With @Square's launch of Square Banking, the company has fully crystallized its goal of becoming the pre-eminent next generation Bank (capital B; think of every financial service a bank offers) for businesses (Square Banking) and consumers (Cash App). pymnts.com/news/banking/2…
What is neat is the deep linkage between payments and banking. (a) Every time you make a sale, the funds flow into your Square checking account by default. (b) You can choose a percentage of your Square sales revenue to automatically deposit into your savings account.
Essentially, these accounts are collectively going to have billions of dollars in them on day 1, thanks to the default funding from payments! Brilliantly solves the cold start problem.
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0. CEOs, CPOs and VPEs: The core product team has traditionally been a triad: Engineer, Designer, PM. Consider changing this to a quartet by adding Analyst. Product analysts can transform product development. Some ways in which they do this:
1. Defining outcomes: Analysts help teams better define the goals they should set, so it’s not just a shot in the dark but based on data. They also make it easy to track progress against outcomes.
2. Clarifying input metrics: Many product teams flounder between inputs and outputs. Analysts help teams better understand what levers they should pull to move the outputs.
There are no bad deals. Every deal - partnership, M&A, investment - has a set of conditions that make it a good deal.
Eg: “Give me 80% of revenue” might look like a bad deal for a company, but if the company rephrases it as “I’ll give you 80% of revenue if you upsell every customer to my service”, it could be a great deal.
Eg: “I’m raising at $25b valuation” might look like a bad deal for an investor but if the investor rephrases it as “I’ll give you a $25b valuation if you give me 5x participating preferred stock”, it could be a great deal.
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.
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.