Founder Weekly (Issue 438 - June 3 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 438

June 03, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 438 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

General

The shelter-in-place orders from the pandemic have created a massive, but temporary, demand shock to the labor market. They have also accelerated many long term trends that will create permanent changes in the work that we do and how we do it. When the economy eventually normalizes, demand for labor will recover, and work will recover, but the shifts in supply and demand will result in a new and sizable set of unmet market needs for job placement. When this happens, online marketplaces will be a critical tool in getting people back to work quickly, efficiently, and at scale. They will also enable new ways for people to build the skills they need to succeed, and for them to work in an increasingly remote and distributed fashion.

The foodtech space is well-positioned for significant technology-driven growth, with companies in the sector raising $5.3 billion in VC funding in Q1 2020, according to Pitchbook. Here are three trends that I believe will stick once we emerge from our kitchens.

The challenges aren’t just technological. They’re managerial.

Lessons learned sleeping 4ft from my office.

Chaos Theory says that organizations are "complex adaptive systems" and that through this lens, we can build emergent, adaptive and resilient organizations.

The CX Report gathers trends on how business happens in the computational era by examining the tech stacks for marketing and products in the context of digital transformation.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Not all revenue is equal. Figuring out how strong yours is remains key for the future of your business, especially in a post-covid world and the likely crisis.

Convincing your first sales leads to buy your product is tough for most startups. You’re asking potential customers to risk a lot of time and effort, long before you have a polished product. Instead of starting sales conversations as transactional, I advise founders to ask their first leads to be ‘customer advisors’. Here’s how to use a ‘Customer Advisory Board’ to incentivize a lead and ease them into a sale, along with some templates you’ll need.

Once your product is ready, promoting it is the best next step. Learn the 7 best ways to market your product or small business with industry best practices with this guide.

Here are 21 ways that companies can use marketing to not just maintain but grow market share over the next 12–18 months. And when I say marketing, I don’t just mean advertising and promotion, but the full range of marketing considerations including the customer, product and price.

Assembling the right SaaS pricing team is essential if you want to make pricing your most powerful growth lever. Learn who should be in that pricing team, and why.

Money and Finance

It’s time to end one of Venture Capital’s most exclusionary, value destroying practices.

To understand the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the venture capital sector, we recently conducted a survey of venture firms to gauge investor sentiment on investment activity and fundraising. Within a few days, 427 venture firms responded, demonstrating the strong desire to share information across the venture community.

To understand the impact of the pandemic on global venture funding, we took a look at comparative trends for the first four months of each year from 2016 through to 2020.

Startups of the Week

KYC & AML Identity verification for fast-growing companies. Start verifying in 5 minutes the ID of your users everywhere in the world, with the highest level of biometrics and document analysis.

Cabana is a mobile hotel company with a fleet of converted camper vans that serve as mobile lodging for travelers looking for an innovative and flexible travel option.

Do you know when your data is broken? Detect data quality problems and anomalies automatically. Then fix them before they hit production.

Drop passwords. Use magic links. Enable customizable, future-proof, passwordless login with a few lines of code.

AI powered dental software. Automatic analysis of clinical data to improve profitability and patient care.

Tips, Tools and Services

You have a choice if you make the right decisions.

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