Alexandros (Alex) Trimis

From a technological standpoint, building a solution like Onlive.site is no easy feat. ⛰️ But we couldn't be more proud of the work that has gone in to it. Here's a bit about our solutions: ▶ The ultra-low latency allows for the smoothest possible #videocommerce experience, something only Onlive.site has managed to accomplish. ▶ That, paired with high resolution video, 3D immersive technology, and many other factors creates a technical demand that Onlive.site has managed to sustain and grow. 📈

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It used to be commonplace for boards to replace founding CEOs as the company started to scale up. After all, operating at scale is a very different skillset from building a disruptive product. There are many great reasons we've largely moved away from that model. But one downside is seeing promising companies derailed as founders screw up the basics of putting together an exec team and an operating structure. It's not rocket science! But it is a new skill to learn. How to build and run your exec team: https://lnkd.in/gK6csSki

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AI startup idea: train agents. Some say being a real estate agent is like driving a taxi—temporary and anyone can do it. Agents' turnover is huge, corporate coaches are exhausted, and real customers don't appreciate being guinea pigs 😅 Got another idea for a side project based on an AI Real Estate Assistant: Young Agent Simulator An AI assistant like Placy is good at talking with clients. She understands how they act. She can play the role of a buyer or seller to help train new agents, making the whole process cheap and easy. Plus, she can send over recommendations for students and the agency’s management about each trainee. This saves money and reduces customer stress Good idea: 💡 insightful bulb   Nobody will use it: 😁 funny face Related post. AI startup idea: instant survey biz  https://lnkd.in/dQUFvxuF @AI_assistant #startup_idea #Placy 

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#MondayObservation: Product-market fit is misused in most pitch decks, VC conversations, and even inside founders' heads. I see "PMF" being a condition for funding in many decks. So founders come up with all sorts of bs to cover that point and get funded, and this becomes probably one of the most misused terms in the tech entrepreneurship and product world. PMF - what does it mean? 1 paying customer? 10 paying customers? 1st loyal customer? None of the above. It is a super-sensitive mix of product growth, customer loyalty and retention, value-price dependencies, maintenance of the team, and tech and market percentage. Everything else is traction. Many companies have paying customers even before the PMF, some companies can even pivot and try out different directions and be successful in both - so what is PMF for them and when is it considered „found“? One of the best practices for PM working on early-stage products is to define the PMF with a set of metrics and keep an eye on that. PMF is "calculated" through stable (sometimes it starts as even explosive at first) growth, high levels of retention, upsells and loyalty, pricing changes that don't cut your customer base in half, the teams being able to support all of that with their time and expertise, adequate marketing budgets and more. PMF is what you are paying your CPOs and CTOs for - the discovery and support of the PMF via building structures, culture, and team and helping your product stay on the market that is ever-changing and competitive for a long period. I keep saying - your PMF is hidden in the shortcomings of your competitors, and getting to the actual PMF will take you way longer than just some months of playing around with your MVP. So can we keep PMF out of the pre-seed VC decks, please? If you want to know more and learn how to get to your actual PMF - let's talk! At Tech Unicorn Builders we are offering support for founders and teams in this product space as well 🦄 #productbuilding #techfounders #pmf #productmanagement #firsttimefounder

