Startup

Viruses and free distribution in schools

The corona virus is a scary thing. It spreads person to person with very few symptoms and then occasionally goes all in on someone. I’m sure we will learn a lot more about its mechanics over time.

The magic moment of acupuncture

I talk a lot about ‘the magic moment’ with founders. That’s the ‘aha’ someone feels when they understand your value…

The human hack

I am a big fan of founders building schools instead of textbooks. Schools are things with culture, trust and deep relationships. Textbooks are tools for learning, they can be apps and other things, but the relationship part is not there.

Don’t do paid acquisition before product market fit

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…

How to think about early funding rounds

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…

Send monthly updates to everyone

A typical seed stage founder has a pretty high amount of paranoia that someone is going to steal their…

Difficult Conversations

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…

The Board Process

Now you need to get your board together for a meeting. I suggest a 90 minute board meeting. Every four to six weeks is enough…

Setting Goals With Your Board

You board is a group of people, like an extended team. As such, agreeing on what you are doing is really important. Communicating regularly and transparently is also important. Your goal is for the board not to dip in and tell you how to achieve things, but for that, they have…

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.