Can entrepreneurship be taught? That’s an old debate but my friend Pierre Gaubil has a more interesting question: can a startup chances of success be improved? And he makes a convincing case that yes, by applying a robust methodological framework that leverages the collective intelligence we’ve built over decades of tech innovation.
A mentor master class I've been doing for The Refiners, the cross-boarder acceleration program for foreign founders in Silicon Valley. Business models are hard to define for entrepreneurs because as a startup this is precisely your #1 mission: research (in the R&D sense), experiment, pivot and ultimately find a scalable business model for your company.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Sharing some of my war stories that I shared earlier this week with entrepreneurs from The Refiners' accelerator program. And trying to come out with some kind of methodology to address the key questions around defining a business model.
Arc is our company-building immersion for pre-seed and seed stage companies. This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Sequoia says your PMF story will fall into one of these 3 very different types. Which one does your startup fit in?
These are the things that people tell you (and some that they don't) about fundraising, hiring, and VC in Techbio.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
What I wish I knew before raising money from VC's... I think a lot of us had to learn the hard way these great takeaways articulated by NFX's Omri Amirav-Drory.
Serial entrepreneur and seasoned investor Vinod Khosla has some strong, contrarian advice for the venture capital industry.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
It’s been a while some investors have observed how board meetings can be dysfunctional. Khosla is taking this idea a step further and explains how VCs can be more useful - and ultimately create more value - out of the board room.
It's a bit of a bummer than oftentimes, once you finally hire a few great VPs at $1m, $2m, $3m ARR ... and they do a great job ... that they then don't scale.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Great points by Jason Lemkin on how it becomes a whole lot different game beyond $5-10m ARR.
In 2020, we published the first public benchmark of SaaS metrics in Europe to help you as an entrepreneur find peer benchmarks across the metrics that matter most for SaaS companies including ARR…
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Lots of great metrics here. Must read blog post and report for SaaS founders. Only thing I regret is that the data doesn't segment by target segment as I've seen many differences when selling to SMB, midmarket or enterprise for most of these metrics.
Can entrepreneurship be taught? That’s an old debate but my friend Pierre Gaubil has a more interesting question: can a startup chances of success be improved? And he makes a convincing case that yes, by applying a robust methodological framework that leverages the collective intelligence we’ve built over decades of tech innovation.
Here's the deck we used for our Seed round. We raised $5M led by Accel. Even though we didn't necessarily show the appendix slides, we sent them along with the…
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Great example of how being concise, short and to-the-point can lead to quick decisions in VC fundraising.
I say @GaryVee because I don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk personally. He could be delightful and entirely unlike his online persona. But his Internet character is doing harm to would-be entrepreneurs…
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Great opinionated post by Nat Eliason on why worshipping struggle and hard work is not a good thing for entrepreneurs. I rarely work on week-ends and after 18 years doing this, i don’t feel my successes and failures have been correlated with the number of hours I worked.
When a +10% isn’t really a +10% OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that’s +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right? Wrong :( Turns out usually it goes up a little bit, or maybe not at all. Why is that? Let’s call this the …
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
There’s a fundamental flaw in many growth hacking approaches: the numbers don’t add up. 10% here, 10% there, etc... but at the end of the day you don’t see the +50% improvement to your top line.
Andrew Chen not only puts a name on this but outlines how to deal with it by segmenting your users and customers by intent.
Brand marketing is mostly useless for consumer startups. Startups build a great brand by being successful, finding product market fit and scaling traction, etc. But it’s not a real lever. Let’s not mix up correlation with causation! If this seems contrarian to you, it’s because there’s a vast ecosystem of consultants, agencies, and other middlemen …
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Right on. I've been on TechCrunch and we had decent coverage for Scoop.it. Did it help our user acquisition? Not really.
For Scoop.it and my previous startup (a b2c mobile platform), I've thought a lot about how to build a brand. And while I respect there might be some exceptions, I very much second what Andrew Chen writes here: building a brand is mostly the consequence - not the cause.
It doesn't mean there's just nothing to do other than growing to build a brand. The story your company tells, the values your product expresses, how it's design, how you communicate and many other things will shape your brand a certain way. But whether it's big or small - or said more bluntly whether you have a brand or not - remains tightly coupled with how much you grow.
So, as a startup founder, unless you're an exceptional marketing genius, your best bet is probably to focus on product market fit and finding the right acquisition channels while paying attention to the story you tell. The brand will follow.
PS: in his post, Andrew focuses on consumer startups but I would say that it's probably also true for most B2B startups. Even though they have more targeted PR / influencer marketing channels they can leverage for brand building purposes, I would consider them from a pure ROI standpoint as customer acquisition channels. And consider any resulting brand awareness impact a bonus.