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Yesterday I shared some thoughts on how to find a job at a venture studio. It's an interesting topic b/c (a) more venture studios are emerging; (b) more people are getting interested in working at them. They see the opportunity to work on multiple startups at the same time and think that'll be exciting (it can be!) Here are the Top 10 questions you (as a job seeker) should ask venture studios: 1. What industries or verticals are you focused on and why? What unique point of view or assets do you have that suggest you can win in these spaces? 2. How does your validation methodology work? How long does it typically take? What indicators / metrics are you looking for? 3. What happens if we invalidate everything we’re exploring? Some might consider that failure, but it’s an important part of the journey, right? Is compensation attached to validating things and moving them through the process? 4. How far do you go with validation before bringing in a Founder/CEO? Once the Founder/CEO is recruited, what is the working relationship like with them? Do they become our boss? 5. How many startups are you aiming to create per year? Will I be working on one startup / idea at a time or multiple? 6. Do employees typically join a startup that’s created through the venture studio? Is that ever an option? 7. What’s the potential of eventually becoming a Founder/CEO for one of the startups we create? What do you look for in FIRs/EIRs/potential founders? 8. What are my career path options? (Note: These are limited b/c most studios are small, < 50 people. There aren't a lot of managerial roles for example. So if you're looking to climb a ladder, studios may be the wrong place to do it.) 9. How does compensation work? Studio compensation is complicated. Some offer options/equity in the studio itself. But unless the studio has an exit, it's not clear how you'll get a return; many studios offer dividends on exits. Others, although rarely, offer equity/upside directly in the startups that are created. Most venture studios pay below market with upside potential, similar to startups. Corporate venture studios will pay market, on par with other roles they have at their organization, b/c they have standard 'pay grades', but they'll rarely offer upside. Doing math on any upside scenarios is tough, but you can try! 10. What’s your secret sauce for building great startups? There are other questions too, many of which should focus on the specific role. Dig into a "day in the life" at the venture studio; many designers, product managers and developers may find the constant 0 to 1 validation work exhausting. You might not be doing a lot of high-level building; it might be scrappy prototyping work over and over. Some love this. Others don't. Venture studios can be awesome places to work and learn. I'd bet at a good studio you'll learn more in a few years than you can anywhere else. But try to figure out what you're getting yourself into. 😀

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Here is a market research for your next product idea. Verticals at which VCs want to throw their wallets. https://lnkd.in/d_EhqYcU It’s not a secret yet for some reason YC doesn’t get enough submissions in these domains. There’a at least 1 good idea I’ve got from reading this - Programming Language (or framework or fork) for New Space domain. There are some lessons to take from SpaceX approach to development and how they handle system recovery. Having this baked into language with set of testing tools to stress test the system is something that is needed to make programming for New Space more approachable. You could license tools on top of that. Do you have any other ideas? #vc #money #ycombinator #programming #spacex #newspace #startup

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Honored to be selected by @HITLAB AARP as a finalist! Sensoria Health delivers a human centric, AI/ML quantified data driven edge to cloud platform for the aging consumer and patient. Years ago, we named the company Sensoria (IA in Italian - AI) because we think that biometric data fusion systems can enable new more personalized and efficient patient care models. Unlike other industries where AI is controversial due to the risk of human job disintermediation, in healthcare there is an ever-widening gap between the need of the growing patient population and the availability of skilled healthcare resources. The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to increase from 59 million to 82 million by 2050 and the same age group's share of the total population is projected to rise from 17% to 23%. The U.S population is older today than it has ever been.As an example, just the year after the pandemic over 22,000 physical therapists resigned in the US. Technology and #AI can be a meaningful steppingstone to bridge the gap. #digitalhealth #remotepatientmonitoring #physicaltherapy #personalizedmedicine

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When passing on an investment, most VCs rarely share the real reason and give a canned response that provides no value to a founder. VCs typically do this to (1) preserve right to invest in the next round or (2) avoid an awkward interaction The best founders seek authentic feedback and actually respect investors more when giving their honest opinion. If you got into venture capital to help make the world a better place through innovation, then these canned responses are a disservice to the entire ecosystem. Also, as Mark Ang shares - the founder wont come back to you for the next round!

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🧠 What Users to Focus on When Building Early Stage Products An Iterative Founder asked me the following questions via e-mail this morning. After writing my response, I thought they might be interesting to others so posting I’m posting it here. > What should inform future product development, insights from: 1) Power users, who engaging deeply with the product, but make up a minority, or 2) Core users, who don't engage as often as power users, but make up the majority? You’re optimizing for usefulness which is # of people who used the product multiplied by the usefulness each person receives from using it. The strategy for optimizing it is to figure out who finds it’s very useful and why then find as many of them as possible. Once you exhaust that group, you find the next group who maybe doesn’t find it as useful but still pretty useful and get all of them. Rinse and repeat. > Should our goal be to cultivate more power users, thereby increasing engagement per user, or to expand the overall user base? Considering our objectives of 1) encouraging more people to become founders, and 2) helping founders be more effective, one argument for power users, due to their engagement, is they are both more encouraged to become founders and more effective as founders. Related to the above. If you’re optimizing for usefulness, you should do whatever has the highest ROI. If your product isn’t very useful to people, you should probably work on usefulness per person (engagement, NPS, etc.). If your product is useful but not very many people use it, you should probably work on getting more people to use it. It takes increasingly more work per unit of usefulness if your product is already quite useful. > How do you build a product without full visibility into data? More and more, I'm feeling the urgency to take the first month of next cycle to work on systems, processes and maintenance.  Vibes. Just kidding.. but less than you think. This is where understanding your users (motivations, pain points, etc.) is so important to people working on very early stage products. Understanding your users builds your mental model of what they want, you build lightweight versions of those things, use the data they generate to verify the mental model. Don’t spend the first month on systems, processes and maintenance. That isn’t going to help you and there’s a hint of fear in it. Instead, build a mental framework based on what you know about your users and spend the month experimenting to verify your framework. Build systems and processes after you know your mental framework is reasonably correct. If you build it before then, there’s a chance you’ll have to throw it all away anyway. If you have other product questions, leave them in the comments. I’ll share what I think but maybe other people have better answers too.

