Founder Weekly (Issue 456 - October 14 2020)

Founder Weekly - Issue 456

October 14, 2020

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 456 of Founder Weekly. 

Over 16,000 innovative startup and tech professionals subscribe to Charlie O’Donnell’s weekly newsletter, which started over ten years ago, before newsletters were cool. He shares info on fundraising, startup strategy, and maintains a huge list of high-quality weekly events for anyone working on either the next big thing or just their next big thing.

General

The 2020 Kleiner Perkins People Report is based on the collective power of their Founders and People Leaders across the portfolio to provide insights into what startups are doing. This report consists of shared learnings and content, as well as a series of surveys conducted throughout the year.

A presentation of several novel ways to visualize 25 years of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The goal is to demonstrate how one's understanding of complex information can benefit greatly from viewing the data from a fresh perspective.

How Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other technologies could point the way to new systems of governance

So much has changed since the last two editions – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms. Even as we explore emerging sectors like climate and crypto, we continue to be excited about marketplaces. And our work with marketplace founders and startups has continued to inform our understanding of the challenges and opportunities that these platforms face.

$640k bootstrapped. It’s an incredible achievement. But how? Omar and Nicole did many things right but there are three that really stand out.

The story of our healthcare AI startup and how I didn’t become a millionaire.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Get out your pen and paper and take notes as we look closely at the freemium strategies of Zoom, WebFlow and MailChimp.

Early stage B2B startups follow a familiar pattern: they have an idea, build an MVP, then rope friends and former co-workers into becoming beta customers. Then, they often hit a wall. What comes next? When you’ve run out of first degree connections that want to use your product, you need to start prospecting. This guide is designed to help Seed stage startups prospect their first customers by providing extremely practical step-by-step instructions for building a pipeline of relevant prospects and reaching out to them.

From two-sided-marketplaces to on-demand models, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about how subscriptions work.

Money and Finance

Much has been written about how to start a venture firm, how to raise money from LPs, how to build one’s product and reputation and how to invest. Precious little has been written about how to return value to LPs and the venture firm/CEO dynamics associated with this process. In this post, Roger Ehrenberg shares his thoughts on the topic.

Following a strong second quarter in global funding, the third quarter of 2020 has held up with $76.4 billion in venture funding worldwide—up 1 percent quarter over quarter and 9 percent year over year.

The pandemic has dealt a disproportionate blow to female business owners, with 2020 shaping up to be one of the worst investment years since 2017.

Startups of the Week

The app that makes disaster preparedness easy and accessible. Because sometimes tomorrow doesn't look like today.

Browser Fingerprinting API. Stop fraud, spam, and account takeovers with 99.5% accurate browser fingerprinting as a service.

Solvo enables developers and DevOps to deliver a cloud product with a lease-privileged security configuration, all the way from dev to production. Automatically. And help their security engineers to sleep better at night.

Tips, Tools and Services

When choosing your next company, first determine which stage (pre-product fit, post-product fit, growth or scale) is the best match. Usually only 1 or 2 stages make sense for any given job search.

How we talk 1:1 with 15000 users/mo to make product decisions.

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