From the Operators Sara Mauskopf of Winnie has solid advice for product designers who may be targeting millennial parents, emphasizing that convenience is crucial and stereotypes won't drive success in "Designing for Millennial Parents" Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies theorizes that the Internet of Things, autonomous delivery vehicles, and machine intelligence will combine to become the consumer product delivery system of the future in "The Future of Shopping Does Not Involve Carts" Larry Kim of MobileMonkey has eight straightforward tips that can help the mind be more creative, all of which are simple and fun in "If You Want to be Highly Creative, Do these 8 Things" Steve Blank of Stanford discusses continuous customer discovery and uses a story of a former student finding a much simpler distribution method for their service as a result of constantly talking to (potential) customers in "How Startups Should Do Customer Discovery" Mattermark Standard is just $49 per month! In addition to publishing this newsletter, we crawl the public web to organize information on more than four million of the world’s fastest growing businesses. We also track investors, from small firms to the biggest VCs in the world, aggregating investment activity over thousands of funding rounds. You can take advantage of this data in Mattermark starting at $49 per month, with no annual commitment. From the Investors Willy Braun of Daphni recalls a mid-2000's prediction that long-tail products would take over ecommerce, discussing how the curve is not only becoming "longer and flatter" but is also quite tumultuous underneath it all in "When A Famous Theory Got (Almost) All Wrong" Philipp von dem Knesebeck of Blue Future Partners and David Teten of HOF Capital ask VCs about their tech stacks and discover some facts and products in use that may surprise you in "What’s your VC’s Tech Stack?" Hunter Walk of Homebrew shares the blog posts he finds most valuable right now (some of which we've covered, but oldies can be goodies!) in "Five Posts I Would Have Written If Someone Else Hadn’t" Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures comments on the similarities (with an emphasis on the risks) between cryptocurrencies and the currencies issued by the original American colonies in the 1700s in "The Parallel Between Cryptocurrency and Continentals" Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners chronicles the journey of Skyhigh Networks from an initial conversation over dinner to a $400M exit in "From Mountain View to McAfee: Our Journey with Skyhigh Networks" Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital shares a straightforward example of a form that can assist in getting feedback from board members after the meeting in "Getting feedback from your Board" | 