Jeff Barg

Product for Engineers dropped another awesome post recently: How we decide what to build. It’s a beautiful building-in-public look at how PostHog goes about product development. There is so much to learn from this newsletter. I love it. https://lnkd.in/ewNBSpu4

60

45 Comments

Building early stage startup momentum? Make sure your speed-to-help is measured in minutes. In today’s environment, you can’t wait days for help. You have to get unstuck fast. With timely advice, execution quickens. Thats the power of a safe-space community that’s built on ‘giving’. It’s our foundational value. You should give what we are building a try.  Zero risk.   DM me to learn more. We’re happy to tee up a call. Happy Wednesday, ya’ll. ———— Please consider ♻️ with founders in your network. As early stage founders, we at times, are a problem away from sinking or propelling forward.

44

21 Comments

It's incredible to see how two guys, fresh out of high school, not just dreaming big but making it happen.🌟 Their platform, which generates custom APIs from natural language prompts, is a game-changer. Imagine simplifying complex tasks like connecting e-commerce platforms to databases or orchestrating IoT devices with just a few commands. 🙌 It’s a bold step towards democratizing API development and making technology more accessible. Innovation isn’t limited by age, but rather fueled by vision and determination. Can't wait to see how their platform evolves and makes API generation more accessible and efficient! 🚀 #Startups #AI #Innovation #YoungEntrepreneurs #TechRevolution https://lnkd.in/dD_jGRNn

8

Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

86

7 Comments

As a B2B SaaS VC 👩‍💻 and a huge data nerd 🤓, fewer things bring me more joy than a truly statistically significant analysis (600+ companies surveyed) of B2B SaaS metrics across early stage companies. Great work by our team at Emergence Capital! See comments for full report, and please let us know how we can make this better in the future!

267

15 Comments

tl;dr - We're pausing NoCode Pros as a paid community for a few months. Why is this happening? John Krueger and I started NCP last summer to help our journey growing our own low code agency, DreamLabs. Our hypothesis was that the best way to level up and achieve flourishing would not be to read some books or guru videos. Instead, we wanted to learn directly with and from other practitioners, fellow nocode / lowcode agency owners in the trenches building their own businesses. Our hypothesis was correct. Over the past 8 months we've applied the insights, lessons and connections made through NCP to achieve our goals as an agency, expanding from a team of 2 to over a dozen. We're now so busy with the agency we can't in good faith maintain the NCP vision at the same time. So we're temporarily pausing NCP to focus on stabilizing our agency. The idea is that after we're built in more foundational stability, we can open up time to return to NCP and bring it to the next level. We appreciate all the NCP members' participation, engagement and support as we learn and grow together. Upwards 🚀

42

4 Comments

So amazing how many Angels & Family offices are reaching out! 😳 Such great opportunities right now in the following industries👇 ⤷ hardware ⤷ manufacturing ⤷ flywheel marketplace ⤷ aerospace ⤷ fintech #GRATEFUL to be building at the intersection of all these industries It’s crazy how fast portcos are developing. From acquisitions to new developments.

21

7 Comments

🎙️ Excited to share a recent convo I had with Justin Wolz on #FounderWellness and #Burnout. Reflecting on my last ten years in tech and especially these four intense years as a founder, I’ve learned a lot about what keeps us going in high-pressure roles. At Ambient, we're focused on Chiefs of Staff, Heads of Ops, and Founders—people who thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty. Through my conversations with many of you, it's clear we share many of the same challenges and strengths. ✨ These roles demand courage, as they often involve stepping into the unknown and solving complex problems before they're fully defined. Ambiguity is where you SHINE! ✨ 🔥 Building #RESILIENCE is key, and it's something we talked about a lot on the podcast. I think there are valuable takeaways for anyone who’s navigating high-stakes environments. 🥂 Cheers to all #ChiefsofStaff #CoS #Founders #BizOps #COO

27

3 Comments

This might be the coolest inside deep-dive into how much ❤️ and attention to detail goes into shipping a high craftsmanship and delightful app. Benji Taylor founded Family, which is probably the best designed crypto wallet (or overall app experience) I’ve ever interacted with, and goes into a ton of detail on their principles + shares examples on how they built the app. I liked his reminder about focusing on simplicity and gradual revelation to make products feel uncluttered while still maintaining a lot of functionality under the hood. But I reallllly loved how he built the case for including fluidity as a key principle in your designs to make an app feel “alive”. Their use of trays, components transitioning from one screen into the next fluidly, and even their text transitions are insanely cool. I can’t even begin to imagine how much time and ❤️ went into perfecting every interaction and transition to the extent that Family has but the wallet truly feels like a 10x delightful experience because of it. You should try out Family or check out Benji’s deep dive for inspo the next time you’re building a product and want to provide an amazing experience! I'll def be incorporating some of these tips for Inari (YC S23).

