suggest ‘precrastination’ as the term, because pre means before and crastination sounds awful, so you definitely want to do things before they become awful.
One of my favorite parts of Silicon Valley is how willing people are to share their successes and failures, driving the collective wisdom of building startups forward. In 2018, this piece by Rahul Vohra was my standout favorite. His…
These were the top 10 stories published by Founders; you can also dive into yearly archives: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.