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This is a must listen to for anyone B2B founder. How to figure out Product Market Fit. One of best frameworks I've seen in a while. https://lnkd.in/ghSmhVNB

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Early-stage founders in Europe earn €30-50k a year. As you get more investment, you can increase your salary. But even on the Series A round, your fix will only be around €120k gross. Not much for 1/3 of heroes that survive to the Series A, right? Many of us could earn triple that at big corps! So, if you plan to leave your good full-time job for a startup, be prepared to earn a third of your current salary in the upcoming years. Research: https://lnkd.in/dKwFd6cu And yep, Placy’s founders’ salaries are in that range too—nothing to write home about Still wanna be a founder in Europe? 😊 #startup_salaries #founders

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Super intertesting trend. The majority of exits of US-based startups have been early stage. The trend from 2014 shows that the % contribution of early-stage exits in increasing faster every year. Raises 2 questions: 1. Is the regulatory hurdle in the US too significant for later stage exists (think Figma)? 2. Are we seeing similar trends outside the USA? Let me know what you think. Data source: Pitchbook #startups #VC #investing

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For every consumer or mass market company I have invested in – there has been one consistent product management theme: simplicity.  While many competitors try to build in more capabilities, more functionality, more content, more, more, more – the winners tend to be incredibly skilled at keeping things very simple. It plays itself out again and again, you don’t have to be first to market, nor the most full-featured, not even the most attractive – you just have to be the simplest.  Over the years, I have come to appreciate that building a product, service or application that is defined by its simplicity is extraordinarily hard. It takes real talent and ingenuity to create simplicity and once you have achieved it – it is as real a barrier to entry as a slew of patents or technical secret sauce. Simplicity is that valuable.

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VC Platform explained, in apples. By the nature of what I do, I think about social systems a lot: how do we build a platform of founders supporting other founders? It’s so easy to get caught up in complexity here, that I make myself think about it, quite literally, in apples. Give it a try: * If I have two apples, and give you one, how many do I have left? One less than I had, so down to one apple. * But in real life the correct answer is that I now have an apple and a relationship with the culture of sharing with others when you can. I‘ll be able to lean back on that relationship when in a twist of fate it’s now me standing with no apples. I am now part of a system. * Can I rely on someone else to start this system? Yes, I can. But apples in life are a bit more complicated: — Maybe the person in front of me doesn’t share the apple with me, because she has already committed it to someone else. — Maybe she borrowed the apple from someone else in the past, and now wants to return it. — Maybe she hasn’t eaten in a while, and now needs not one, but both apples to sate herself. — All these people might be generally willing to share an apple with me—but maybe not this exact one, the timing may be not right at the moment, they are part of a bigger group where they have agreed to only share apples inside the group etc. Yes, the analogy with deal-sharing is intended, too. :) * When we factor in real-life circumstances, it’s hard to tell if the person, in fact, has a spare apple or not. Besides, when I wait for someone else to share an apple first, I make myself dependent on an external factor over which I have no control. I shouldn‘t, therefore, be surprized to find myself in a situation when I would want someone to share an apple with me, but the system is not there yet. * So, in reality, the only sure way to become part of a system like that is to wait for a moment when I have a spare apple and share it. * For this to work, the person I am sharing the apple with should actually need the apple. Let’s imagine I try to share an apple with someone who has just had two, doesn’t like apples, or has an apple tree. In the best case, it just won’t work. In worse cases, if let’s suppose I insist on giving the apple, the person might grow irritated. So, I need to share my spare apple with someone who actually needs an apple at this point in time. * This example is fabulous, as it helps answer other questions as well. For example, should I then give both apples, so that the relationship is 2x stronger? My answer will follow in the next post. PS. The artwork frivolously used by me to illustrate my thoughts is by a generative artist @dmitricherniak on inst who considers automation his artistic medium. He makes it seem easy, but after spending an hour in DALL•E and getting a bunch of really ugly apples in webs, I am a raging fan.

