Founder Weekly (Issue 567 - December 21 2022)

Founder Weekly - Issue 567

December 21, 2022

Founder Weekly

Welcome to issue 567 of Founder Weekly. This is the final issue of 2022. We will be back on January 4th, 2023 after the holiday break. Wish you all a Happy New Year and have a wonderful holiday.

General

From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are over 40 builder-worthy pursuits for the year ahead, according to the a16z team.

This report is a deep dive into the world of Gen-AI—and the first comprehensive market map available to everybody. We provide an overview of over 160 platforms in the space and their investors, as well as insights from leading thought leaders on the potential of this technology. This hands readers a unique opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of the generative AI market and the potential for new players to challenge established players like Google.

How we iterated fast and proved initial traction for Nango without building the actual product.

Elon Musk faces both engineering problems and people problems at Twitter. Matt Mullenweg explains how he’s tackling them at Tumblr, plus why he chose to make WordPress and WooCommerce open source.

We thought we had made something people wanted. Our first startup was actually a vitamin. 

Marketing, Sales and PR

The Generalist is a tech and news publication founded by Mario Gabriele that started out as a side project, but quickly turned into a full-fledged business making more than $300k per year. And to be up-front, that $300k number is a gross under-estimation, as it was the last time I could find Mario publicly talking about revenues in August 2021. I’d venture to guess that number is more accurately $450-500k at this point, as he’s raised his prices quite a bit recently. But I went with that number because it was the last concrete data point we have. 

Benchmarks of B2B companies, based on a16z data and investing team expertise.

Being scientific about your sales process allows you to help your sales team close more deals and better forecast your business. Here are the sales funnel stages to stay scientific.

Startups of the Week

Sym is the intelligent approvals-as-code platform for developers.

Get organized with Hints AI assistant. Save 60 min every day.

The fastest, most accurate AI editing desktop app for Lightroom workflows.

Tips, Tools and Services

The Equity Agreement for Service ("EASE") is a free legal template for entrepreneurs to offer equity to service providers instead of cash. It is being released as a "Beta" version to gather comments and input from the startup community.

Considering moving from BigCo to startup? We crowdsourced a tactical guide for first-time startup job-seekers on how to evaluate career opportunities at early-stage companies.

10 tactical tips and guiding principles for a new Chief of Staff to lean on as they scale their impact at a startup — from building better systems, not just booking more meetings and finding an executive's superpower.

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