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If I had to pick one founder every early-stage builder should study, Filip Kaliszan would be near the top of the list. He’s not on X, he rarely gives interviews, and Verkada doesn’t really chase headlines. But I’ve learned a great deal from him ever since we first partnered...

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Bill Trenchard

8,709 subscribers

30,538 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

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5 Kommentare

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Bill Trenchardvor 9 Monaten

More in CNBC today:

Profilbild von Bill Trenchard
Bill Trenchardvor 9 Monaten

And you can find more of Filip’s thoughts on PMF here:

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Konstantine Buhlervor 9 Monaten

@VerkadaHQ I completely agree with you @btrenchard! Well said

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Shaun Gold | Venture Comedyvor 9 Monaten

@VerkadaHQ No personal brand. No hot takes. Just a $5.8B outcome.

Profilbild von JJ
JJvor 9 Monaten

@VerkadaHQ Spectacular milestone Bill !! Very impressive you led the founding seed of Verkada at $10M pre in late 2017. 500X+ MOIC at the deal level … and even after dillution, pretty sure this single investment returns @firstround Fund VI ($180M, 2016 vintage) many times over! 👏🏼👏🏼

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Startup Archive

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Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”
5:28

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”

Michael McGuiness

500,098 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, on why dogfooding your own product is the single best shortcut to building something people want: Shayne is asked what he thinks it takes for a founder to build a successful company. He starts by dismantling the fantasy he once had as a teenager: "When I was in high school, I was always like, man, I'm going to build this side project. It's going to get traction. People are going to give me money, and then I'm going to drop out. And it's going to be like this perfect clean break where I take no risk. Completely did not happen." Shayne dropped out of college at 18, but what followed was nothing like the smooth ride he'd imagined. "There were almost 3 years of like complete brutality of things not working and me trying things and me learning different things and running out of money, stressed about rent, like the whole 9 yards." That stretch taught him the first non-negotiable for any founder: full commitment. "If you really want to do this, if you really feel like it's your calling, don't half-ass it. Go all in. Don't hedge your bets." Shayne Coplan 🦅 continues: "If you're hedging your bets and you kind of haven't cut the rope and you're like, 'Well, I'm still at this, but I'm trying this on the side, whatever.' That's not how great, durable businesses and products start in this day and age. You got to go all in. You got to give it every ounce you got." But going all in is only half the equation. The other half, and the part Shayne believes is the real shortcut, is being one of your own users: "You have to obsess over your customers and people who are using your product. And just the easiest thing to do to build a product company is to use the product yourself and to talk to your own users all the time and triage between what you learn from your users, what you learn from dogfooding your own product, and your product development cycles." He ends with a dose of humility: "It's all I got. I'm still learning honestly."
1:27

Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket, on why dogfooding your own product is the single best shortcut to building something people want: Shayne is asked what he thinks it takes for a founder to build a successful company. He starts by dismantling the fantasy he once had as a teenager: "When I was in high school, I was always like, man, I'm going to build this side project. It's going to get traction. People are going to give me money, and then I'm going to drop out. And it's going to be like this perfect clean break where I take no risk. Completely did not happen." Shayne dropped out of college at 18, but what followed was nothing like the smooth ride he'd imagined. "There were almost 3 years of like complete brutality of things not working and me trying things and me learning different things and running out of money, stressed about rent, like the whole 9 yards." That stretch taught him the first non-negotiable for any founder: full commitment. "If you really want to do this, if you really feel like it's your calling, don't half-ass it. Go all in. Don't hedge your bets." Shayne Coplan 🦅 continues: "If you're hedging your bets and you kind of haven't cut the rope and you're like, 'Well, I'm still at this, but I'm trying this on the side, whatever.' That's not how great, durable businesses and products start in this day and age. You got to go all in. You got to give it every ounce you got." But going all in is only half the equation. The other half, and the part Shayne believes is the real shortcut, is being one of your own users: "You have to obsess over your customers and people who are using your product. And just the easiest thing to do to build a product company is to use the product yourself and to talk to your own users all the time and triage between what you learn from your users, what you learn from dogfooding your own product, and your product development cycles." He ends with a dose of humility: "It's all I got. I'm still learning honestly."

