9 lessons from Uncork’s 2024 Portfolio Summit
Every year, Uncork hosts a portfolio summit for our portfolio companies’ founders and execs. We orchestrate breakout sessions, lightning talks, panels, and fireside chats for our founders and execs to learn from each other and from awesome guest speakers.
This year, we had incredible founder-led talks, ranging from “Evolving Your Role as CTO” (h/t John from LaunchDarkly) to “Growing and Succeeding in an Unpopular Category” (h/t Alex from Hallow). We also had fireside chats with Ali Javid from Wrapbook, Dan Rogers from LaunchDarkly, Dick Costolo from 01 Advisors, Fidji Simo from Instacart, and Cal Henderson from Slack.
Through the course of two days, I scribbled messy handwritten notes across over a dozen pages and am excited to share a handful of my favorite lessons below.
Without further ado, here are nine lessons for startup founders & execs from the 2024 Uncork Portfolio Summit (non-exhaustive, and in no particular order):
1. On company values
→ Good values are opinionated. If you can’t make a credible case for the opposite of a value, it’s probably not a very helpful value (Mux’s CEO articulates this pretty well here)
→ Values should be helpful tie breakers, and help make decisions. If you can’t imagine the value helping nudge a decisional gridlock in one direction or the other, it’s probably too generic.
(h/t to Cal Henderson, co-founder and ex-CTO of Slack)
2. On qualities to hire for
→ Hire for imagination & agility + depth of experience
→ “Tired and cynical is the enemy” - hire for the opposite
(h/t to Dan Rogers, CEO of Uncork Portco LaunchDarkly)
3. On teaching new managers how to manage
→ Management is ≠ knowing all the answers
→ The iterative loop of management: gather feedback, make decision, communicate
(h/t to Dick Costolo, ex-CEO of Twitter and Managing Partner at 01 Advisors)
4. On maintaining startup agility & innovation while scaling up
→ Remove friction from experimenting: e.g. Twitter had a policy where any engineer could roll out new features to 1% of the user base if they got manager sign-off (h/t to Dick Costolo)
5. On getting honest feedback from exit interviews
→ Ask questions people will have no qualms about answering, e.g. “who is someone you think is under appreciated in the company?” (h/t to Dick Costolo)
6. On board management
→ Be intentional about what you want out of each board member, leaning into their expertise and strengths, and equip them with the relevant info to be helpful (h/t to Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart and ex-VP and head of the Facebook app)
7. On successful M&As
→ Cultivated relationships come before successful deals
→ Deals have core values too — they should be argument enders
(h/t to Bob Moore, CEO of Uncork Portco Crossbeam)
8. On moats in AI
→ In addition to data and workflow embedding, evaluations are emerging as a moat in vertical AI
→ Characteristics of workflows that make for good LLM apps: Standardized tasks with some variability, lots of data, repetitive tasks, and desire for efficiency
(h/t to Ronan Burke, CEO of Uncork Portco Inscribe)
9. On solving problems no one’s been able to crack
Fidji Simo led the team in charge of monetizing mobile and making video core to Facebook’s product. Her mentality is to “run towards the fire” and approach everything with boundless curiosity.
She distills cracking hard problems down to:
- Having a clear vision and hiring great people
- Being stubborn on the destination and flexible on the journey
There are many more gems that I’ll save for another time… Thank you to all of our founders, execs, guest speakers, advisors, LPs for a wonderful portfolio summit. And of course shoutout to the Uncork dream team :)
