It's our sacred duty as journalists to uncover toxic behavior at startups!

The "toxic" behavior:

📷 Creative director took bad photos
🐟 No fish in fish tank
🪑 Can't put jackets on chairs
👠 Execs have snobby fashion sense (at a fashion co.)
💻 Trouble managing tech launches The most substantive critique was about the lack of an orderly review/advancement process.

Perhaps that's because HR was providing an obscenely opulent set of fringe benefits to FTEs?

If you were born after ~1985 it can be difficult to appreciate how much smaller a role plastic played in the built environment.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1423369057181454339

You could have dropped an 18th-century cabinet maker into an early 1980s TV factory and they'd have been able to 80% of the work with no training.

Within 10-15 years you might as well transport them to the moon.

Many founders seem to think VCs are purely rational beings who can be convinced to invest if the right logical arguments are made and the correct fact sets are assembled.

The reality is that most VCs are more Epicurean than Aristotelian – especially at the early stage.

/🧵 I have the honor of reviewing a lot of Series A decks and it’s shocking how often the actual product the company sells isn’t shown until halfway through the pitch.

Strategy, team, sales, etc., are all important. However, remember that VCs are consumers too.

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If you're applying for a Senior Associate/Principal gig in VC, I can't recommend making a personal deck highly enough.

These roles attract hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants. A well-crafted presentation stands out in a field of CVs.

Why are decks so helpful?

/1 So much of the job of a VC is parsing decks and the ability to craft a good one is a signal that you know what you're looking for.

They're also a nice visual experience after a never-ending slog through CVs and LinkedIn profile pages.

2/

Everyone should angel invest.*

*After you've set aside an emergency fund of six-months of living expenses, socked away a downpayment for a home, and are saving ~15% of your salary in diversified, tax-advantaged index funds for retirement.

https://twitter.com/shl/status/1303681058479771651

Everyone should angel invest.*

*After they've calculated the expected return of $10K in a $20M post-money seed round (factoring in future Series A dilution) and a $150M M&A exit where a third of the proceeds skip the cap table and are paid out as retention bonuses to management.

It's become commonplace to include a few examples of early-stage startups you'd like to invest in as part of applying for jobs in VC.

I think the better move in most cases would be highlighting under-appreciated subreddits, Discords, etc. where creators are congregating.

/1 Links to random startups with just a few lines of context, and absent any material financial information or stats about traction, aren't that helpful.

Worse, if the hiring committee is underwhelmed by those selections, it can hurt your chances on the margin.

/2

I'm amazed at the level of magical thinking that even well-educated, technically-minded people exhibit re: COVID.

E.g. in this story a medical expert cites "proper ventilation" of their child's classroom as a pre-condition for returning...

cnbc.com/2020/07/26/sho… This is a fair request and totally understandable, but if your child's school didn't start the permitting process for upgrading their HVAC system around March, it's likely not happening this year.

Changing ventilation systems is one of the harder retrofits.

The least told founder story in startup-land:

📅 Eight years in
🌟 Product being lapped by new entrants
🪙 Good not great revenue, moderate growth
⚖️ Teetering on edge of profitability
🐜 Team is antsy, harder to retain/recruit
🔒 Overvalued in prior fundraise, limited exit ops The last point can be brutal.

The founder has a responsibility to VCs, but more importantly, to the team to "land the plane," but has fewer resources to do so.

There's also sunk cost and reputational anxiety, and the pressure of rapidly diminishing career EV.

This is a great thread.

The important point for founders here is that the 19 failed companies in this scenario might have survived and thrived with a different capital structure.

https://twitter.com/gokulr/status/1285184340549201921

One problem with the VC content-industrial complex is that it outproduces founder perspectives by a factor of 10:1.

That leads many entrepreneurs to internalize the mindset of investors, often to the detriment of their own prospects.

I've been surprised how hard it is to find good blogs/twitter accounts focused on software for kids. As I'm guessing many others are in the same boat, I want to try and crowdsource a list of favorites.

Please reply with any apps your kids love. Here are a few mine (4 & 7) dig: Legend of Zelda meets Magnus Carlsen. This is the best chess app I've found, and it manages to combine deliberate practice with all the aesthetic/gameplay hooks that keep kids engaged – all with a flat-price model.



magnuskingdom.com

The jigsaw puzzle industry generates ~$700M annually. It’s a great business to own a piece of, but not so large that it would make sense to use traditional venture capital – $50-$100M over multiple rounds – to disrupt it.

But what if you only planned to raise $3M – total?

/1 I bring up the puzzle market because last week a $3.4M Kickstarter concluded for a reimagined jigsaw puzzle brand that features twee graphics and the promise of a “magical twist” when finished.

