🔥 Repeat founders 🔥

Why does it seem like they get special treatment from investors?

8 secrets that 2nd time founders have learned the hard way 🤫 🏆 The quality of your people is your unfair advantage.

Repeat founders hire the best, even if they have to wait.

📲 They prep their rolodex with the best people & consultants they want to hire, long before they need to fill those roles.

Crappy technologies often win. Why?

My atomic essay for today is also a lesson from Clayton Christensen 👇🏽 I forgot to share the New Yorker CC article that I was reading when I wrote yesterday and today’s post.

It’s such a good read and amazing how spot-on and early he was to these observations!
newyorker.com/magazine/2012/…

Writing today about GETTING SPECIFIC.

An atomic essay on Clayton Christensen, getting specific and GOOD ENOUGH products 💝 Clayton Christensen, the brilliant HBS innovation thinker & professor, was hired to analyze and improve fast food milkshakes 🥤

At the time, the company didn’t know why the milkshakes were popular with consumers 😍❣️

Why aiming to control your own destiny can be a superpower for founders 💪🏽

An atomic essay on moonshots & escape velocity 🚀 Escape velocity in physics is the speed an object needs to reach to escape the earth's gravitational pull, and take off into space.

To more inclusive & interesting conversations in 2021 🥂

Here are 54 women I follow on @twitter and learn from everyday. I follow both men and women, and I learn from both. Please RT if you do too, and amplify their voices. VCs: brilliant, insightful, humble goes w/out saying

@sarahtavel: brilliant on marketplaces
@aileenlee: OG unicorn spotter + @AllRaise founder
@briannekimmel: SaaS & future of work
@kirstenagreen: consumer queen
@katie_haun: all things crypto

Applying software to highly regulated / intermediated industries like education and healthcare is so tricky.

When well-meaning technologists dive into these industries they slam into quite a few things. Human systems prove harder to hack.

A thread: ⚠️ 1st problem: more than usual inertia around the status quo.

There are often multiple stakeholders who have fought to build distinct moats or for whom the status quo simply is profitable, and it distorts economic, productivity, and outcomes-based incentives.

Sometimes it takes a few startups, raising several rounds of venture funding, and going through an acquisition process — before founders understand some of the *unwritten dynamics in venture capital.*

Go in prepared. Here are some guidelines.
parul.substack.com/p/unwritten-ru… #1: Raising more money does not automatically translate into building a more valuable startup.

Y’all will debate me fiercely on this one, but historically, this is true. Please see @epaley’s definitive analysis on this here. techcrunch.com/2016/10/15/ove…