1. One’s manager is a critical part of the decision to join a company. A lightly discussed but important thing to diligence is how influential your potential manager is and how well they are regarded within the company.
2. How fast have they been promoted? Do they have the ear of the company’s leadership team? Can they get things done? Can they clear hurdles for you?
3. “Hitching your wagon”, as it were, to an influential fast rising star can be one of the best career decisions you make.
4. Conversely, if they are regarded as ineffective and mediocre, your experience is likely to be challenged, to say the least.
5. How to diligence this?
(a) Career trajectory: use LinkedIn + supplement with asking the potential manager directly.
(b) Ability to get sh*t done: set up “manager diligence” meetings with future teammates. Potential questions: “Tell me about a situation where your manager helped you.” “What do you wish your manager did more / less of?” The truth will come out :)
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1. The new Series A disruption aka The Revenge of the Crossover funds (thread)
2. The last big disruption to Series A was @a16z doing $10m at $40m post (circa 2013). I remember my jaw dropping when I heard about that kind of Series A for the first time. Prior A rounds used to be $5m on $20m post.
3. The new A trend that's picked up steam over the past year-ish is crossover funds (funds that invest across both private and public companies) moving downmarket and leading $16-20m Series A rounds at $80-100m post, and in some cases, not taking a board seat.
1. @zoom_us is the leader in video collaboration today. Many use cases like telemedicine, fitness, education have been force-fitted on top of Zoom due to the pandemic.
2. However, looking out five years (or even sooner), each use case will have its own set of apps, custom built from the ground up. The growth of the Zoom app itself, through strong, will be far outstripped by the growth of “the rest”.
3. @zoom_us has a huge opportunity to be the video infrastructure that powers these apps. Zoom could become the AWS for video and real-time communication.
0. Companies pondering fully distributed workforces - please do consider how much of your work is synchronous. (Thread)
1. A lot of creative/product development work is synchronous (people need to be online at the same time and work together). For example, roadmap brainstorming; pair programming; design/engineering iteration on pixels, etc.
2. Even a 3 hour timezone difference can make synchronous collaboration challenging. Eg: if an engineer in CA starts working at 10am local time, it's 1pm in NYC and their teammate might have stepped out of lunch. Similarly, 4-5pm in NYC is lunchtime in CA.