Founder Weekly (Issue 420 - January 29 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 420

January 29, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 420 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

Sometimes focus is the wrong answer.

Turning a product failure into a business success.

Every marketplace is unique. But every successful marketplace is unique in the same ways. Historically it’s very hard to find a successful marketplace that wasn’t built on an underutilized fixed asset.

Inside the loathed company that defies every rule of branding—and logic.

Annual report from the Reuters Institute, based on survey of leading journalists and media executives, looks at the year ahead in the news industry.

In 2009, personal-finance behemoth Intuit bought Mint, an impressive startup. And then it let its $170 million acquisition wither on the vine. 

Marketing, Sales and PR

Looking to discover new ways to market your software? Read this guide to discover 41+ essential SaaS marketing strategies to acquire new users.

In this post I'll show you how to build a strong brand awareness on LinkedIn. This story is based on our own experience of growing personal brand on LinkedIn from nothing to 1 million views.

Managing a Growth team in many ways can be like managing an investment portfolio. Each individual experiment or project is an investment and the goal is to maximize the long-term return (i.e. impact) of your portfolio. Having worked in Growth for almost 10 years I’ve seen how the portfolio of a Growth team can evolve over the course of several years. In this post I’ll cover the three major classes of projects that a Growth team works on and how Growth teams should be adjusting their portfolio allocation over time based on changing needs.

A 5-Step Process For B2B Brands (With Examples & Best Practices).

Money and Finance

Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) is a tax provision that allows founders and investors of early-stage companies to exclude $10 million or more from their taxable income, but few have heard of it. Here's why it can make a big difference—and what you need to know about it.

Families of wealth face three key questions about intergenerational wealth planning: how best to invest to sustain future generations; how best to engage the next generation; and how best to ensure family unity endures. Often each question is addressed independently. We find that a conversation across generations about the impact of a meaningful venture capital (VC) allocation can help address all three questions in an integrated manner. As VC spurs continued innovation and industry disruption, families should consider the potential positive disruption the inclusion of VC can bring to their intergenerational investment plans. This paper provides some context for considering such an inclusion by discussing the investment potential and implications for interested investors.

When it comes to startup investment, automakers are still going full speed ahead. From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology, transportation startups have attracted unprecedented sums of investment capital from auto manufacturers in recent years. In the past few quarters, that trend has been accelerating.

Venture capital investment is seeping out from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, but the West Coast still dominates the market by a wide margin.

Startups of the Week

A new looping video app by the creator of vine.

Eva is the easiest way to send delightful gifts tailored to recipient preferences. Simply send an email or text. Eva takes care of everything else!

Optimized usability for your smart home product. We provide a complete no-code solution for IoT enterprises that will engage your users so you can focus on building amazing hardware products.

Tips, Tools and Services

Employee turnover of 15 to 58% is entirely compatible with fast-growing tech startups. Here's how we reduced ours by 65% in one year.

Tweetstorms used to be a hacked-together means of avoiding character limits on Twitter messages. Today, they’re everywhere. Twitter, especially if you follow founders, venture capitalists, and journalists, looks more and more like a long-form blogging platform every day.

Raylene Yung shares a collection of counterintuitive career lessons, the ones she learned the hard way. She also dives into why the IC and management tracks aren’t parallel ladders, but rather intertwined steps. Finally, she covers more specific roadblocks that can appear at every stage of your engineering career, as well as guiding questions that can serve as a gut-check as you seek to push them aside.

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