Jake Bloom

💯 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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How to pitch: The company has zero traction —> “We’re early” You only have 2 customers —> “We’re working with design partners” You currently have no revenue but hoping some pipeline finally closes —> “we’re on track to exit this year at $3M ARR” You’re in the natural kill zone of a FAANG —> “We view them as partners rather than competitors” There’s no way the tech can actually work —>“We’re manifesting the future” And of course: One of your developers uses Co-Pilot to write some front end code —> “We’re an AI company”

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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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Hiring a strong founding engineer is one of the hardest but most impactful decisions a startup makes. Three methods to find founding engineers I’ve seen work well on PeopleGPT: - Engineers at Seed / Series A companies - Former VC-backed CTOs or founders - Current founding engineers In each case, the searches filter for 1) background in a high-growth or venture-backed environment (powered by PeopleGPT's integrated funding data), and 2) significant IC experience. Do you have other strategies? Share in the comments below 👇

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As public software companies got hammered over the last week, David Peterson explores what that means in our latest edition of The Angle. Are we witnessing the end of software? Where did all the growth go? Software isn’t dead, but it’s evolving. And building great companies is no longer about riding the wave of the cloud and building products that are a bit better than the incumbent. Founders who want to build great public companies need ideas that break the mold. And we’re excited to partner with such founders. To read David’s column and explore other exciting tech news, please access and subscribe to our newsletter using the links in the comments. 

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I get approached by a lot of startups promising to fix my woes, but most of the problems I deal with in security today aren't VC-level problems. The downside of this is that there are a ton of problems in the security space that are too niche for anyone to fix at scale. There's a catch-22: The problems are too small for VC-backed companies The risk area is too large for small companies The security space has too many requirements for bootstrappers. One of the problems we have as security teams is that we like to reduce risk surface area; less is more. We also generally can't trust bootstrapped startups with our most sensitive data because they are too small, can't afford SOC2 or security tools, are a reliability risk etc. Most of these problems we fix ourselves with internal engineering teams, even though they are problems experienced by multiple companies, so there's a ton of duplicated effort across the industry. Realistically, though, small companies done right can be just as secure as big companies. Sure, they don't have dedicated security teams or tools, but starting a secure company has never been easier. Functionally, you can live off the land for a long time with a small select set of tools. I'd like to see a future where we make it easier and cheaper for bootstrappers to get started so I don't have to fix the same problems over and over again. 

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Tiers is here! When Ben Vallack and I launched SetSeed as a subscription model we had this clever idea of easy licensing. One site license gave you everything. Wahoo! Yeah, except it was actually a really dumb idea. 🤦 Great for small sites. Terrible when we realised our platform was powering big sites, even government department ones overseas. So… in the spirit of life being one big R&D journey, we’ve rejigged and automated our limit system. Websites can now be deployed based on intended use. Scale up with ease too. Value isn’t being the cheapest in town; it’s about being the smartest.💡 #FoundersJourney #StartUp #ScaleUp #PluginFree

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The initial breakdown of Google's API docs leak (by Rand Fishkin and Michael King) is fascinating. It's a direct confirmation that Googlers lie to you/mislead you - and stuff they deny publicly is indeed what they use in their code. I haven't had a chance to go over everything yet but I wanted to share that among the ~14000 ranking attributes documented in the leak, there is one called "siteAuthority". That's most likely likely their very own version of DR/DA. And that's just one of many attributes related to backlinks (there's plenty on Anchors, link velocity, and more). I've said it before and I will say it again: Taking Google's word about backlinks is like taking a casino's advice on how to beat the house. I'll leave the link to the breakdowns of the leak in comments below. ___ I'm Michal Jackowski, founder of BacklinkManager.io, writing about SEO, link-building, tech & my company. Follow me + hit 🔔 to stay tuned.

