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Founder Weekly - Issue 668

2025-01-09 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 668

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 668 of Founder Weekly. Happy New Year! I hope you had great holidays and took some time off to recharge. :-)
General

15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders
David Senra, host of Founders podcast, explores common principles behind successful individuals' stories. The summary highlights key lessons, including the importance of resilience, powerful relationships, avoiding self-pity, and understanding generational influences in shaping success.

How Eight Sleep Co-Founder Alex Zatarain Built a Company That Pioneered the ‘Sleep Fitness’ Category
A practical guide on how to position your brand to build not just a business, but an entire movement. 

The next big thing in 2025 will be...
For the 5th year in a row, 50 of technology's top thinkers weigh in on the year ahead.

Explore vs Execute
The two main business modalities are more different than you expect. When you hit PMF, it’s a culture-shift to switch from one to the other. 

Understanding Startup Board Control
The article explains startup board control, emphasizing its importance for founders. It covers board structure at different funding stages, strategies to maintain control (like negotiating seats and choosing investors wisely), and the rare possibility of obtaining super voting rights in exceptional cases.


Marketing, Sales and PR

The Founder GTM Handbook
How Databricks, Stripe, Notion and more built their GTM engine.

How to Price Your AI-First Product
Why we’re seeing a rise in output and input based pricing models relative to SaaS.


Money and Finance

Venture Goes Multi-Product
The capital markets for private tech companies are sorely outdated. Expect this to change as today’s venture giants seize an opportunity to become multi-strategy institutional asset managers.

Reimagining Startup Financing
A VC’s Take on Equity-for-Service Models.

Enterprise Seed VC Funding Napkin (At Year 4/5 of Deployment)
The article updates key metrics for evaluating early-stage enterprise VC fund performance, including seed graduation rates, pro-rata accessibility, and entry-to-reserve ratios. It provides insights into current market trends, such as the impact of AI and changing valuations, while offering benchmarks for excellent performance in various aspects of seed-stage investing.
 
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Founder Weekly - Issue 667

2024-12-19 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 667

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 667 of Founder Weekly. This is the final issue of 2024. We will be back after the holiday break. Wish you and your family Happy Holidays!
General

Inside the Brain of a 17-Year-Old $1M/Month AI Founder
The video features Zach Yadegari, co-founder of Cal AI, discussing how to build and scale viral AI apps, using a hypothetical app called "Dr. AI" as an example. Zach shares insights on app design, user experience, growth strategies, monetization, and technical implementation, emphasizing simplicity and effective marketing through influencers.

AI in 2025: Building Blocks Firmly in Place
2024 was AI’s primordial soup year. In 2025, the foundations are solidifying with Big Tech and startups discovering what will really work for customers.

Consumer Trends 2025
TikTok Shop is huge. Is drinking actually on its way out? And are Gen. Z beauty customers loyal?

How COVID almost killed his Multi-Million Dollar Travel Startup
Farouk Ismail, co-founder of Slice, shares his entrepreneurial journey from manually processing travel bookings to raising $17.5 million, surviving a 95% revenue loss during the pandemic by launching in the US and betting everything on his vision. His startup Slice offers a innovative PayLater Travel product that helps customers book flights through manageable installments, having already served over 70,000 customers.


Marketing, Sales and PR

How to get your first customers (even with ZERO audience)
The video features Jonathan Courtney, Co-Founder and CEO of AJ&Smart, discussing lead generation strategies that don't rely on a large online following. Key strategies include the Dream 100 approach, the Canvas Strategy for outreach, targeting audience-specific platforms, strategic gifting, and creating high-value content, all aimed at building meaningful relationships and providing value to potential clients.

7 Psychological Drivers of Referral Behavior to Accelerate B2B Growth
Best practices and pitfalls from Cello, Airtable, Canva, Asana and more.

Best captions for Instagram in 2025
This guide is your one-stop shop for mastering the art of the Instagram caption. We'll explore creative ideas, proven formulas, and real-world examples to help you elevate your Insta game. 


Money and Finance

5 + 1 Predictions for Venture Studios in 2025
What does the future hold for venture studios?
 