36

3 Comments

Synthflow AI recently raised a chunky seed round of $7.4M. Their pitch is that their no-code platform makes it easier than ever for SMEs (which usually have low tech capabilities) to deploy voice agents for a multitude of use cases. And they do have a pretty good flow builder. At Hooman Labs, we too are striving to make voice agents as simple as possible to deploy. But we believe that while self serve is important to enable users to play around with voice agents, it is more critical to build a suite of plug and play agents (including necessary integrations) which don't need a lot of tinkering by the user. To do this, a voice agent provider needs to go deep into a vertical and understand the workflows of their user, end to end. We're doing this for e-commerce and building agents which solve calling needs of brands across the life cycle of the customer, from pre-sales to post. Some of the use cases we're working on are consultative selling, delivery updates, abandoned cart conversion, return requests and warranty claims. If you run an e-commerce brand and are looking to automate your calling function, would love to talk to you and understand how we can help. Tarun Rathore #voiceai #conversationalcommerce #ecommerce

31

🚨 Announcing the 2nd cohort of the FundraisingHackers.com “Seed+ bootcamp” we’re hosting together with Slava Solonitsyn (ex-VC and top YC founder, $180M+ raised), read below. A few weeks ago we ended the 1st cohort and it truly was a blast 🎇 14 startups across Seed, Seed+/Series A stages (and US/Europe/Asia) participated, including YC alums and exited founders. A bunch of them have already successfully raised. Some are in the process right now. Some have postponed their raise saving them a bunch of time/nerves not spent on failed fundraising. This pic is from the final workshop we’ve hosted. If you’re fundraising (or planning to in the next 3-6 months) you defo wanna check this out. This is not a course — we’ve already outsourced our “parallel fundraising playbook” (comment with “playbook” if you want the link). Instead, we provide you with a deep dive into YC-style best fundraising practices and give you a supportive environment to go and raise, period: 1. Share the “off the record” ins and outs of the parallel fundraising playbook with real-life examples/stories we’re never going to share anywhere else publicly 2. Help you understand your momentum and fundraising timeline so as not to make the wrong (too early/too late) decision 3. Provide you with an accountability group of peer founders (your first taskforce members if you don’t have any yet!) 4. Help you to refine your story/narrative and pitch materials to meet the expectations of top VCs 5. Work through your challenges/questions during office hours/group workshops 6. Give you access to our exclusive FundraisingHackers.com workspace with tons of useful content: from investor databases to guides, tools, templates, and much more Places are limited and you can get in on a first come first serve basis, so hurry up and apply, link is in the comments.

40

9 Comments

🔮 What's the future of developer platforms? ☠ Or the death knell for open core companies? Get the answers (and more) from Ethan Kurzweil; longtime partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and soon-to-be founder of a new, early stage venture firm. In his time at Bessemer Ethan invested in Launchdarkly, Twilio, PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, SendGrid, HashiCorp and npm. He's seen it all, you won't want to miss his takes on what's next and what isn't going to work. I'm sharing our closing lightning round questions here, but the full interview (which is much juicer) can be found at calyx.substack.com. ⚡Lightning round questions!⚡ *What's the developer platform that you respect most?* 🔶 Zapier. It's the ultimate democratizer of development for 4,000 different esoteric use cases and some not so esoteric use cases. And they built it in a way to allow anyone to use it. *Who is a developer GTM leader you respect?* 👨 Adam FitzGerald at HashiCorp. Disclaimer - he’s a Bessemer operating advisor. He is the best thinker to help companies structure developer evangelism programs at scale. *Unpopular opinion re: dev tools?*  💼 That a lot of dev tools shouldn't be businesses. Many should be free or part of a larger developer platform offering. The difference between tool and platform can make a big difference as to whether you have a sustainable business. *How do you feel like you’re able to uniquely work with developer-first companies?* ⚾ I’ll keep it to one for the lightning round: I’ve gotten lots of experience with false signals. If you’re a founder working on a startup sometimes you’ll respond to a false signal and it’s hard to go back and unwind those choices��we have lots of experience with developer platforms and can help founders avoid those pitfalls. Disclaimer: Ethan would never use emojis like this. He actually...doesn't use emojis!? I've just added them in an attempt to improve readability on LinkedIn... enjoy!

48

4 Comments

If you're thinking of submitting your YC application or are in the midst of the application process, check out this video by Dalton Caldwell. It covers everything that YC looks for in an application and was a great resource for me during my own journey. Take a look! #YC #startup #entrepreneurship

28

We are thrilled to announce that TurboDocx has successfully closed its Angel funding round, raising $75,000. This significant milestone marks a leap forward in our journey to revolutionize smart and modular document and slide deck creation, accelerated by AI. A heartfelt thank you goes out to our friends, family, early supporters and everyone that believes in our vision. Your support is not just appreciated-- but a strong vote of confidence in our mission to innovate and transform how business document creation is created. What does this mean for TurboDocx? We're reinvesting it into the business: - Focusing on Partner/Client Needs - Understanding and addressing the evolving needs of our users remains our top priority. We're here to build not just a product but a solution that truly makes a difference. - Enhanced Solutioning - We're more committed than ever to developing solutions that set new benchmarks for efficiency, re-usability, and innovation has never been stronger. - Innovation, Partner, and Channel Growth - Our investment team and advisors primarily consists of go-to-market (GTM) and implementation professionals that have already provided invaluable guidance on scaling our overall growth. Looking ahead: As we celebrate this achievement, we're mindful that fundraising is not the end goal but a milestone --a means to an end-- to build out a well oiled machine. We're excited to leverage this opportunity to further our mission, drive innovation, and exceed the expectations of our users and partners. With this said - If you'd like to be part of this exciting journey, please reach out! Stay tuned for updates, join our growing community, and let's reshape the future of document and slide deck creation together. -Nicolas https://lnkd.in/e4CGrUVB

