As the Fall weather sets in for Denver, we’ve been working on software that will identify blog posts from founders and VCs, and someday engineers. This week Kevin’s good friend Max visited, and helped him wrangle technologies like doc2vec, LDA, and t-SNE to unlock the next step of progress. Our aim is to discover 100x as many startup and engineering centered blogs so we can bring you the very best reads each week.
We have a favor to ask this week. If you use GMail and notice us showing up in your Promotions tab, drag us over to Primary. Of course if we haven’t earned this place in your inbox yet, reply to this email and let us know how we could be better.
Uber, FanDuel, and Pinterest spawned containerization and serverless
Dani Grant and Nick Grossman of Union Square Ventures solve the riddle of which comes first: great apps or the infrastructure needed to run them in “The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase.” For Bitcoin skeptics, the lessons are valuable independent of whether you think web 3.0 is really about cryptocurrencies.
From the Operators
Sandy Lerner originally of Cisco shares her founding story. You may have already heard the story of VCs overthrowing the company’s married cofounders, but we didn’t know the early details of doing Internet marketing back in 1987 that grew them to over $250k in monthly revenue. Get the whole story in the “How I Built This” podcast
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro wondered if there was a way for his new company to bias towards lower risk, profitable growth while steering clear of a high risk, high growth at all costs in “SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs”
Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad has been regularly sharing financials on Twitter, yielding several interesting conversations threads. Check out their results for September, August, July, and June.
Felicia Curcuru of Binti launches a new office hours series from AllRaise, focused on helping female founders get warm intros to investors through the network. Check out the “Female Founder Office Hour Deal Flow Network”
From the Investors
Congratulations to David Ulevitch formerly of OpenDNS who was promoted to General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz this week.
Cory Levy of Spearhead sits down with Jeff Clavier this week diving into the lessons learned across his 20 year career as a VC in “Jeff Clavier on Standing Out, Valuations, and Saying No”
Dan Martell offers timely advice as annual planning activities kickoff at startups everywhere with “7 Steps to Building The Right Business Forecasting Process For Your Startup”
Kristine Yamartino of OpenView Venture Partners gave us the idea of using text messages to beat out competing companies for candidate attention in “How to Keep Candidates Engaged through a Long Interview Process”
From the Analysts
Jason Rowley of Crunchbase reports that the SoftBank vision fund may have shook up Sand Hill Road’s near monopoly over venture funding in “The Q3 2018 Global VC Report: New Records Hit Amid Seismic Shift In The Industry”
This Week’s Pick
Both Danielle and I have Apple Airpods, and it became a hassle to tell them apart. A few months ago, Danielle bought a case for her’s, and not only can we tell them apart, but her’s glow in the dark now (I’m getting jealous over here!). For women, this makes it easy to find them burried in your purse. If you listen to books / music while your partner is sleeping, this also makes them standout on the nightstand table. Best $9 we’ve spent.