We have a great post this week from the founder of Thumbtack, who shares lessons on over a decade building the company. Most “lessons” posts serve up platitudes, but Jonathan’s post has a number a unique ideas. My favorite: he’s built multiple companies along the way 1) the startup hunting for basic product-market-fit 2) the startup hunting for business-model-market-fit 3) the startup hyperscaling 4) the startup building out a leadership team. There’s a new challenge just when you feel you’ve got the hang of it.
From the Operators
Jonathan Swanson of Thumbtack recounts Thumbtack’s wild ride in Zero to $1B: 8 Lessons Scaling a Startup.
Anand Iyer of Trusted shares An important Marketplace Metric: Search to Fill. Don’t be deterred by the Uber example at the beginning, this pieces goes deep on the math you need to corner your marketplace.
Andy Sparks of Holloway and his team at Holloway have put together the The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital. It’s the definitive guide to raising.
From the Investors
Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital memorializes the passing of Mary Oliver. If you haven’t read her, Bijan found a good poem to start with.
This week Twitter was all upset about Ryan Hoover’s search for the Weekend Fund Chief of Staff, but Jason Calacanis sets them straight with a primer on carry in A carry comp kerfuffle in Micro VC land.
500 Startups recently published their 2018 wrap up, and we were surprised to see how many unicorns they’ve funded over the years. Add these startups to your index of unicorns: Credit Karma, Talkdesk, Twilio, Grab, Sendgrid, Canva, Intercom, Bukalapak, Gitlab, Revolution Precrafted
Hunter Walk of Homebrew says “Podcast Discovery” Is A Problem But It’s Not A Company. I’m a bit sad, because I want a collaborative filtering solution for podcasts, and Breaker isn’t quite there.
Gené Teare of Crunchbase reports that 2018 Sets All-Time High For Investment Dollars Into Female-Founded Startups. It’s so refreshing to see this happening.