From the Operators Brian Balfour of Reforge, Shaun Clowes of Metromile, and Casey Winters of Greylock Partners dive in to several examples of stagnating growth as a result of ignoring retention in "Why Retention Is The Silent Killer" Gina Bianchini of Mighty Networks shares advice on managing time as a CEO, building in a competitive market, and understanding how to recruit by appealing to what the potential employee professionally needs & wants in "A Conversation with Gina Bianchini, Founder & CEO of Mighty Networks" A recap of Maven Ventures Hypergrowth Retreat has insights from Josh Elman (Greylock) on tracking metrics that matter, Andrew Chen (Uber), Elena Verna (Malwarebytes), Joe Du Bey (Eden), and Parker Thompson (AngelList) on balancing growth with monetization, plus more from operators at Pinterest, Dropbox, Zoom, and many more in "How to Achieve Startup Hypergrowth, According to the Experts" Andrew Lee shares the story of shutting down Esper, and urges other founders in similar scenarios to ask themselves four questions that may make the process much easier in "What End-of-Life Care Teaches Us About Startup Failure" Leo Schwartz of Upbeat has templates, guidance, and explanations around how to pitch funding events, launches, and more to news outlets, along with tips on how to run an embargo, in "A Guide to Pitching Funding and Launch Stories" 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 Mahesh Vellanki of Redpoint Ventures compares and contrasts Stitch Fix and Blue Apron's IPOs to define success as "a positive outcome for all constituents involved in a company" in "How Stitch Fix and Blue Apron Help Us Define Success" Guy Turner of Hyde Park Venture Partners outlines major areas of startup risk (single points of failure, platform dependency, cyber security, and more) to help operators answer "Is your startup shock resistant?" Eric Tobias of High Alpha explains not just why startups need great product managers, but also defines what actually makes that person excel at their job in "Why You Need a Great Product Manager" Satya Patel of Homebrew explicitly defines what makes a worthwhile ML/AI company - extracting data that's hidden from incumbents and having a scalable way to win the market - in "Two elements of winning machine learning companies" | 