Big Brain Business

10,981 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Scott Belsky on the most common mistake founders make when building a product “Every product has what we call a ‘first-mile experience’, which is the part of your product that the most customers will see. And it’s all drop-off from there. What gets people through the first-mile experience? First, you have to empathize with where that customer is at — whether they’re a consumer or an enterprise customer, in the first 30 seconds of that first mile of your product, I guarantee you, they’re lazy, vain, and selfish. They want to get through it fast. They want to look good to their boss or their friends or feel good about themselves. There needs to be some quick hit of feeling successful in that first mile for them to engage further.” Ironically, the first-mile experience is the last thing many companies and product people will focus on. “Typically it’s the final mile before you launch where you’re like, ‘Oh wait, what should the onboarding be?’ or ‘What should the defaults be?’ That’s like a happenstance conversation towards the end of shipping when in fact that’s the only thing that every customer will ever see. So why not nail that?” Scott takes this point even further: “If you can really just nail the first-mile experience of your product — even if after that it’s all kind of crappy — you’re probably in the top 1% of products out there.” Another interesting point Scott makes here is that optimizing the first-mile experience is something that you’ll have to continually work on because your customers change over time. “Your first cohort of customers that used your product, those were early adopters — and your first-mile experience was nailed for them. But [as you’ve grown] this new cohort of customers that started using your product are no longer early adopters. They’re pragmatists. They’re not coming because they like to test and try new products. They’re coming because their boss told them they had to or they read some blog that said this was the best product in the space, and the first-mile needs to be different for them.” Scott sums his point up as follows: “Spend consistent time, forever on that first-mile experience of your product.” Video source: South Park Commons (2025)
3:25

Scott Belsky on the most common mistake founders make when building a product “Every product has what we call a ‘first-mile experience’, which is the part of your product that the most customers will see. And it’s all drop-off from there. What gets people through the first-mile experience? First, you have to empathize with where that customer is at — whether they’re a consumer or an enterprise customer, in the first 30 seconds of that first mile of your product, I guarantee you, they’re lazy, vain, and selfish. They want to get through it fast. They want to look good to their boss or their friends or feel good about themselves. There needs to be some quick hit of feeling successful in that first mile for them to engage further.” Ironically, the first-mile experience is the last thing many companies and product people will focus on. “Typically it’s the final mile before you launch where you’re like, ‘Oh wait, what should the onboarding be?’ or ‘What should the defaults be?’ That’s like a happenstance conversation towards the end of shipping when in fact that’s the only thing that every customer will ever see. So why not nail that?” Scott takes this point even further: “If you can really just nail the first-mile experience of your product — even if after that it’s all kind of crappy — you’re probably in the top 1% of products out there.” Another interesting point Scott makes here is that optimizing the first-mile experience is something that you’ll have to continually work on because your customers change over time. “Your first cohort of customers that used your product, those were early adopters — and your first-mile experience was nailed for them. But [as you’ve grown] this new cohort of customers that started using your product are no longer early adopters. They’re pragmatists. They’re not coming because they like to test and try new products. They’re coming because their boss told them they had to or they read some blog that said this was the best product in the space, and the first-mile needs to be different for them.” Scott sums his point up as follows: “Spend consistent time, forever on that first-mile experience of your product.” Video source: South Park Commons (2025)

Startup Archive

32,450 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a hello@ironclad.ai email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”
7:07

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a [email protected] email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”

Todd Jackson

50,683 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Todd Jackson (Todd Jackson) was VP of Product and Design at Dropbox, Director of Product at Twitter, Product Lead for Gmail, PM for Facebook's Newsfeed, Photos, and Groups, and also the founder of Cover (which he sold to Twitter). Today, Todd is a partner at First Round Capital, and over the past year, he and his team have analyzed all of their internal data and the journies of the hundreds of startups they’ve worked with to put together a highly actionable framework to help founders find PMF. And it's phenomenal. In our conversation, we discuss: 🔸 First Round Capital’s four-part PMF framework 🔸 Examples of companies at each level 🔸 How to know if you’re stuck at a level, and how to get unstuck 🔸 What to change when you’re stuck: persona, problem, promise, and product 🔸 The specific goals at each stage of PMF 🔸 The most common pitfalls at each stage 🔸 Much more
0:50