178

40 Comments

Just over a year ago, Imran Mahmud, MD introduced to me what was then called, Co:Helm. I was taken by the backgrounds and stories of Abdel Mahmoud, MD, Zahid Mahmood & Tahseen Omar and moreso their grit and determination to forge ahead with their mission of reducing the cost of healthcare. They soon got into the Sequoia Arc program with the backing of another friend, George Robson. And have been staying low and building ever since. Inbetween rebrandng to Anterior (formerly Co:Helm). And even more recently announced a new round to add more fuel. https://lnkd.in/e3V4qrRz Happy to be a supporter alongside Annelie Ajami, Dorothy Chou, Adil Mohammed, Andy Young, Caroline Mogford, Christian Arno, Felix Leuschner, Freddy Kelly, Leonard Picardo, Mandeep Singh, Michael Steel, Omid Ashtari, Noor Shaker, Sultan Murad Saidov, Yuelin Li and others in the ecosystem... [Anterior is giving clinicians a second set of hands—and fixing one of the biggest pain points for patients. It is a LLM-powered co-pilot for administration, handling all the work that comes before the clinical decision-making. Where it might take a nurse several hours to track down, organize and summarize hundreds of pages of records they need, Anterior can do it in seconds, allowing clinicians to increase their output tenfold and focus on what matters most: helping patients.] #healthcare

65

Of note: Your health records are coming to new apps This in an interesting change, and a somewhat Epic change. All puns intended. If you don’t know, the leading medical record storage solution in the US is operated by Epic. A rather critical problem is that if you walk (well drive) between two hospital in the US, the medical records tend not to follow you, unless you carry a large Manila envelope. Having Epic (and others) via TEFCA allow export of records arguably allows you to only carry your phone, which is a very siginificant change. This also (arguably) opens up a huge new innovation sector. Epic is one of the organizations that has been helping the US federal government establish the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA. The goal being to iron out both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients' data at scale. Health-care data in the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to move around. Clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, and there hasn't been a trusted nationwide mechanism in place for transporting it securely. This means if a patient moves to a different state or visits a new hospital, their medical records tend not follow. PS. If you want appreciate how profitable the US medical sector is, Epic HQ has a restantant designed to look like Kings Cross from the Harry Potter movies. https://lnkd.in/g8NaWza8

1

3 Comments

Thanks for the insightful pitch strategies. When can I get a slot to pitch to you?

3

Halfway through our Y Combinator batch, over 60% of the startups in our cohort (including us) were stuck pivoting. That’s when Paul Graham flew in from England to talk about finding a great startup idea. Here’s what he told us: 1️⃣ Turn off the three ‘bad idea filters’: By turning off the ‘bad idea filters’ in your head, it instantly becomes easier for good ones to emerge. 1/ The sanity filter: Often, the greatest startups come out of ideas that originally seemed insane. So don’t shut down ideas because they seem impractical. For eg, when Airbnb started, no one ever thought people would let strangers sleep in their homes. 2/ The money filter: Money is important for a startup, but if you’re able to drive strong growth without generating revenue, don’t discard the idea. For eg: JustinTV (now Twitch), began with a guy live-streaming his life with a camera strapped to his head. There was no revenue stream initially. 3/ The schlepp filter: Don’t dismiss an idea just because it seems like too much work. For eg: Stripe had to handle unholy amounts of legal and regulatory work to get banks onboard their payments platform. Still, they did the hard work, and Stripe solved a problem that hundreds of their contemporaries were afraid to work on. Often, the impractical hard work becomes the moat that protects your startup from competition. 2️⃣ Don’t build for boomers   If you’re only building for boomers, your company will die with them. Whatever you’re building needs to become popular amongst the younger generation. If you’re a college student and you find a lot of your peers using what you’re building (and not just because they’re your friends), it could well be the start of something big. 3️⃣ Stop thinking all the best ideas are taken As founders, we often come up with an idea only to realize another company has already built it. We then find ourselves wishing that such other company didn't exist. You need to throw that mentality out the door. One quote I’ll always take away from PG’s talk is that there are billions of years of existence left. It would be practically impossible (and quite frankly depressing) for all the good ideas to run out by 2024. These tips really helped us zero in on what we’re building today. At our last startup, Desklamp, we’d spend weeks on end producing each feature launch video. During our pivot phase, PG’s talk inspired us to ask ourselves if we could automate that process using AI. That bold question led us to Clueso (YC W23): end-to-end AI automation for producing software videos for companies. #startups

619

29 Comments