Right on. I've been on TechCrunch and we had decent coverage for Scoop.it. Did it help our user acquisition? Not really. For Scoop.it and my previous startup (a b2c mobile platform), I've thought a lot about how to build a brand. And while I respect there might be some exceptions, I very much second what Andrew Chen writes here: building a brand is mostly the consequence - not the cause. It doesn't mean there's just nothing to do other than growing to build a brand. The story your company tells, the values your product expresses, how it's design, how you communicate and many other things will shape your brand a certain way. But whether it's big or small - or said more bluntly whether you have a brand or not - remains tightly coupled with how much you grow. So, as a startup founder, unless you're an exceptional marketing genius, your best bet is probably to focus on product market fit and finding the right acquisition channels while paying attention to the story you tell. The brand will follow. PS: in his post, Andrew focuses on consumer startups but I would say that it's probably also true for most B2B startups. Even though they have more targeted PR / influencer marketing channels they can leverage for brand building purposes, I would consider them from a pure ROI standpoint as customer acquisition channels. And consider any resulting brand awareness impact a bonus.
Tomasz Tunguz is a venture capitalist at Redpoint and writes about startups, fund raising, SaaS companies, and best practices for founders.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Tom Tunguz analyzed the S1 filing from Dropbox which contains impressive numbers. Freemium models can be hard to scale - something I’ve learned the hard way. A common mistake is to think that freemium is when you have X% of your users potentially willing to pay for your product and the rest who never will. But as Dropbox numbers show, a healthy freemium model is when 100% of your users are potentially premium customers and when it’s just a matter of j’me before they become one. That’s at this condition that you can have 2% conversion - and not 2% of 2%.
The 10 Things I’d Tell My Younger CEO Self to Do Better Next Time. What are the Top 10 things I’d tell myself to do better, if I could go back in time?
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
SaaStr's Jason Lemkin shares some great lessons in that post. I can definitely echo to some of them but I actually found I've been at times too slow on big decisions (his #1 tip is to slow them down). While I agree that rushing things on impulse can be bad, some of my mistakes came from not reacting soon enough when things were bad. And ignoring - or wanting to ignore - signs that they were.
What are the things you'd be doing better next time?
Raising money is hard. And it’s even harder if you’re an entrepreneur from outside the Bay Area. Entrepreneurs from outside of Silicon Valley often struggle to raise money here. There’s issues with culture and style, differences in expectations, as well as our emphasis on growth over monetization. I’m reminded of this every time I travel …
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Excellent summary by Andrew Chen on the cultural gap when it comes to fund raising in Europe vs Silicon Valley.
On the positive side, I'd add that, coming from Europe where access is often hard and networks often closed ones, I was surprised by how accessible VC's were. It doesn't mean they'll invest easily though, unlike what most foreign founders still think and as Andrew Chen explains in this post.
The Startup Genome analysis, which investigated 650 Internet startups, found that “premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform poorly and lose the battle early on”.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Great summary of what premature scaling is. And how to ensure you validate the right steps before attempting to scale.
Here's a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? My answer is almost always the same: don't
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
As we're developing a new product with the Scoop.it team, I was re-reading this great post by Eric Ries on the fallacy of product launches for startups. This was also the topic for one of the roundtables I participated to at the recent CrossLink capital's Alpha Summit.
As startup people, most of us have dreamed of doing an Apple-like product launch. Get on stage, capture attention, unveil something amazing, etc...
But most startups don't have the opportunity to mobilize attention in a big way like Apple or other big companies do. Unless they have a big personal brand, founders won't get huge attention for their new babies - however beautiful they think it might be.
Perhaps more importantly, Apple-style launches mean getting products 100% ready and flawless which - for software startups - is terribly wrong. To quote LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
Finally, even a good launch is temporary. Great startups succeed by getting long-term, sustainable growth.
Not 15' of fame.
I failed at this several times but we got one right with Scoop.it's launch-that-wasn't-a-launch. Instead of trying to get massive PR coverage we couldn't get anyway, we launched a private beta, reached out to influential people who cared about the content curation problem, got them to use our first version which led them to blog about it and iterated the product for close to one year before finally opening the doors.
4 million users later, I think of this of our most successful launch (that wasn't).