Think of it as a DTC startup for die-cut diversions.

kickstarter.com/projects/maxte…

/2

"The most valuable software startup in the western world to launch after Facebook is Shopify, which currently has a $90 billion market cap and is based in Ottawa."

Feel like there's not enough commentary on this point, via @epaley.

techcrunch.com/2020/05/20/fou…

/🧵 Obvi, everyone recognizes Shopify as a massive success, and the importance of ecommerce as a secular trend. "Tobi" is in the "no surname required" class.

But I'm surprised this fact hasn't been held up more as a totem in arguments about talent retention/immigration policy. /2

If I were a mayor of an up and coming, mid-sized city I'd offer $500K housing credits to the top 10 VPs at Twitter.

If Twitter is just the first domino, imagine the power of being able to kickstart a regional talent hub?

techcrunch.com/2020/05/12/twi… Imagine how attractive Nashville would be if five of the top 10 tech creative directors lived there?

The long term benefit of having a cluster of talented VP/CXO level tech folks could be transformative, and would cost a fraction compared to building a new football stadium.

I predict that one bright side of the COVID-19 era is going to be an increase in funding for startups operating at the intersection of tech and life sciences.

The weird "Blood/Bit" barrier that has historically separated the two camps is breaking down.

blog.benchsci.com/venture-capita… If Twitter is any indication, COVID-19 has led many tech VCs to dig into the world of drug development as they track the progress of treatments/vaccines.

Even this limited scaling of the learning curve will likely lead more investors to take meetings they may not have before.

Startups often agonize over the wording in their press releases for weeks, yet give almost no thought to the accompanying visuals—big mistake.

Don't send a pitch without *at least* one of these images:

🦸‍♂️ Hero Shot
🏙️ Office Logo
🦁 Logo in the "Wild"
🎨 "Illustrated" Logo

/1 🦸‍♂️ The Hero Shot

Ideally, you have a product that looks cool.

Minimally, you'll have a clean image that explains your product's value proposition.

Pictures *are* worth a thousand words – Invest in them!

techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/fac…

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I have a feeling Magic Leap is going to get lumped in with Juicero as a heavily-funded hardware startup that failed to launch, but it's a very different case.

Technical risk has taken a back seat to market risk over the last decade, but there's nothing dishonorable in failure.

https://twitter.com/Techmeme/status/1252990340493123592

Magic Leap was trying to do something incredibly impressive, that if successful, would have changed the way we consume media.

It was led by a founder who had previously had a huge success in a somewhat related space.

Some technical problems are just hard to solve.

In addition to spending the last decade funding the companies that built the infrastructure that made social distancing possible (e.g. Slack, Instacart, Github, etc.), Marc used his reputational capital to raise $1.3B to fund biotech – a place most tech VCs fear to tread!

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1251927722583920640

Even some of the "frivolous investments" have turned out to be pretty useful in retrospect.

Instacart was decried as a luxury for tech bros, until it became a crucial part of social distancing infrastructure!

It's hard to predict how companies will evolve over time!

It's time to build.

But, specifically, what is it time to build?

Housing, education, medicine and manufacturing aren't suffering from a lack of builders.

If politics is the problem, are we building a new political party?

A fundraising list? The spirit of the essay is great, I think Marc is one of the most interesting thinkers of our time, but "ITTB" is preaching to the choir.

I mean sure, 💪👊🇺🇸, but what we could really use now is a bit of elite guidance, or something to rally around.

Dear Media Outlets:

📈 We don't need more novel visualizations of COVID cases, deaths, etc.

😷 We could use a dashboard tracking the progress of PPE manufacturing.

For instance, which companies have promised to increase production? By what volume? By what date? 3M committing to produce 166M N95 masks is woefully inadequate.

cnn.com/2020/04/06/pol…

If the expectation is that we're going to be a "mask-wearing country," there are *at least* 200M people who will need them. If that group used 1/week, that's 800M masks a month!

I’ve designed FDA-cleared medical devices used by 2M+ people and I find the invocation of the Defense Production Act an insane approach to address ventilator shortages.

In modern parlance, “President can’t make factory go brrrr.”

washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…

/1 📜 First, let’s assume the government just invalidates any relevant patents that companies like Philips might hold in this space. It would be easy enough to pay any impacted companies after the crisis abates.

/2

This is my daughter in the ICU at @BostonChildrens after developing a potentially fatal case of sepsis following two years of immunosuppressive chemotherapy for leukemia.

She survived, but others won’t be as lucky, especially if we don’t practice social distancing.

/1 Kids with cancer can’t choose to postpone life-threatening complications. Your decision that it’s “just a flu, I’m going to live my life,” may well rob them of theirs.

Cook at home, stream Netflix and make responsible decisions that will only marginally impact your life.

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