Founder Weekly (Issue 532 - April 20 2022)

Founder Weekly - Issue 532

April 20, 2022

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 532 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

From Our Sponsor 

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General

To guide web3 builders tackling what decentralization means in practice, across several use cases, we cover: the design challenge of web3 decentralization; how builders can use the novel components of web3 systems to achieve decentralization; and an analysis of several models of decentralization and how they apply in practice.

Zapier has 3M+ users and generates $125M in ARR. At a $5B valuation, its fast-growing horizontal platform is unable to meet the demands of all of its customers. The increase of underserved Zapier customers presents an opportunity.

We don't need aging institutions to pave the way for 21st-century dynamism. What we need is will. And audacity.

Failure is a great teacher. Fast, a high profile one-click checkout startup backed by Stripe, went belly up on April 5th. The company’s failure offers lessons for investors and operators. 

Web3 has tremendous disruptive potential across a multitude of use cases, but early implementations in gaming have been met with a healthy degree of skepticism. It is imperative that as P2E companies raise enormous sums of capital, with the promise of providing economic value creation, they also embrace their responsibility of providing economic stability to those very players. Else, their reputations of being companies with bad economics or worse, Ponzi schemes, fads, and scams will continue to endure.

Marketing, Sales and PR

Bessemer Growth’s early-stage playbook on how to make effective scaling decisions to become a strong Series B+ company.

How Webflow Pairs Self-Service and Sales for Rapid Growth.

This story shows the problem with most NPS surveys. Learn how to increase the response rate of your surveys and get better customer insights.

See the SEO strategy Capterra uses to drive $4M worth of organic traffic, and how your SaaS company can beat them in the SERPs.

Money and Finance

With a sufficient amount of investment and the brightest brains in the world focusing on developing new and better ways to design fintech products, there should be a lot more disruption in this field.

Here are some highlights from the chat, which offers a useful snapshot of current conditions that other investors – and founders – might benefit from knowing, even while Hans Swildens  himself offers that this moment could be a blip. 

The a16z guide to raising debt – when to do it, the different debt options, and the ecosystem of lenders.

Startups of the Week

Mindmesh is the virtual desk that puts you in control. Centralize work, notes, todos, and meetings. Jump back in an instant. Focus on what you should be doing, right now.

Wisewell is revolutionizing the way we drink water with a four-step purification system that transforms your tap water into delicious, clean drinking water.

Trustworthy is the Family Operating System, an online service that helps modern families protect, organize and optimize their important information — ID’s, Money, Property, Passwords, Insurance, Taxes, Legal, Emergency Instructions, The Family Archive and more. 

Tips, Tools and Services

The co-CEO of investing unicorn Public shares his lessons on fundraising, hiring and finding focus.

After tackling startup challenges from Stripe Press to Figma Education, Brie Wolfson shares her personal collection of templates — the docs that she's used to stay focused on the work that matters and true to her own career. 

As a product manager, it’s important to hone the minimum set of activities that allow you to keep a product line moving forward productively. One of the most important core product management skills: the ability to triage unsuccessful products and avoid spending unnecessary effort on products that are destined to be losers.

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