David Khavari

💯 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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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Non-Engineering Roles at Early-Stage Startups Offering $120K+ Base Salary with Meaningful Bonus and Equity: Chief of Staff @ Milo (Consumer), Remote Biz Ops Lead @ Fractal Agriculture (FinTech), Remote; Backed by Virta Ventures Chief of Staff @ CakeAI (AI SaaS), NY; Backed by Primary Venture Partners Demand Generation Specialist @ Rootly (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, 8VC, Gradient Ventures Account Executive @ CommandBar (Enterprise SaaS), Remote; Backed by Soma Capital, YC, Insight Partners Product Marketing @ Slope (Enterprise), Remote; Backed by YC, Union Square Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures Supply Planning Manager @ PROVEN Skincare (Consumer), Remote; Backed by YC, FJ Labs, Soma Capital, Social Capital Account Executive @ Accrue Savings (Consumer), NY; Backed by Ground Up Ventures, Tiger Global Chief of Staff @ UNIGRID Battery (Climate), CA; Backed by Union Square Ventures, LiquidMetal Ventures Job details and the full list (40+ opportunities) are in the comments below. If you're interested in non-tech jobs focused on specific industries like HardTech, HealthTech, Climate, etc., then DM me or let me know in the comments.

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🤝 Iterative Cofounder Matching - What to look for in a co-founder? In the 2 weeks since we launched the co-founder matching platform, we've matched 40 people. After seeing what people are looking for in their co-founders, I have 3 observations. 💡You Don’t Need An Idea to Meet Co-Founders I noticed 90% of users on the platform already have some sort of start up idea. This made me wonder whether aspiring founders without an idea are hesitant to meet co-founders. I think this could be because many people attach too much importance to the idea. In my opinion, you should meet potential co-founders even if you don't have any ideas because 1) You'll meet other people with ideas. (90% of our user base, for example) 2) The idea will change, almost always. The problem and co-founder fit, are more important. 💪 Value Compatibility As Much As Skills 70% of first time founders were looking for specific expertise or skills in their co-founder. On the other hand, 100% of second time founders equally prioritised motivations (and a sense of humour). As an ex-founder, I understand why. More often than not, co-founder breakups happen because of motivation misalignment, lack of communication or misaligned working styles. It’s easier to stay resilient with a co-founder who has a sense of humour - and laugh through the extremely tough times. 👨‍🔧 Non-Technical vs Technical Co-founders 85% of the non-technical folks prefer a technical founder. More interestingly, 30% of technical founders also prefer a technical cofounder. I think people might be placing too much value on technical experience at the idea stage. For non-technical people, my suggestion is to build a basic MVP to validate your idea first. Learn no-code tools like Bubble/Flutterflow if you have to. Once you validate - you’ll also have a clearer, more convincing pitch to your potential co-founder. For technical people, my advise is to prioritise co-founders who are obsessed about the problem, rather than the solution. Want to learn more about how to choose co-founders? We’re hosting an event tomorrow, where Hsu Ken Ooi will talk about what to look for in a co-founder (and what to avoid). 📅 Date: Tuesday 14 May 2024 🕒 Time: 6:30-9:00pm 📍 Singapore – Register for location details. Look for the 📌 in the comments to register

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How does a Senior Product Manager go from layoff to landing a Staff Product Manager role with a significant compensation increase? Join us as we chat with Nora Hughes, a seasoned product manager with a decade of experience in the tech industry. Nora shares her journey from being laid off in October to navigating the challenging job market. She talks about her initial struggles, including the overwhelm of job searching during the holidays, dealing with COVID-19, and the loneliness that came with it. Nora discusses how she discovered the Intentional Job Search (IJS) program and her thought process before joining. She highlights the program's structure and quality and how it helped her regain focus, prioritize effectively, and build confidence in her job search strategy. In this candid conversation, Nora also reveals her aha moments, including the value of peer interviews and the comprehensive support from the IJS community. She explains how the program's personalized coaching and strategic guidance were pivotal in helping her land a dream role as a Staff Product Manager in AI and ML at a large public company, achieving a significant pay raise and working alongside best-in-class professionals. If you're curious about how the IJS program can transform your job search and career trajectory, this video is a must-watch. Nora's story is a testament to the power of structured support and intentional effort in achieving career success. Key Moments in this Episode ======================== 00:00 - About Nora 01:00 - Challenges before IJS 02:45 - How Nora decided to join the program 07:30 - Nora's experience in IJS 17:30 - Negotiations 20:00 - Her message for you https://lnkd.in/eHEBAxpQ

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Interesting new surrvey about the VC industry by PitchBook: 13% of VC firms are not planning to raise a new fund and 27% of VC firms have been pushed further thier plans to raise a new fund. That means a 40% decline. No wonder that startups are haveing tough time to raise funds. See article below. https://lnkd.in/exYYyCPu

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Someone asked me how to move from SW to HW / robotics as a kickass builder excited to jump in. Love it! My response: robotics needs more great SW leaders who treat HW like a commodity, figure out a huge market need / GTM path, then pull in a team to unlock that.  With a SW mindset and SW architecture thinking. A lot of MechEs in love with their tech and the HW.  The HW is commodity - hard but commodity - and SW is where the interesting stuff is.  Simpler is better.  Most important is problem selection.  That is where you make / break the company and idea. And yes - there is HW innovation to be had - and I love folks doing that and doing it well. But there are far, far more opportunities for automation and problem solving with huge value creation now, with basically commodity OTS HW and SW. Choose problem, assemble solution, kick butt.