Our Other Newsletters
Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.
Copyright © 2024 Founder Weekly, All rights reserved.


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Founder Weekly - Issue 666

2024-12-12 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 666

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 666 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
General

Brittle Points: How to make companies robust
Brittleness is when the company fails because just one component breaks. Learn some strategies for fixing Brittle Points. 

How to Choose a Startup
And why so many people get it almost entirely backwards.

From alert hell to AI autopilot
How AI is reshaping IT, QA, and Incident Response.


Marketing, Sales and PR

The definitive product positioning framework (part one)
The article discusses product positioning as a strategic choice involving selecting target customer segments and differentiation, emphasizing that positioning is a critical bet owned by the CEO and best expressed through a company's homepage. It argues for use case-based segmentation over firmographics, highlighting that effective positioning requires focusing on the specific activities workers perform rather than broad company characteristics.

Building Sales Commission Plans
Best practices, trends, and insights on how to create an effective sales commission plan for 2025.


Money and Finance

How CEOs are turning corporate venture building into outsize growth
Companies are creating meaningful growth by developing new ventures. Those with the most mature capabilities are growing quickly and can show the way for companies that are just beginning.
 
Our Other Newsletters
Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.
Copyright © 2024 Founder Weekly, All rights reserved.


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You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Founder Weekly - Issue 665

2024-12-05 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 665

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 665 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
General

Identify your bullseye customer in one day
Michael Margolis, a UX research partner at Google Ventures for nearly 15 years, has developed a unique approach to help startups identify their "bullseye customer" through hands-on research sprints. His method, which includes running customer sprints, conducting effective interviews, creating prototypes, and utilizing "watch parties," aims to accelerate learning and align teams around customer insights for various industries beyond typical tech startups.

Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race
Annotated translation of its CEO's deepest interview.

How Systems of Agents will collapse the enterprise stack
Systems of Agents, an AI-driven paradigm, are poised to revolutionize enterprise software by collapsing traditional Systems of Record, Engagement, and Intelligence into a single cohesive framework. This new approach uses autonomous digital workers that understand and act on natural business communication, eliminating the need for siloed tools and manual data entry while providing richer, more accurate data and streamlined workflows.


Marketing, Sales and PR

The 30-Day Test: How to Know if Your VP of Sales Will Succeed
The article argues that most first-time VPs of Sales fail within a year. It proposes a 30-day test to assess their success: recruiting strong reps and removing weak ones to ensure a productive pipeline.

SEO Analytics: The “I Can’t Believe It’s This Easy” Guide
Learn to track and analyze SEO data with key metrics, essential tools, and actionable reporting to boost your site's search performance.


Money and Finance

Why Are Start-Ups Losing So Much Money?
The article examines the increasing trend of startups exiting at a loss, reaching levels not seen since 2009, and explores various factors contributing to this phenomenon. It discusses issues within the venture capital model, including misaligned incentives, overvaluation, and the pursuit of growth at the expense of profitability, while also touching on challenges faced by high-profile startups in different sectors.
 
Our Other Newsletters
Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.
Copyright © 2024 Founder Weekly, All rights reserved.


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Founder Weekly - Issue 664

2024-11-28 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 664

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 664 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
General

The Emerging ‘AI Native’ Playbook
Opportunities for Founders and Investors.

How To Start A Dev Tools Company
In this episode of Startup School, YC General Partner and Co-Founder of Algolia Nicolas Dessaigne explains the ins and outs of starting a dev tools company from the ground up. He'll explain how to find the right idea, who should be a part of your team, and whether or not you need a sales and marketing team when you're ready to go to market.

The Uncomfortable Truth: A 3X Founder's Guide to Intellectual Honesty
Crossbeam CEO and co-founder Bob Moore shares his tools for quashing biases in pursuit of the truth at every stage of company building.

The Levers of Innovation
The article explores the challenge of increasing exceptional startups by examining potential bottlenecks in innovation, ultimately concluding that the primary constraint is a shortage of exceptional founders with intelligence, passion, and courage. The piece argues that creating more innovative startups requires a complex, interconnected approach that addresses cultural, psychological, and systemic barriers to entrepreneurial risk-taking and creativity.

