This week both Danielle and I started new jobs. I’ll be managing an engineering team for Quizlet’s new office in Denver. I hadn’t heard of them until being recruited, and was blown away to hear they’d passed 50 million MAU and are used in a huge percentage of schools. We’ll try to share more details on Danielle’s new job next week, which is with a different company.
Taking a 7 month sabbatical has been eye opening. Sometime, I need to write more about it. It’s crazy to think I had worked 20+ years never taking anything longer than a 2 week break. Now that more people are working white collar jobs that don’t wear out their bodies, I hope it will become common to delay retirement, but mix in sabbaticals like this. It really is life changing. One of my favorite parts has been building out Buried Reads. I’ve got it honed to a few hours each week, and will continue to publish weekly notwithstanding the new job.
From the Operators
I caught up with Aline Lerner of Interviewing.io last week, and as per usual we got into a great conversation about recruiting. I asked her what single one of her data-driven posts she think would be most interesting to Buried Reeaders. She said What do the best interviewers have in common is a post founders regularly tell her has been helpful. If you haven’t read it already, check it out.
I knew that Buffer and Baremetrics were regularly sharing the revenue and profit actuals, but it turns out there are way more startups doing this. Postmake put together a list in Open Startups.
Daniel Gross of Pioneer put together a list of Markets To Build In that are new on his radar. I learned a ton from the post. For example I didn’t know Travis Kalanick is starting up a new company called CloudKitchens, probably from what he learned building UberEats.
From the Investors
Jerry Neumann of Neu Venture Capital follows up on a previous strategy post this week with Managing Technological Innovation: Industry Analysis. I’ve tried to read Michael Porter’s famous strategy book, and got bored to tears. Jerry’s slides give you a way easier entré into strategy theory.
Ryan Caldbeck of CircleUp tweeted this week about CEO comp. There are some juicy parts in here on secondary sales where founders take money off the table before exit.
In The Seed Slump Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures summarizes an earlier Mark Suster post, but ends up getting to a more provocative question: is it time for VC to go through change given everything upmarket and down market has changed so dramatically.
Bethany Crystal of USV asks Who anoints you with decision-making power? She links to a fascinating book Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians. Maybe that’s the sweet thrill of confirmation bias that I’m feeling given that I was a terrible student through most of grade school, and ultimately dropped out of college.