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Jack Dorsey has exited Bluesky's board, and frankly, I'm not surprised. If you've been paying attention to Dorsey's social media activity and if you're aware of his stance on the future of social media, you'd have seen this coming too. As we all know, Dorsey is the co-founder and former CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter. After the $44 billion sale of the legacy social media platform to Elon Musk, Dorsey has most openly supported two newcomers in social media: Bluesky Social and #Nostr. And yes, he's an investor in both. Dorsey has been more active on X, the platform he's no longer officially involved with, than he ever was on Bluesky. He's most active on damus.io which is built on Nostr protocol. In several respects, he serves as an unofficial advisor to all builders on the protocol. I briefly spoke to Dorsey at a conference in Tokyo last year, and it was clear he's bullish on two things: Nostr and Bitcoin. Why? Freedom. Today, this remains true. During the conference, there was a portion where Dorsey interviewed Edward Snowden and both expressed their support for Julian Assange. Stella Assange, Assange's wife, is now one of three people that Dorsey follows on X. And, yes, this also ties into why Dorsey has shown support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as a 2024 presidential candidate. What I find to be an interesting statement from Dorsey in all this is that X is "freedom technology." Given that X is a centralized social media platform where you don't own your account and can be suspended by the platform's discretion at any time, it fundamentally is not. In the past, Dorsey has expressed he hopes X will build on a decentralized protocol like Nostr. Further, Dorsey stated on Bluesky last year, "I don't believe a company should own the protocol, platform, and distribution." In its current iteration, Bluesky owns all three. And that's likely where the disconnect is. I'm not very active on Bluesky these days, but I am interested in seeing how CEO Jay Graber continues to lead the team during this transition. Are you on Bluesky or Nostr? Are you still active on X? What are your thoughts on freedom technology and decentralized social media networks? #socialmedia #bluesky #twitter #decentralization #opensource #tech

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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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How we avoided overhiring during the VC boom: (and why it paid off) In 2021, VC funding was flowing freely and startups were on hiring sprees. We had just raised a big round ourselves and the temptation to staff up quickly was strong. But something about it felt off. Did we really need all those roles just because we could afford them? My co-founder and I had our doubts. Instead of following the herd, we took a step back and asked the hard questions: - What key positions do we truly need to hit our next milestone? - How much impact will each new hire realistically have? Can we quantify it? - Can any existing team members step up to take on new responsibilities? By pressure-testing our assumptions, we realized we could grow just as fast with a leaner team. We hired incrementally, only when we felt the pain of a gap. That discipline paid off when the market turned. ↳ no layoffs or frantically cutting costs. We were already running lean and mean. The lesson? Don't let a fat bank balance lull you into complacency. Stay hungry and hire wisely. Bigger isn't always better.

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An oldie but a goodie, this is still one of the best podcasts for founders ever published. Your Friday listening sorted! - how to know you have product market fit - when to pivot and what to pivot on - keeping hold of your insight - the importance of being right and non-consensus

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After a week of using the rabbit inc. R1 I've decided to return them. Hopefully I actually get a refund... Here's why: 1. Onboarding was really painful, especially considering it being billed as some sort of breakthrough AI device. The software was super buggy and the hardware made me miss the first generation iPod's super fast scroll wheel. 2. It never worked. At all. Every task I tried to get it to do it just... did nothing. 3. IRL it is way less sexy looking. The screen is super tiny and the resolution for photos was terrible. Everything looked like a photo from a 2003 digital camera. 4. SIRI will be coming out with all the features this thing promises with hardware that actually works. Parting thoughts: It seemed pretty breakthrough when it was pitched at CES 2024 (January) but in 6 months it just seems like a hacky mess inside an orange toy for kids.

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Earn royalties for automating troubleshooting steps? See an AI Assistant use your steps to respond to alerts and questions? If you can be in San Francisco on Sat June 22nd, sign up for SRE Day and use discount code KYLE20 so we can provision you a dev environment for our workshop. Link in the comments. I'm also taking volunteers for anyone who wants to race Eager Edgar, one of our AI Assistants, troubleshooting popular Kubernetes-based apps... #sre #devops #platformengineering #whatdoirunwhen

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TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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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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This applies to pre PMF startups too: “To be a really good mathematician, you have to be lazy…Is there a clever way I can do this that will save me time?” What’s the “laziest” way you can test a hypothesis about your users behavior to increase retention or engagement and get to PMF faster ?

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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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