Todd Jackson (Todd Jackson) was VP of Product and Design at Dropbox, Director of Product at Twitter, Product Lead for Gmail, PM for Facebook's Newsfeed, Photos, and Groups, and also the founder of Cover (which he sold to Twitter). Today, Todd is a partner at First Round Capital, and over the past year, he and his team have analyzed all of their internal data and the journies of the hundreds of startups they’ve worked with to put together a highly actionable framework to help founders find PMF. And it's phenomenal. In our conversation, we discuss: 🔸 First Round Capital’s four-part PMF framework 🔸 Examples of companies at each level 🔸 How to know if you’re stuck at a level, and how to get unstuck 🔸 What to change when you’re stuck: persona, problem, promise, and product 🔸 The specific goals at each stage of PMF 🔸 The most common pitfalls at each stage 🔸 Much more

Lenny Rachitsky

203,095 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

I'm beyond excited to announce that I’m joining Lightspeed as a Partner on the early-stage investing team and helping to build everything they're doing in new media. I've spent the last six years investing in early-stage companies, and the last year building a media platform in parallel. What started as a side quest has reached 350,000+ followers and millions of viewers a month. For me, investing and storytelling have always been two halves of the same job. This work has put me in rooms with incredible founders, researchers, and operators - many of whom have become close friends, collaborators, and early stage bets. There's so much happening at the frontier right now, and the media platform has given me a way to be in those conversations early (and to bring the people I admire most into a wider audience). When Lightspeed reached out, we saw the same opportunity. Venture and media are converging, and the next generation of great firms will need to show up differently: reaching founders and builders before they've even started a company, and being the place where people first get excited about what's happening in tech. With more than $50 billion in AUM, Lightspeed has been building alongside founders at the frontier of technology for decades. It's a firm I've admired for years since I started investing - for its intellectual rigor, its long-term conviction, and the way it approaches company building. I’m excited to join a team that brings real depth and substance to its work, and I hope to bring that same ethos to everything I put out. Thank you to Ravi Mhatre, Bejul Somaia , and Josh Machiz for believing in this vision and trusting me to help build it. I’m so excited to see what we do together. If you're an early-stage founder, building or thinking about starting something, or just curious about this ecosystem - please reach out. My DMs are open and I’d love to chat!
2:12

I'm beyond excited to announce that I’m joining Lightspeed as a Partner on the early-stage investing team and helping to build everything they're doing in new media. I've spent the last six years investing in early-stage companies, and the last year building a media platform in parallel. What started as a side quest has reached 350,000+ followers and millions of viewers a month. For me, investing and storytelling have always been two halves of the same job. This work has put me in rooms with incredible founders, researchers, and operators - many of whom have become close friends, collaborators, and early stage bets. There's so much happening at the frontier right now, and the media platform has given me a way to be in those conversations early (and to bring the people I admire most into a wider audience). When Lightspeed reached out, we saw the same opportunity. Venture and media are converging, and the next generation of great firms will need to show up differently: reaching founders and builders before they've even started a company, and being the place where people first get excited about what's happening in tech. With more than $50 billion in AUM, Lightspeed has been building alongside founders at the frontier of technology for decades. It's a firm I've admired for years since I started investing - for its intellectual rigor, its long-term conviction, and the way it approaches company building. I’m excited to join a team that brings real depth and substance to its work, and I hope to bring that same ethos to everything I put out. Thank you to Ravi Mhatre, Bejul Somaia , and Josh Machiz for believing in this vision and trusting me to help build it. I’m so excited to see what we do together. If you're an early-stage founder, building or thinking about starting something, or just curious about this ecosystem - please reach out. My DMs are open and I’d love to chat!

Claire Zau

381,018 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”
4:39

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

We first began our partnership with Zack Kanter and Stedi back in 2017. Today, they announced their $50 million Series C. But most of those years were spent quietly and quite obsessively building the underlying infrastructure. Once the company built its way into healthcare, things started to inflect quickly. (They were recently named one of Ramp’s fastest-growing vendors across all categories, not just healthcare). But as with most “overnight success” stories, it was nearly a decade in the making. The ambition to replace legacy clearinghouses with a modern API-first, software-native platform is a big one, and the breadth of the product surface is stunning. But it’s Zack’s desire to keep grinding towards bigger outcomes that’s truly outlier. He’s built Stedi with unusual levels of patience and persistence. (For example, they threw away the entire codebase 8 times, and took 4+ years to launch anything publicly.) These choices stem from a determination to avoid what he calls the accumulation of not doing things the right way. His philosophy is rather unique and is best captured in this quote: “As a company, we’ve decided we’re gonna eat glass. That is what sets us apart. We’ll go to the ends of the earth to do things the right way, even when it’s not economical and it doesn’t make sense.” He gets at more of this idea in the clip below from our recent interview, where he talks about why he’s building Stedi to be a company he wants to run forever. He’s an incredibly tough founder to bet against, and I feel fortunate to both be an early supporter of his First Round and to call him a close friend.
0:42