2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise
The enterprise AI landscape is being rewritten in real time. As pilots give way to production, we surveyed 600 U.S. enterprise IT decision-makers to reveal the emerging winners and losers.


Marketing, Sales and PR

The ultimate guide to founder-led sales
Jen Abel, co-founder of JJELLYFISH, has guided over 300 early-stage founders in mastering sales techniques, customer discovery, and establishing repeatable sales processes to reach their first $1M ARR. She shares insights on founder-led sales, effective outreach strategies, lead generation, maintaining sales momentum, and navigating common pitfalls in the sales process.

How to Successfully Bring AI Products to Market at Scale with GitHub’s CRO
Join Elizabeth Pemmerl, Chief Revenue Officer at GitHub, as she shares an in-depth look at GitHub's journey with CoPilot and its growth from an internal tool to a widely adopted AI product.  With nearly a decade of experience at GitHub, Elizabeth discusses the importance of customer feedback, iterative development, and scalable strategies for product and team growth. Learn about the challenges, successes, and key strategies employed at GitHub to reach tens of thousands of organizations and millions of users leveraging AI solutions.

Your guide to the 2024 SaaS benchmarks
We're dropping new data from 800+ SaaS and AI companies.


Money and Finance

The Complete Guide to Party Rounds: What They Are and How They Work
How startups leverage momentum to attract multiple investors, raise capital quickly, and fuel growth—while navigating the unique challenges of party rounds.

Play It Cool: Chasing Heat vs. Being Contrarian in Venture Capital
Which categories aren't "hot" today, but are worth our time and investment?
 
Our Other Newsletters
Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.
Copyright © 2024 Founder Weekly, All rights reserved.


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You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Founder Weekly - Issue 663

2024-11-21 00:00:00

Founder Weekly - Issue 663

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Founder Weekly
Welcome to issue 663 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
General

Y Combinator's Request for Startups
Y Combinator's "Request for Startups" highlights emerging opportunities across various sectors, including government AI automation, public safety tech, manufacturing revival, stablecoins, chip design, fintech, space exploration, and AI-powered engineering tools. The document emphasizes that now is an unprecedented time for builders to create transformative technologies that can solve significant challenges across industries.

Lessons from my First Exit
The author shares lessons learned from selling his bootstrapped hardware company, TinyPilot, for $598,000. He discusses what went well, areas for improvement, and surprises encountered during the sale process, offering valuable insights for other entrepreneurs considering an exit.

How to find customers in the Dept of Defense: From prototype to the Pentagon
Steve Blank, a Stanford professor and Lean Startup pioneer, discusses strategies for bridging commercial and military markets, mission solution fit, and challenges in national security startups.

Roadmap: Voice AI
Voice AI is transforming business-customer communication by enabling human-like conversations, personalized experiences, and scalable solutions across industries. The technology has evolved from basic IVR systems to advanced speech-native models, offering improved latency, contextual understanding, and emotional awareness, with potential to revolutionize customer service and business operations.


Marketing, Sales and PR

The Complete Guide to Programmatic SEO
5 chapters covering frameworks, case studies, execution, and best practices used by the best experts in the field of programmatic content.

p-Hacking your A/B tests
Half of your “successful” A/B tests are false-positives. This is why, and how to fix it. 


Money and Finance

The Unholy Trinity of Venture Capital
The article discusses the "Unholy Trinity" of venture capital: capital agglomerators (large VC firms raising billions), capital allocators (massive institutions seeking yield), and capital absorbers (AI companies requiring huge investments). This trinity is reshaping the venture capital landscape, potentially at the expense of smaller funds and traditional VC models.

Selling Your Startup to Private Equity
Jason Lemkin and Andy Wilson explore selling SaaS companies to private equity, covering growth strategies, aligning incentives, and navigating acquisitions. Andy shares lessons from his exits, offering founders practical insights into the PE track, from preparation to mastering the deal process.

Bring Your A Game to the Series B
What a Lowercarbon growth investor looks for in your pitch.
 
Our Other Newsletters
Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.
Copyright © 2024 Founder Weekly, All rights reserved.


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You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.