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TL;DR: Hire me (and my team). Over the last year, my team and I at Endeavor Labs have developed: 1) A custom ML solution for predictive invoice coding for a fintech SaaS company 2) Predictive models for demand planning in the warehousing and logistics space 3) A RAG-based app for answering security questionnaires. (Still a work-in-progress.) We’ve also done a couple data platform builds, helped a legal AI startup hire their founding team, and provided technical diligence for several on M&A transactions related to data analytics and AI. Here are some nice things our clients have said about us: ▶ “Thanks to their capabilities and highly collaborative approach, we were able to get our AI product to market in record time. I would gladly recommend them to other CTO’s.” - Pauly C., CTO of Ascend Software ▶ “I was impressed with how quickly they understood our business, and navigated the quirks of our data and processes to actually deliver a working solution.” - Hill H., Co-CEO of Central Storage & Warehouse ▶ “The systems that Endeavor Labs set up significantly reduced the time and effort needed to get answers from our data.” - Alex F., CEO of Axl.net Are you looking for a partner to help get your data or AI/ML project off the ground? Or get an existing one back on track? Let's talk. (Calendar link in the comments.)

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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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Those who know me well, know that I typically like to stay behind the scenes—working with founders, speccing out products, iterating with engineers, etc. So this was a BIG step outside my comfort zone. Thank you Harry Stebbings for taking the time to dig into my 15+ years in product and how those learnings shape my role at Sequoia Capital and our work with founders. We covered a lot of ground, from the product philosophy we walk pre-seed and seed-stage founders through in Arc to the PMF framework we recently released. The experience wasn’t as panic-inducing as I thought it would be! While I’m out here, I wanted to mention one thing that I didn’t get to cover with Harry: the fact that my career arc as a product leader looks a bit different from most. I have been very intentional about staying an individual contributor and focusing on building products vs. building teams. To my fellow IC lifers out there, even if the path isn’t obvious, there’s always the option to make one. Don’t think leadership only means management. Special thank you to those who didn't just tolerate, but enabled the path I'm on: Jess Lee, Terry Angelos, Ashley Alexander, Vishal Shah, Ethan Lubka, Roelof Botha, Alfred Lin, and Pat Grady.

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I sometimes see entrepreneurs effectively "single-thread" their approach to VC pitches. They find a partner they like and want to work with, and they let that partner champion them through the process. If you're a hot deal, moving fast, you might meet one other partner one time before you pitch the partnership. Maybe not even. It is absolutely the right thing to start by targeting individual partners you want to work with. They're the ones you build the business with, day in and day out. But as you move through the process, take a moment to understand the broader firm. It's the firm you're legally marrying, not the partner. Understanding the decision-making process and culture inside the firm will pay dividends if and when you hit a bump in the road. You're raising from a partner *and* a firm: https://lnkd.in/gSHuh399

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Reader feedback for my latest post about how to use AI and my PRD template to never have to write a PRD from scratch again. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/eJjVXJUJ

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𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 Knit? I recently had an early-stage prospect ask me this, and while the immediate answer was clear to both of us (𝑖𝑡'𝑠 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒-𝑡𝑜-𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡, 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠), it got me thinking more deeply. We work with two types of product teams: 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐝: These teams need the fastest way to deploy and reach market parity. They choose Knit to save time and accelerate their integration process. 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝: These teams understand the complexities of building, maintaining, and scaling integrations. Often, they've already built several integrations and now seek a specialized partner to handle this aspect. These teams buy Knit for two key reasons: 𝐀. 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: They want the assurance of being able to say "Yes!" to any integration request without worrying about time or cost constraints. 𝐁. 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐞: They value the specialized knowledge and support that Knit provides, especially when dealing with challenging questions or edge cases. While time-to-market is crucial, there's much more to the decision than that. If you're facing integration requests from your clients and want to consult with experts, drop us a note. 👋 #integrations #saas

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Some of the most inspiring founders I've backed take expertise from one field and apply it to another. They're able to create solutions that might not emerge within disciplinary silos. I call these people "missionary misfits.” I'm drawn to these misfits because they tackle big problems without being constrained by the “rules” of individual domains. They combine their deep subject expertise with unbounded curiosity for adjacent disciplines to solve real-world problems. I believe that the most disruptive innovations come from the unconventional remixing of insight and experimentation. That’s why missionary misfits are the apex predators of innovation. These are the ones who initially raise eyebrows yet become study material for future generations. They will transform industries and solve societal problems. And I want to partner with as many as possible.

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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