[A rather reflective post, this Diwali week!]
Beyond the usual time management tips and hacks, of instilling atomic habits, and of getting things done – the world of James Clear, Tiago Forte and David Allen and similar purveyors of ‘smart productivity’ advice – lies the more rarified world of ‘wisdom productivity’. This is the world of Oliver Burkeman and ‘Four Thousand Weeks’, of Celeste Hadlee and ‘Do Nothing’. …
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra, the ‘PR’ firm du jour, and the high priestess of the ‘go direct’ movement, where founders are encouraged to front the message about their co to the world, instead of relying on internal or external PR teams to front their point of view. I first came across Lulu on Twitter when Dwarkesh Patel thanked her for connecting him to Daniel Yergin…
Link to podcast and transcript, organised by Venture Unlocked. The podcast was published 26 September 2024.
Saga Ventures raised $125m for their first fund. In this episode, the three cofounders and Partners, Ben Braverman (ex Flexport), Thomson Nguyen (Square), and Max Altman (Alt Capital) talk to host Samir Kaji on their fundraise, and the experience of raising in a tight fundraising market.
What I found interesting –
Link to podcast + transcript. The episode was published on 18 September 2024.
Daniel Yergin is an oil / energy expert and author of ‘The Prize’, which is an acclaimed history of oil (and as Dwarkesh says, a parallel history of the 20th century too). I havent read the book. It is there in the bookshelf somewhere waiting to be read. For now this podcast will do. …
As part of the PMF Convo series, I recently spoke to Srikrishnan Ganesan, cofounder and CEO of Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that sells software for better customer onboarding, implementation, and professional services automation. In June ’24, Rocketlane raised a $24m Series B co-led by 8VC, Z47, and Nexus Ventures on the back of strong market momentum in the U.S. market. This was on the back of an $18m …
I recently spoke to Mohit Kumar, cofounder and CEO, Ultrahuman, a fast-growing consumer health startup, as part of my PMF Convo series, where I speak to founders, operators, VCs who have struggled with PMF (product-market fit) successfully, or unsuccessfully, with the startups they have founded or worked with (or work at).
Ultrahuman sells such devices as the Ring Air, a sleep tracking wearable; M1, a continuous glucose monitoring …
Mel Goldman has a central role to play in the origin of India’s now flourishing venture industry. In the late ‘80s, as the World Bank officer in charge of the Industrial Technology Development Project, he identified four local partner institutions (who thus became venture capital firms) for loans, earmarked for the specific purpose of these institutions providing venture capital in turn to innovative Indian ‘startups’. From this initiative, the seeds …
If you are a founder and get a pass from a VC who cites low TAM (Total Addressable Market) as a reason for passing, then be rest assured that in nine out of ten cases, that is not the real reason. The real …
Every other week, I get at least one, sometimes two, introductions or inbounds from senior corporate leaders wanting to ‘pick my brain’ around startups / venture, or wanting to have ‘open-ended conversations’. Not all of these are around exploring job opportunities, though about half are. The rest are split between offering advisory (to startups) and investing in them, or both.
I can understand the motivation for this. Startups are an …
284 pages; published 2023; read March 2024
TLDR: Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert on megaprojects and why most fail to finish on time and budget. Only 0.5% of megaprojects are under budget as well as on time, he says. In this book he covers the why, and how you can get these megaprojects done in time and under budget. Good, easy read with lots of interesting examples. As with all …