It once would have seemed like a crazy barrier to get large amounts of data, but startups are finding all sorts of creative ways to do it.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
The hype on AI is real says FirstMark Capital's Matt Turck. But he warns that big data is one of the key drivers. If you don't have access to large data sets, you can't train any AI to learn anything. So as he notes, there's a lot of talent recruiting, data gathering and then learning and fine-tuning before you can launch a product. The lean startup approach of "launch, fail fast and learn" therefore doesn't work.
To which I'll add another point. Will you eventually own the data stream your AI relies on to learn? If you do then great. But if you don't, how defensible is your future business if your data comes from Facebook or Google API's?
"Today, it’s quite common to meet startups who house their product and engineering centers in Portland, Vancouver, Toronto, Beijing, Waterloo, Paris, or London. Some companies are even relocating their headquarters to these geographies after getting off the ground in the valley."
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
When I was studying engineering and thinking about going to grad school, I had my own version of the American dream. I had done a short internship in a Silicon Valley company, I had visited the Stanford campus and I had one obsession: I wanted to come back and be a part of this ecosystem. Because this is where people knew, this is where tech talent and knowledge resided.
So 20+ years ago (closer to 25 now... damn...), I went to grad school at Stanford and it changed my life. I discovered so many things that weren't even discussed or taught in European universities that I couldn't list them all.
Today, this situation has changed completely as Tom Tunguz explains in this post. Make no mistake though: Silicon Valley is still unrivaled for tech in many ways. Ecosystem, access to funding, tech culture (with its pros and cons as recent coverage unfortunately showed), go-to-market, scaling, market access, etc... But one thing is very different from 25 years ago: great engineering talent doesn't need to be in Silicon Valley to be great.
I've tested that first-hand being a French founder in San Francisco with an engineering team based in France. Very frequently, I meet peers who will tell me about such and such new technology that's trending in Silicon Valley. And of course, I tell my team about it. But almost systematically, they tell me they've known about it for months or tested it and sometimes implemented it already themselves. The Internet makes the world smaller but it makes the tech world an even tinier little village as engineers are now hyper connected.
Tom adds a new point to this which is the economic equation. All of us foreign founders in Silicon Valley have felt what he explains very personally. We all have rising costs, budgets which are getting harder and harder to balance and - unlike our peers who grew up in the Bay Area - a clear understanding of how much attractive the alternative is economically.
When I relocated 6 years ago to San Francisco with an engineering team based in France, it felt very exotic. I kept explaining that yes, we have good engineers in France - not just bakers, winemakers and luxury clothes designers. Now, when I say my engineering team is based in France, it looks smart.
One question I get asked a lot by founders and product managers I meet is “Are my metrics good enough?” This might refer to good enough to raise money, or good enough to keep working on a feature or…
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Yes, there's only one really. But where it gets tricky is understanding how to measure it and more importantly what to do about it.
I've found myself it's easy to crunch a lot of data and feel you're understanding things where actually talking to real people is irreplaceable. There are lots of things data don't capture that people will explain.
And it's when you start hearing the same story over and over again that the pattern becomes obvious. As well as the data... and the way to improve it.
We use them to try to “get to know” people. It doesn’t work.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Recruiting is hard. And if you had any doubt about this, science has now proven it: by combining random interviews in a series of tests, researchers have found that interviews can not only be irrelevant to detect whether a candidate will perform in his/her job but it can also be counterproductive.
Are you using any tests in your recruitment process?
Growth is the lifeblood of startups. Growth is what differentiates Snapchat from hipster coffee shops. It’s the difference between revenue-less Instagram and The New York Times. It’s why investors…
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
Awesome read by Intercom head of growth that captures a lot of what I've been experiencing myself. Local and micro optimizations are not enough to build a long-term growing product.
After surveying more than 1,000 software executives about their SaaS pricing habits, we've uncovered some alarming gaps. View the results here.
Guillaume Decugis's insight:
OpenView Labs' Kyle Poyar finds that these figures demonstrate a lack of maturity by a lot of SaaS companies in their pricing strategy.
Their survey is really nice and will make you think about your own approach to pricing if you're in SaaS.
My own thoughts while I took the quizz is that pricing is indeed a key element of the mix and is often not tested enough. But for some legitimate reasons too: it's quite hard to do solid A/B test on pricing when you're in early-stage phases as you'll probably won't have enough data to produce significant results quickly. And when you're beyond that phase, it can be perceived as harder to change.
But at the end of the day, this is inspiring data and should inspire you to design some interesting pricing experiments.
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Can entrepreneurship be taught? That’s an old debate but my friend Pierre Gaubil has a more interesting question: can a startup chances of success be improved? And he makes a convincing case that yes, by applying a robust methodological framework that leverages the collective intelligence we’ve built over decades of tech innovation.