We first began our partnership with Zack Kanter and Stedi back in 2017. Today, they announced their $50 million Series C. But most of those years were spent quietly and quite obsessively building the underlying infrastructure. Once the company built its way into healthcare, things started to inflect quickly. (They were recently named one of Ramp’s fastest-growing vendors across all categories, not just healthcare). But as with most “overnight success” stories, it was nearly a decade in the making. The ambition to replace legacy clearinghouses with a modern API-first, software-native platform is a big one, and the breadth of the product surface is stunning. But it’s Zack’s desire to keep grinding towards bigger outcomes that’s truly outlier. He’s built Stedi with unusual levels of patience and persistence. (For example, they threw away the entire codebase 8 times, and took 4+ years to launch anything publicly.) These choices stem from a determination to avoid what he calls the accumulation of not doing things the right way. His philosophy is rather unique and is best captured in this quote: “As a company, we’ve decided we’re gonna eat glass. That is what sets us apart. We’ll go to the ends of the earth to do things the right way, even when it’s not economical and it doesn’t make sense.” He gets at more of this idea in the clip below from our recent interview, where he talks about why he’s building Stedi to be a company he wants to run forever. He’s an incredibly tough founder to bet against, and I feel fortunate to both be an early supporter of his First Round and to call him a close friend.

Brett Berson

19,649 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Tony Gwynn shares what it took to become one of the greatest hitters of all time and how to master the mental game. "It took me a while to figure it out, but after about 4 or 5 years, I started to realize that this thing was more mental than it was physical." He didn't figure it out alone. "Those first 5 years, I had great conversations with a lot of great players. Pete Rose, Willie Stargell, Henry Aaron, Mike Schmidt. I had a chance to sit down and talk to 'em - pick their brain, find out how they do what they do." The greats learn from the greats. They never stop learning. They never stop wanting to get better. "After about 4 years, I started to realize that this is more mental than physical. So what I need to do is get an approach that I think will work and then just trust the approach. Trust what you practice on. Trust it." That's the key. Create the plan then work the plan. And when it's not working, you still trust yourself. "During the winter, I can hit in a cage and be mechanically sound. But the first time I hit live in spring training, I'll be lucky if I get a ball out of the cage." "For younger guys, that's a sign of, 'Oh, I'm not getting out of the cage,' so they try to speed things up, do things quicker." Trust your approach and stay under control. Don't let frustration change who you are. The game is mental. The greats know that and they learn how to build a process that works for them. They adapt as needed, but they learn the art of focus. Focusing on how to master and trust the process. (🎥Special Collections )
2:15

Tony Gwynn shares what it took to become one of the greatest hitters of all time and how to master the mental game. "It took me a while to figure it out, but after about 4 or 5 years, I started to realize that this thing was more mental than it was physical." He didn't figure it out alone. "Those first 5 years, I had great conversations with a lot of great players. Pete Rose, Willie Stargell, Henry Aaron, Mike Schmidt. I had a chance to sit down and talk to 'em - pick their brain, find out how they do what they do." The greats learn from the greats. They never stop learning. They never stop wanting to get better. "After about 4 years, I started to realize that this is more mental than physical. So what I need to do is get an approach that I think will work and then just trust the approach. Trust what you practice on. Trust it." That's the key. Create the plan then work the plan. And when it's not working, you still trust yourself. "During the winter, I can hit in a cage and be mechanically sound. But the first time I hit live in spring training, I'll be lucky if I get a ball out of the cage." "For younger guys, that's a sign of, 'Oh, I'm not getting out of the cage,' so they try to speed things up, do things quicker." Trust your approach and stay under control. Don't let frustration change who you are. The game is mental. The greats know that and they learn how to build a process that works for them. They adapt as needed, but they learn the art of focus. Focusing on how to master and trust the process. (🎥Special Collections )

Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness

95,654 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten