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Josh Feuerstein
For much of my career in product management, I wasn’t nearly aggressive enough about getting myself in front of customers to do problem discovery, even as a founder highly vested in building the right things. Here’s the simple realization that shifted my mindset (which should have been obvious to me as a New Yorker): *People love talking about their problems, including their work problems.* I know a lot of people who pay very good money for the privilege of having someone listen to them talk about their problems for an hour. In retrospect, there were three things holding me back: 1. assuming it was an imposition to ask customers/users to spend time educating me on their problems 2. thinking I needed to be ready to share a compelling solution to earn and optimize my time with them 3. and if I’m honest, being afraid I’d hear that people didn’t care enough about the problems we planned on solving. But that’s for another post :) People are especially happy to talk about their problems when they believe there’s a chance you might help solve those problems AND they know you’re not selling them anything (at least not yet). It's simple to clarify these intentions upfront when you're recruiting discovery interview prospects. Doing so will not only set the right context but dramatically increase the number of people who agree to spend time with you. If you find yourself feeling tentative about problem discovery, remember: 1. Problem discovery is all about getting people to talk about their problems 2. People love talking about their problems (especially New Yorkers 😉)
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7 Comments -
Henry Ward
I’m hiring a new Chief of Staff. In tech, a CoS can mean a lot of different things. For me it is two things. First, a person that gives me institutional grade leverage. Second, a person that can speak for me both inside Carta and outside. Many CoS’s have gone on to do incredible things like Matt Howland who after being my CoS became Carta’s General Manager of the captable business and subsequently a founder and now CPO/CTO of Cordial, Sumeet Gajri who became Carta’s Chief Strategy Officer and then Managing Director of Original Capital, and Jane Alexander who became Carta’s Chief Marketing Officer and now Partner at Capital G. Every chief of staff has brought their unique skills to leave a positive impact on me and on Carta. It is a hard gig. You will work my hours (which are a lot). You will do everything from deciding how to use my time to developing Carta strategy. You will be in every meeting I’m in, you will be involved in every decision I make, and you will see what it’s like to run Carta. You will see things you haven’t seen before, and if you’ve seen the press, it is not for the faint of heart. But if you do it, you will learn a ton, experience things most people never get to, and see the world in a whole new way. It is a three year tour of duty and then we try to place you in a leadership role somewhere within Carta. I’m posting this because I’d love to find a wonderful person to work with for the next three years. If you are interested please consider applying. For those that apply I’d like to ask you to submit two things. 1. Please submit a short answer (less than 600 words) to the following question. Last November I got a lot of negative press for sending a pre-emptive email to thousands of customers about upcoming negative press about my leadership style. The subsequent storyline was “Henry is terrible at PR and what an idiot for bringing more attention to negative stories???” They could be right. I could be an idiot. But for this question, assume I wasn’t. Assume that it was a calculated decision and, in hindsight, still a correct one. Why did I do it? Please write it in the form of a in memo to the Carta Board explaining why we made that decision and thought it was the right one. 2. Please submit a short video presentation (less than four mins) teaching me something I don’t know. It can be about anything. It can be a cooking lesson, a business lesson, a history lesson. I’ll give an example in the next comment. I know it is a big ask but hopefully not much more time than preparing for an interview. And it will give us a head start so that in the second round, instead of asking you questions, you get to come in and grill me. 🙂 If you are interested please apply through the posting below with your board letter and a link to your video; I'm excited to see it. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I’m super excited to hear from you. https://lnkd.in/gtmFfrjV
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114 Comments -
James Colgan
Great to see Eric Glyman's post on the impact of moving support into the product organization. Even better would would be to move support into engineering. We did this at Outlook mobile and Spendesk to great effect. The majority of tickets tend to be performance, quality, or reliability-related. Bugs and glitches. Putting a colleague's name on a ticket increases the rate of those tickets getting resolved. UX issues will surface, but they'll be in the minority. They will be well-understood by your design and UX/Research team already. And the triad can work through those as part of their regular planning cycle. Support reporting into engineering eliminates the distance between the user and engineers and puts the responsibility for quality where it needs to be.
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Brandon Black
💯 If your team is drowning in support tickets and customer "rough edges" you should probably sit back and evaluate if you have a viable product. At the very least, you should evaluate if your product team is correctly focused on the needs of your customers when this pattern emerges. "Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place." "In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team." Customer feedback is a gift. Don't squander it or pawn the problem off on a man-power to solve it. A pile-up here is *always* a sign that your product direction needs improvement.
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Max Raphel
Building Products in Startups: Lesson #2 As entrepreneurs, we often gravitate towards what we naturally excel at or enjoy. Not everyone is a born salesperson, but until you've heard "NO" enough times, you haven't really tested your product and your own resiliency. Resiliency is especially important when you are prospecting for potential clients. In short: EMBRACE THE "NO" TO FIND THE "YES" — AND NEVER STOP SELLING YOUR PRODUCT. Building a startup also means pushing boundaries. As founders, many of us aren’t trained sales professionals, but here's the truth: selling is a muscle you need to exercise regularly. Each "no" is an opportunity to understand your market better, refine your pitch, and find your path to "yes." Here are some additional observations to date: Learn to Love Objections. The tough questions from potential clients are golden opportunities. They force you to think critically and refine your product's value proposition. If you only hear praise, it's time to dig deeper. Praise makes me nervous! Stay in Sales Mode. No matter who joins your team, founders should remain close to customers and drive top-line sales. Relying solely on others to sell your product can be risky. Keep Iterating on Your Sales Pitch. Don’t settle for a pitch that works once. Iterate, adapt, and evolve. Don’t Delegate. You may be tempted to delegate sales to a 3rd party who has “access” and “special sauce” - do it yourself at first. Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile & Buyer Persona. Do this until you hit on a conversion rate within the accepted range for your industry segment. By the way, even if you dream of a product that sells itself (and that should be the goal), the reality is, few products do. 🤷♂️ Whether you're a natural salesperson or not, selling is a fundamental skill in the startup world. What sales challenges and lessons can you share? Happy Selling! 🚀 #StartupLife #StartupLessons #Sales #CoffeeIsForClosers
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Risa Goodman
After 10+ years working with early-stage startups it’s fair to say I’ve seen I’ve seen some things (& some things I will never unsee), learned some things, earned some stripes, some scars, and some measure of expertise (one hopes) helping more than a dozen startups find product-market fit. While I’ve enjoyed year-long runways at well-funded startups that were eventually acquired, or went public, or very publicly imploded—what really taught me the real meaning of Lean startup was working with self-funded founders who had ten compelling concepts but resources to build one. When you don’t have a year to be wrong; you learn to get it right very fast. If you are a founder facing your own set of high stakes decisions & tradeoffs; we can help. For free. You can book a 1 hour chat with us to talk through all the things racing through your head. We know what’s involved in getting something tested, validated, and built; this is what we do every day all day. We might not have all the answers but there is a good chance we can give you some clarity, some calm, some options. Call us at 1.844.4FLAGRANT or DM me. And if you want to get a sense of what we are like as hoomans- check out our Delightful Reveal series. It’s all the things we have been reading, watching, listening to, & enjoying. https://lnkd.in/gfrz9tQS #startups #entrepreneurship #socialentrepreneurs #innovation
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Mike MacIntyre
I’ve been reflecting on the differences between SaaS startups and Climate startups as I have been frequently asked "What stage/type of company are you looking for?" My initial, naive response was based on my SaaS experience "oh an early stage company with seed funding or more". The reality of how this translates in to the carbon removal space is actually quite different. Some of these are discussed below. ⏱️ Time to Market & Scaling SaaS startups can rapidly develop and launch products, iterate based on customer feedback, and scale globally with relatively low marginal costs. CDR startups face longer timelines to develop and commercialise their technologies. The initial concept often comes from a scientific research paper and to demonstrate that it will work at large scale requires overcoming many physical and logistical challenges, whether that’s building facilities, waiting from agricultural cycles or proving that the predicted outcome is actually realised in the physical environment (e.g. MRV). The Technical Readiness Levels (see below) are frequently used to highlight where different technologies are in their development maturity. 📈 Business Model & Revenue Generation SaaS startups typically rely on subscription based revenue for model for a tangible software product. Revenue is often predictable and grows rapidly with customer acquisition. CDR startups are still working out the best business models with part of the challenge being that there isn’t always a tangible product at the end of the process - CO2 locked away in the ocean or in rocks is hard to see! The primary revenue source is likely to be carbon removal credits but these can only be generated at a certain stage of maturity so grants or pre-purchase agreements are necessary to help bridge this gap. This is still a nascent market with some reputational challenges. Some technologies, like BioChar, may have also have a utilisation revenue stream but that in turn could compromise the permanence of the carbon removal. Partnership also play a key role here but that requires more of a discussion. 💰Funding & Investment The promise of rapid growth, good unit economics and high returns make SaaS startups attractive to investors. For CDR startups, Investors will likely see a lot of risk until a company has reached a certain level of technical feasibility and commercial viability. However, getting to that stage likely requires some substantial capital. A slowly evolving regulatory landscape creates additional uncertainty. The funding journey for these companies is going to be a mix of grants, early buyers (e.g. Stripe, Microsoft, etc.) and will be a bit chicken and egg. So the answer to the question “What type of company are you looking for?” Is “It depends!” But I can say that it’s one that is having a direct impact on carbon removal and is dedicated to protecting and enhancing the physical world. That’s a start 🙏
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Sawyer Middeleer
As an early-stage Chief of Staff, I often talk to folks who are looking for CoS roles. I get asked a lot of similar questions and want to share my answers for anyone who's pursuing this path: 1️⃣ What does a CoS actually do? CoS's are all different. At a company as young as Aomni, Chief of Staff is a "white space" generalist role, meaning I take on any business priorities that our founder/future execs don't own themselves. Today that means Ops, Sales (in partnership w CEO), Marketing, Customer Support and certain Product tasks. 2️⃣ How can I find CoS opportunities at startups? I don't think it's a good use of time to apply cold. This is because CoS hiring at startups is highly trust-based and the market is crazy rn. Unless you have a sterling resume, you're going to lose out to competitors in the CEO's network already. Instead, leverage your network to develop relationships. Look for opportunities to start on a freelance basis where you can build trust before the job is even posted. Consider different roles at the right company where you can evolve into a CoS over time. 3️⃣ How can I stand out to hiring managers? Same thing as #2 -- it's all about relationships. Demonstrate that you can perform well in the role and add value as a trusted partner to the CEO/exec team, whatever that takes. 4️⃣ What's the hardest part of the CoS role? The biggest thing is stress. You don't have the same level of responsibility as the CEO, of course, but the pressure they experience reaches you via osmosis. I'm always trying to improve how I manage stress. 5️⃣ Do I need to have consulting or banking experience, or an MBA? Absolutely not. My somewhat irrational and biased opinion is that these experiences are actually anti-signals about one's fit for the job at a startup (probably not the same at a big company). Many people with these backgrounds are uncomfortable without structure, inflexible and unwilling to do grunt work. Effective CoS's at startups are highly curious learners, resourceful operators and great first-principles thinkers. As long as you can demonstrate these traits you're golden. --- I also want to shout out some communities that anyone in this space should have on their radar: Ask a Chief of Staff, Chief of Staff Network and Generalist World are 3 of my faves. Always happy to answer questions and support new and aspiring CoS's in any way I can!
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James Smith
+1 this wholeheartedly. I don’t even love calling it “Support” and prefer something like “Customer Experience Engineering.” These folks are a direct line between customers and product engineering. Reduce that friction, and assuming you act on the feedback, you’ll reduce frustration-related tickets coming through this channel. Funny enough, when you do that, you can have these same folks focused more on proactive solutioning with customers vs. just reactive support, thus scaling the role from cost-center to revenue-generator. 🚀🚀🚀
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Nathan Murthy
I am incredibly inspired by and grateful for my teammates at Verse for achieving our first fundraising milestone together: we recently secured $20.5 million in Series A financing led by GV (Google Ventures) 🙌🏾 🎉 with participation from Coatue, CIV, and MCJ Collective. I've been trying to contain my excitement for weeks 😊 as am sure are my colleagues now that we can share the good news. I'd like to give a big shout out to the engineering team - Jessica Greenfield, Kaleb Pace, Shawn Toubeau, Brandon Clayton, Ryan Kladar, Ryan Triolo, Yuzhou Jiang, and Mahdi Kohansal - for the speed and precision of every line of code they've written, and to Seyed H. Madaeni, Ph.D., Matt Penfold, Shehzad Wadalawala, Dane McKay, Alison Mickey, Debi Ryan, and Tanner McAuley for leading and driving us on the business front. We'll be on the look out soon for more folks to join us 😉 As we used to say at my last job: "We haven't won yet." The path to decarbonization will be a multi-decade, if not multi-generational effort. Verse is just one organization in a constellation of thousands developing real solutions to the climate change problem. Until we achieve net zero emissions at a global scale 🌏 🌍 🌎 our mission remains to be done. #software #ai #energy #sustainability #climatechange #startups https://lnkd.in/gG-DEX5x
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Miles Gordenker
Are you a startup hiring engineers with AI experience? Good luck- there just aren't that many of them (yet), and most of them have worked at larger companies- which means startups will be a culture shock. 🧠 Here's how we're working around the issue at Toric. Every single candidate is told up-front that they'll be asked the following question: "Design a system that utilizes RAG to extract and analyze data from competitor reports and industry analyses in PDF format, providing companies with tailored strategic insights based on their market position and objectives. The PDFs contain a mixture of text, charts, and tabular data." During the interview, we let candidates use the internet while answering questions to follow their research/thought process. The best candidates come in at least somewhat prepared, so I throw them a few curveballs to see how they search for and leverage external info. I've been very impressed by the results. Candidates told me they love how "fair and transparent" our process is, and even that they enjoyed the case study. IMO, it's the best way to predict success at our company without resorting to immoral tactics like giving candidates unpaid take home projects to complete. #hiring #artificialintelligence
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Emily Bartels
It was a great couple of days in San Francisco for Stripe Sessions. I know, for those in my network, this is probably the umpteenth post you've seen...but I am going to share a few of my reflections anyway. 1. The Jensen Huang fireside chat with Patrick was off the hook. I didn't take any notes because I was listening so intently. I'm inspired by leaders and companies that are not scared to break the conventional mold. 🤯 Jensen has 60 direct reports. Why? Because he doesn't believe in privileged access to information. How? No 1:1s. At that level, it shouldn't be necessary. Feedback is given publicly and it's a gift for everyone to learn from everyone's mistakes. ✍ He is not quick to fire people, but prefers to "torture you into greatness." Jensen went from cleaning bathrooms to the founder and CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. This stuff can be learned. 2. In the AMA with Patrick and John, Patrick commented on how a beautiful building is an act of generosity. 👨🎨 Some may think that beauty and craft is a bit esoteric in the context of a payments conference, but it's a reflection of the "soul" of a company. There is a greater purpose at play and I really admire companies with depth that goes beyond just the products they build. 🗿 If you have not heard of Monumental Labs, check them out. If you are like me and you are uninspired by the blandness of modern suburban cities and find yourself in awe over ancient stonework, you'll think it's super cool. 3. Mic drop 🎤 to Stripe on all the big announcements and the stage performance. You wowed the crowd and made us laugh trying your best to make us laugh. 📈 Global GDP is $100T, but as Patrick states, that's not a cap. Stripe's mission is to grow that number, in part by enabling new market-making businesses with all their cool tech, allowing more people to participate and benefit from that economic growth. (Patrick's reflection on Ireland's progress made me tear up a bit) 👂 The voice of the customer is heard. For all of us building businesses, it is so important to identify the customer value first, and then revenue will follow. 👩💼 It made me pretty antsy to go build :-) It's a lot of work to put on a great conference. Kudos to the people who put in the work to make it all happen. 👏 And for everyone I connected with, it was great seeing you all IRL!
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Ankit Jain
We hosted our first ever Hangar DX dinner in SF this week! We kept the dinner intimate with 12 DX leaders from Slack, Notion, Figma, Reddit, Amplitude, LinkedIn, Yelp, Benchling, Babylist and AMD. This gave everyone opportunity to have open unfiltered conversation about the DevEx space today, and form real connections. These were some of my most surprising findings: 🌟 None of the DevEx teams have a Product Manager - it is extremely hard to find a PM for DevEx who truly understands and aligns with developers' complex workflow needs 🌟 Even though everyone feels the pain of ownership, no one is using any off-the-shelf IDP today 🌟 Roadmap is primarily driven bottoms up - everyone uses some form of surveys and internal interviews to inform the roadmap 🌟 Influencing C-suite and explaining impact seems to be on top of mind Thank you Poya Osgouei for helping host the dinner, and Aviator for sponsoring :) #developerproductivity #developerexperience #devex
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9 Comments -
Brandon Mathis
AI is innovating a variety of industries across the US and Agriculture is no exception. 🐄 My new friend, Catie McVey, has created a new "Agtech" startup that uses patented 3D Modeling and Machine Learning algorithms to evaluate the health of cows by looking at specific characteristics such as hoof morphology and facial characteristics. Working with her to architect how to get source data from "The Stockyards" to "The Cloud" has been a lot of fun. I am constantly discovering new ways AI can make an impact in industries from legal, to healthcare and now agriculture! Read more about Catie's journey on RIoT - Internet of Things' blog #AI #software #agtech
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Charlie Franklin
A standard approach to new hire equity for public tech companies is a new hire grant ~2x the refresh grant, followed by annual refreshes, all with 4-year standard vest. The problem with this approach is the big drop off in vesting in Year 5 — in effect, you’re signaling to employees that’s the time to leave. How can we avoid this cliff? A simple way to accomplish this goal is with the combination of a front-loaded new hire grant and ratable refreshes. The key drivers to make this program work are: Front-loading the NH grant — this helps eliminate the cliff in year 5 Reducing the NH grant multiple — this also reduces the cliff, and lowers total spend Moving to 3-year vests — this pulls more vesting value forward Notice this actually saves the company money too. When we lower our new hire multiple from 2.0x to 1.5x, should we be worried it’s less attractive to the candidate? I think no, for a very specific reason: people rationally discount future value. Check out my full post below. 👇 And this isn't the only solution - how else can you adapt your stock comp design to minimize cliffs? #compensation #totalrewards
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Deepak Singh
I was recently chatting to an early stage founder about product-market fit (PMF). This isn't an exact transcript, and is edited for better understanding. Founder: How do we know that we have gotten the PMF? We are tracking retention because we are b2c and expect people to use our app weekly. Me: Yes, that makes sense. Retention is a good metric because it means customers are preferring you over others on a regular basis. I like to add potential monetisation avenues to the PMF discussions as well. In my experience, keeping monetisation in mind while making the initial product choices, makes things easier down the road. Founder: Yes, we haven't thought about monetisation yet. Let me think about it. To understand PMF better, we have benchmarked retention with other similar products. We are at 40% of the best apps in the category in terms of weekly retention (W4) Me: That's a good thing. As long as the retention curve flattens, it's a sign of PMF. Founder: Makes sense. But how do we improve that number? Me: I am sure you have studied Superhuman's blog around how they improved their PMF. They tried to identify what sort of people are loving the product, and then focussed on those. Founder: Yes, we have. We can use that. Me: Yes, but one issue with that approach is - it works well when you have a set of users who pay for your product. When people pay, they are willing to take a longer survey like Superhuman. When it's free, like your b2c product, you might have a sampling bias in survey, where more engaged users take the survey and provide you a different picture than actual. Founder: So how do we tackle that? Would doing interviews be better? Me: Yes, it would be better. But even there, people who have used your product sparingly (dropped without getting value) won't be willing to speak to you. So you have to be careful - make sure that you have all the key personas listed before you start calling the users. That way, you can put more effort in segments where you haven't talked to enough users. Founder: Makes sense! So we identify the segments for whom the product is working, and then target them? Me: Yes, with couple of more things to keep in mind. First, make sure these segments are large enough for you. If not, you might have to work on making additional segments to love your product. Second, make sure you understand why your product is working for them. Use that in your landing pages, ad copy, etc. and you might be able to attract them quite easily. Founder: Sounds good! People say you should start amping up marketing spend after PMF. When do we do that? Me: It's hard to answer this question when you aren't monetising. Get your investors' opinion. If you were monetising, I would have looked at the gross profit. ----- A simple concept can become much more nuanced in application, which we don't talk a lot about. This conversation would have been quite different for a different product - like enterprise or marketplace.
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