Founder Weekly (Issue 404 - September 25 2019)

Founder Weekly - Issue 404

September 25, 2019

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 404 of Founder Weekly. Check out a free online event called the SaaS Web Summit - where founders, CEOs, sales, and marketing can learn about how to scale a SaaS.

General

Life in Silicon Valley during the dawn of the unicorns.

The story of Blue Apron’s rise and fall from grace seems straightforward. As business analysts would have you believe, it was simply doomed to fail from the start. It has a poor business model, a commodity product, and operates in a highly competitive industry. But I was there from the very beginning — as the first engineer and second full-time employee — and having been on this roller coaster ride for the last 6 years, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Blue Apron was a business with truly great potential that squandered an extraordinary opportunity.

Why do societies vary in their rates of entrepreneurship and organizational founding? Drawing on the largest available longitudinal sample comprising 192 countries over 2001-2018.

Bessemer reveals the seven sins of data collection and the emerging markets that’ll help companies protect and secure consumer data.

Influencer culture has normalized charging money for all kinds of intimacy.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Marketing study of online traffic sources, broken down by industry and based on 3.25 billion website visits.

Slack's website gets over 100 million visitors every single month. Their conversion rate is among the highest in the industry! This post breaks down Slack's magical formula and show you how you can apply it to your own SaaS website!

Everything you need to know.

Money and Finance

We looked at 120 US Series A rounds from our portfolio over the past 18 months to see whether or not preemptive offers were generally more or less dilutive than process driven rounds. On average, founders taking preemptive offers are taking ~1.4% more dilution for less money.

The Power-Law of Venture Returns.

Identifying and Capitalizing on Macro Market Trends

Startups of the Week

Save Thousands Of Dollars On The Best Services And Software To Kickstart Your Business. It's 100% free! Secret is the first free platform of exclusive offers on services and software for startups and SMBs. Sign up to get ccess to big savings on a curated list of services to kickstart and grow your business.

Gain comprehensive visibility into your on-prem and cloud-based source code repositories. Detect and rapidly respond to code theft, loss, and misuse in real time.

XY Gaming organizes esports tournaments, where we automatically monitor the players in-game statistics and award them scores based on their performance.

Tips, Tools and Services

Looking for good copywriting examples? These 10 e-commerce brands have a flair for creativity, originality and above all, persuasion.

The RACI Matrix makes sense, but it has a few fundamental flaws. ARPA is Help Scout’s alternative to the RACI model.

In this article, we give some history of the The Twenty Statements Test (TST) and share two case studies. In the first, we were trying to understand expert conceptual models. While in the second, we used the TST to better understand edge cases in a decision-making process. Hopefully this article provides some inspiration to apply it to your own work.

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