Each week we interview an expert in a domain that will help youtake your business from zero to one. We'll also do a weekly breakdown of companies that recently raised Seed or Series A, and talk about their impact on the market they're disrupting.
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There's never been a more exciting time to start a B2B company. Today Agentic AI, which is AI that takes action on your behalf, is going to change the way businesses interact with their software, and I think it's a great time to be building.
If you had invested in every search fund over the last 40 years, you would be getting a net annual return of over 35%, which would blow Buffett out of the water.
I stood up in front of a room of a bunch of golf association executives and was asked, "what do you do differently?". Golf is very much a "this is how it's always been done" sport. And we punched, "this is always how it's been done in the face".
This helped me kick my two Starbucks per day habits.
You need to have fun on a day to day basis. I work for pleasure and for the pleasure of building quality stuff, quality product, quality relationships with your team, customers and investors.
Free is not enough. You also need to have a strong value proposition and established brand awareness.
These workflows. These processes. They should and will look extremely different than they do in 10 years time. You're able to bake in this level of intelligence so fundamentally into the software that today now passes the CPA exam.
When you're an incumbent and you're in the industry, you have personal biases one way or the other. You might be conscious of it or not, and that can hold you back.
Trasnparently, when you build companies, they're like houses. The foundations really mater. At Clair we have state by state disclosures and our compliance team is as important as our product team. If you don't have those things culturally, it's very hard to adapt backwards.
And it ended up being that over about five years we 20x our revenue with that marketing strategy, and grew brand awareness from about 6 to 60%.
We have to find ways to make it entertaining and actually open the world, using the television frame as a window to the world. And that was the window we had. Our mission was to try and lift all boats so that young preschool children were much more prepared for school and in many ways, for lilfe.
It's an upgrade to our election process. Right now, there's all sorts of lawsuits and shenanigans going on to get candidates on ballots or off ballots because of the plurality voting system.
Building a brand is like a bonsai tree. You have to trim parts of it in order for it to be healthy. And the parts that you're feeding the tree with are your time and your money.
I'm trying to do this better myself, from a vulnerability standpoint, I'm always trying to get better. I'm learning to try to help myself to help others. Brands need to think the same way. If they believe in their own products and their own vision and the way they feel, and they don't let every consumer decision change that course, they may actually be more powerful.
You have to assume that this could take up to a thousand meetings to get this done. And if you get to a thousand meetings your business is probably not a right fit for a venture or you're not right fit for being a founder.
LIke Blue Apron's recipes, you do everything you can first, chopping, prepping, get everything ready, and then cook. Entrepreneurs should think about their work similarly, get your stuff together, and then go launch your product and be ready to anticipate the market. The old adage of being an entrepreneur is like jumping out of an airplane and assembling a hang glider on the way down is silly.
We're here at this company because we're working on decarbonizing the economy.
in 2010, 20% of the top Russell 1000 had a workplace giving and volunteering program. By 2020, it was over 90%, so there was a 700% growth and it wasn't just large companies.
Two mins a day is worth more than 2 hours on Saturday.
AI is the most vulnerable technolgoy that's ever been pushed to production systems, while at the same time also being the fastest technology to be deployed into production systems.
At the end of my company Omni, I was tracking something internally that I called speed to learning. Which isn't how fast you're making money, it's how fast is the company figuring stuff out.
When founders started using the V word for vision, it's bullshit. Nobody gives a shit about your vision, they give a shit about your product.
My hope for professional education is that it's going towards learning from people who've done it. I really believe that in today's world, content is abandoned and what's missing is an element of trust.
The inspiration came from watching a Notorious BIG interview and he said that BIG stood for business instead of game. I want to create an ecosystem where hiphop, our culture of sports have a seat at the table of investing.
We wanted to get to default alive as soon as possible, which is just operate profitably.
We did the counter of what other founders would do. We bet exclusively on Snowflake and that bore fruits in terms of how the Snowflakek ecosystem and customers benefited from it. We were able to compress product market fit cycle and leverage a lot of the ecosystem dynamics that Snowflake offers to be able to go to market much easier and much faster.
A lot of us are always on making sure that the world can always stay on making sure you can watch your Netflix and do other things. But The always on world has a real impact on the humans behind it.
At PlanGrid, we ended up building a piece of software that would have helped me in my last job as a construction engineer. With TigerEye, we really believe that this product would have separated us from having to sell to AutoDesk, and still being a standalone company today.
So the idea of this company sounded like this: Can we produce more weeks, months, years of life for people?
In Sweden, 90% of dogs are insured, whereas in Germany, it's only 10% that are insured. In the US, it's 2-3% that are getting insured.
I believe that healthcare improves the most when we put the decisions and the power in the hands of the consumer. Not in the hands of stakeholders who are thinking about the bottom line.
When you're innovating in an existing market, it's crucial more than ever to build a minimum "lovable" product
There's something very special about the early years. And it kind of breaks my heart to think that you have so much potential put into a system that doesn't make the most of it.
As an entrepreneur, you have to find the customer that is willing to push the envelope and truly, truly wants to make a change. You need to find the first mover, because in a category like health care, not every hospital or health system will be that innovative
"One of my first VC conversations, the investor was like "you know what, I just don't think this is a big enough market opportunity". And my answer: Every single person in the world dies.
Moving to adopt remote work makes you a better company.
"Oftentimes we get so excited about getting something new in customers' hands that we forget that customers rarely like change"
The hiring decision is a big decision. It changes someone's life. If we want to have equal access to opportunities, we have to be mindful of bias. We can use AI to fight that bias.
People always think that as an entrepreneur it's always about your own execution. I thought the same thing. And sometimes you realize that timing and tailwinds matter.
Take your time. Take your control
Give people ownership and if you manage people by output and you look at the actual output, and that's the main thing you focus on, then you can be incredibly efficient working remotely.
It makes gaming and data so much easier, and your interactions with your fans, you become closer. With access to player data, you can actually learn as a player what you can do to get better.
You don't start with wanting to have a business. You start with wanting to fix a problem.
Your startup is special, but not THAT special.
AI is good enough today that people are forming real relationships from a neurological perspective with these AI chatbots.
At Shipt, we had to figure out how to do a lot with a little. and with Landing, we had to figure out how to do a lot with a lot. As a founder, remember that every resource is precious. Every minute is precious.
As an entrepreneur, you need to burn the ships
"We had sort of a sketch and I mean that literally, like we had a floor plan with tape on it, in this building in Brooklyn. And we showed it on Craigslist and we pretty much sold out that first floor when it was just tape on the floor."
"So it used to be "sell 50% of your company for 5 million dollars", and all of a sudden people didn't need that much money
The most rewarding thing about the IPO and success of NerdWallet was the people we were able to bring along on the journey
"Our first set of furniture in our coffee shop, my Dad took from our house. The couch and table that customers were sitting on and using came from our home."
"I just think speed is the only lasting advantage that a startup could have. And if you don't press that advantage every day, you're losing ground".
"There are people who are really good at doing things that you don't love to do. You only get to live once. So focus on what you love to do."
Marvin shares his thoughts on tech accelerators from his time leading the team at 500 Startups
Jon discusses how start up founders can apply the concept of 'horizon planning', the blueprint Intuit uses to build billion dollar businesses.
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