Founder Weekly (Issue 566 - December 14 2022)

Founder Weekly - Issue 566

December 14, 2022

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 566 of Founder Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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General

In the first post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit", Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the no-code platform’s long journey and the challenges they came across while building a horizontal product.

The old economic world may be leaving us, but its pathologies stubbornly remain. 

Marketing, Sales and PR

This looks at the adoption of TikTok among news publishers around the world and at the ways the platform could better support journalism.

How are healthtech companies creating sustainable growth paths by selling to SMBs? Can companies solely rely on SMB sales to get to scale, or do they inevitably need to go upmarket (especially during challenging economic times)? We talked to Nancy Ham, the previous CEO of WebPT, Nate Maslak, CEO and cofounder of Ribbon Health, and Oliver Kharraz, CEO and cofounder of Zocdoc, to unpack their SMB go-to-market strategies.

Money and Finance

Something happened in the past 7 years in the startup and venture capital world that I hadn’t experienced since the late 90’s — we all began praying to the God of Valuation. It wasn’t always like this and frankly it took a lot of joy out of the industry for me personally. What happened? How might our next phase of the journey seem brighter, even with more uncertain days for startups and capital markets?

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Cooley's latest quarterly and annual reports on Venture Financing trends including pre-money valuations, liquidation preferences, pay-to-play and more.

Startups should expect more private equity M&A both in the public & private markets. Over time, the M&A market activity should begin to inform public valuations. If private buyers are willing to pay premiums above the public market, then overall market multiples should rise.

Tips, Tools and Services

Investor meetings are notoriously hard especially the 1st meeting. Here is how Founders can prepare for and run an awesome 1st investor meeting. 

All the contracts you need to sell software. Standards created by the Common Paper Committee: attorneys from companies and firms like Salesforce, Fivetran, and Goodwin Procter.

Let’s redefine what success looks like for creators and stop focusing on the wrong things.

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