Founders

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…

Management Rituals — One on ones

I had several hundred employees in my first two companies, so I frequently get into conversations with founders about basic management rituals. The most important one in my opinion is the one on one. One of the easiest way to think about these is to imagine you are having…

Two things that get you to Series A

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 —…

Send monthly updates to everyone

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