Founder Weekly (Issue 341 - June 13 2018)

Founder Weekly - Issue 341Â Â

June 13, 2018

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 341 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

How to make innovation programs deliver more than coffee cups.

Khalid Halim pulls at the strings of scaling-and-breaking phenomenon to articulate what he calls the law of startup physics. He explains how companies and people grow at different rates — and what this tension means for how both will break while scaling. Halim shares how he’s seen this law apply to both executive teams and to founders, including the truths each must accept and the promises each must make. The VCs that work with Halim have played back to him how the founders that abide by this law can save themselves and their teams much heartache and stress — speedbumps that can cause any startup to decelerate.

Four Pillars to Increase Your Influence Both at Work And in Life.

Turn your feature backlog into an actionable matrix of prioritized initiatives.

Focusing on profitability can help creatives make their ideas become reality.

Books

Marketing, Sales and PR

Sean Ellis, founder and CEO at GrowthHackers and the first marketer at Dropbox, explains why sustainable, long-term growth comes down to tracking toward the right metrics and experimenting across the full customer journey.

Amazon may outrank your small-business website, but it can't connect with your customers like you can.

Two lessons from Greenvelope on building viral loops that ignite growth.

Money and Finance

The previous VC wisdom was “management, management, management.” What they mean is that good management builds businesses and bad one destroy it. To implement this thinking, many VCs replace entrepreneurs with professional CEOs. My analysis of billion-dollar and hundred-million-dollar entrepreneurs shows that entrepreneurs can be trained to build big businesses with reduced needs and without VC. This way they can keep control of their venture and of the wealth they create. The question is whether the entrepreneurs know the skills they need or are willing to learn. Examples include Michael Dell who got a mentor who helped him lead Dell, and Page and Brin who partnered with Schmidt to build Google.

Product and engineering lead the way with tech startups, as should HR, but unfortunately, this often means finance comes very last. Yet finance should come first -- or at least much, much sooner -- argues Caroline Moon, who runs a16z's financial operations practice (part of our corp dev team) for guiding startups.

Startups of the Week

Sleep Safely. LifeDoor will be there when you need it most. LifeDoor's smart sensing technology connects to your home's existing smoke detectors to automatically close your home's interior doors in the event of a fire. 

Earn money directly from your couch using your own devices. We connect tech startups with qualified candidates (you!) who are looking to tests apps for an extra bit of cash.

Tips, Tools and Services

The squint test · Don't make a good design on accident · The CRUD strategy · Keep the criminal at the scene of the crime

It's a good skill to have.  Let us tell you how.

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