Sajith: Bessemer Venture Partners is one of the OGs of the venture industry. Lots here to learn for a venture nerd like me, from this podcast where Patrick O’Shaughnessy hosts three of the senior partners at Bessemer including the legendary Jerermy Levine. I got to learn a lot about how they work together and the Bessemer OS. What i found particularly …
I have been interviewing founders, operators, and investors on their perspectives on product-market fit (PMF hereafter) over the past few months, as part of research for the book I am writing on this topic. I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of the first ten interviews and review the definitions of PMF that have emerged. Thus, this essay where I tease out common strands and themes …
Konark Singhal cofounded MockBank, an edtech co that provided test prep for government exams. The startup saw some initial traction and were able to raise a small preseed round, but struggled to grow and scale. Eventually, the co was acquired by a well-funded competitor, and Konark exited MockBank to found and run Mountblue, a profitable bootstrapped coding bootcamp play. In our chat, Konark talks about his definition of PMF (effortless …
Prashant Singh is one of the most original thinkers I know in the Indian startup ecosystem. An ideal career for him would have been writing fiction, but he is, disappointingly for fiction readers, delightfully for us in the startup world, now golden handcuffed to product management! I think of him as a Product Manager’s Product Manager; conversations with him always lead to interesting insights and perspectives, a different take on …
Venture is our craft and Marc Andreessen is one of its shokunins. So when the Shokunin speaks, you stop everything and listen, or in my case, read (the transcript). Dwarkesh Patel asks some very good questions to PMarca in this wonderful podcast. I particularly enjoyed reading PMarca’s riff on managerial capitalism vs bourgeois capitalism, and venture as the managerial firm that …
I found it an interesting listen given Intudo is the leading local VC of Indonesia; a la Aleph for Israel, and I daresay Blume for India:) Hence I was curious to learn more about them. I found the following utterly fascinating – their concentrated deployment strategy (only 26 cheques in six years of existence), their sourcing strategy (actively engage with and woo …
Vasanth Kamath and the smallcase team have been very intentional, deliberate operators building a well-crafted and thought-through product in smallcase. The use of lower case alphabet is deliberate (again that word!) as Vasanth and the team want everyone to think of smallcases as a common noun (like mutual funds) and not a proper noun; which of course is the opposite of how a Xerox or traditional marketer thinks! In …
There is not one but as many as three (or more) products that founders need to keep in mind, and keep evolving, while they build their startup.
The first product is well understood; this is the one aimed at users / customers, consisting of all of the surface edges of the startup that come into contact with the users, in order to solve the user’s problems. The desire to create …
This was one of the first interviews I conducted, as part of the research for my book on product market fit (PMF here onwards). Asad is cofounder & CEO, LambdaTest, building one of the most technically innovative India startups. As Satya Nadella recently put it after meeting Asad: “LambdaTest is doing for test automation what Kubernetes did for container orchestration – creating that next level of efficiency around test automation …
I first heard of Chameleon, which helps SaaS companies improve their product adoption processes and practices, from Sheel Mohnot when I was interviewing him for our PMF Convo. In our convo, Sheel mentioned this company that took six years from their Seed to Series A raise. I was intrigued and asked Sheel for a connect to Pulkit Agrawal, the founder & CEO of Chameleon. I had a …