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I am often asked about the “hardest thing” in running a start-up Hiring great people is hard, fundraising and managing a cap table is hard, competing with very well funded incumbents is hard, finding product-market is hard (probably the hardest one on that list if you ask me..) - a lot of founders talk about these. But for me, especially on the GTM side of things, the hardest thing is the insane power imbalance between a start-up and pretty much everyone it’s selling to. No one talks about it but it exists and it gave me more sleepless nights over the last 3 years then any other problem. Let me explain. As a devoted Sandler fan, I live and breathe by “equal business stature”. Your time is valuable and so is mine. Before investing into anything, get clear commitment from the other side. Walk away from the relationship if effort is not reciprocated. This approach served me incredibly well in my 9 years in investment banking, sales and investing but it sadly doesn’t quite translate to early stage start-ups. The last 2 years have shown us all that you can’t build a business out of selling to other startups. If you want to survive, you have to go after larger companies, partner with established service providers and generally swim with much bigger fish. They have thousands of employees, you have 15. They have a brand name, you are a new kid on the block. Most importantly, they have time, they can afford to wait a few quarters… you need this deal signed yesterday. Everyone knows it. They can afford to f*** around, you have to play by their rules if you want a shot at working together. I WISH walking away from a deal after someone reschedules a meeting for the 3rd time or wants a trial extension was a possibility - but in reality it’s not. One large customer and one successful partnership can change the game in the early days of a startup. So you end up over-investing and giving more than your fair share, violating the “equal business stature” rule many times over, but I have yet to find another way to open doors and actually get a shot at the goal. Do I still believe in “equal business stature”? Absolutely. But there is this weird corner of commercial operations, called the zero to 1 game, where rules that apply to 90% of situations cease to exist. 

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To all debating whether no-code should be used in build products with fundraising in mind: Investors often have a mandate to invest when there's a strong technical value prop or moat, which is why they're hesitant about no-code foundations. It's not about scale, compliance, IP, or security—modern no-code tools excel in these areas today. The real issue is the absence of deep tech roots that makes them wary. However, more open-minded investors or those focused on non-technical value props, moats, or other verticals usually have no problem with this approach. Better yet, they appreciate it for showing resourcefulness and avoiding overcomplication.

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We've launched Dumbbe and it's now Available on the App Store! (BETA) link: https://lnkd.in/dzWThSZt Some updates... Yesterday we also launched it on the Product Hunt, where we ended up as the: - #11 product in the featured list... we had 186 upvotes and 150 comments :) The launch itself went well. We are seeing user growth as expected... now it's time to keep it going and work on retention :) User feedback revealed some mistakes we made like not including a quick tutorial. This resulted in one user just taking multiple photos of a banana and posting it. The feedback also showed us some bugs we had in the onboarding experience as well as within the Laugh (for you) page. We also found some problems with memes rendering with low-quality photos. Fixing all of them, now. One thing we'll focus on in the coming days is the quality of the memes that are outputted by our users. The goal is for our users to output the funniest and best-looking memes. That is already highly improved with 'dumbs' (user-generated funny captions), but there is still a lot to be done... #buildinginpublic

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This is a powerful example of what it means to be a purpose-driven entrepreneur: Ilya quits Open AI over concerns that the organization is prioritizing profit over safety He launches a new organization “Safe Superintelligence” that allows him to pursue a mission aligned with his personal values. He uses the organization for the creation of something more than a team: a movement that people are supposed to join not only for the financial incentives that it offers but also for the possibility of working on something that they deeply care about. On a side note, I believe this latest development is further proof that we are firmly on our way to achieving Superintelligence. It’s not a matter of “if” anymore, but rather of “When”. 

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