From the Operators
Jackie Bavaro of Asana discusses their approach to product management, getting deep into methodology, how users influence decisions, and how PMs work with designers, marketing, and others in "Asana’s Jackie Bavaro on developing the role of product managers"
Daniel Tawfik of Vonjour learns a hard lesson and emphasizes the importance of simple, straightforward marketing to accompany an early stage product in "It’s Not a Feature Problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits"
Farhan Thawar of Helpful thinks technical interviews only help good interviewers, and shares their strategy to slowly onboard new engineers in "Technical interviews are garbage. Here’s what we do instead"
Kevin Natanzon of BetaLabs has an interesting look into what it took for TBH to go from new app to a $100M sale to Facebook in "What most don’t see in TBH, an app sold for ~$100M and launched only 9 weeks ago"
From the Investors
Alex Clayton of Spark Capital is back with the S-1 analysis of SendGrid, who will trade under the ticket "SEND" on the NYSE, "SendGrid IPO | S-1 Breakdown"
David Skok of Matrix Partners shares the first results from their "2017 Private SaaS Company Survey," covering growth, go-to-market, and cost structure for over 400 companies.
Louis Coppey of Point Nine Capital has an exhaustive look at data network effects, how that then affects attracting talent, the long term value of data, and much more in "Routes to Defensibility for your AI Startup"
Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners publishes a story about someone's path to their first startup job as a teaser for his new book Entering Startupland in "How to Get Your First Startup Job"
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures thinks we're due for "a massive amount of innovation in SaaS" after 20 years of running the standard playbook, arguing that a drop in seed funding rounds indicates that competition is stifling company creation, in "The Rising Stakes in SaaS"
Jason Lemkin of SaaStr urges founders to know what their real, GAAP revenue is, whether it comes from recurring subscriptions, services, hardware, or anything else, in "You Know What’s Even Better Than MRR? POGR. Plain Old GAAP Revenue."
