Why Isn’t AI Making Everyone a “10x” Engineer?

I’m noticing a pattern: most founders now approach me with a vibe-coded product. It’s normally great at communicating their vision. But I’m not yet...

5th Birthday Thoughts

It’s hard to believe but today is Platform’s 5th birthday. I want to mark this anniversary with some thoughts on what we’ve learned over five years...

LLM Context Window Size: The New Moore’s Law?

At a recent panel on AI startups, I was asked by an aspiring entrepreneur the extent to which current LLM context window sizes were a limitation on...

Cursor and Co-Pilot UX Patterns

Are you using Cursor for software development? I started playing with Cursor this week to see what all the fuss is about. It seems like a positive ...

Hiring at the Pre-Seed Stage: Build Your Team Wisely

During the pre-seed stage, hiring the right talent can feel like an uphill battle. With limited resources, no established brand, and often just a...

The Local vs Global Optimum Problem in Startups

As a founder, building a startup feels like pushing a rock uphill. Frustrating, exhausting, relentless, uncertain. If you don’t give up (and you ge...

Why Your Application Is Your First Pitch to VCs

As someone deeply involved in talent acquisition at a venture studio, I can tell you that filling out a Founder-in-Residence (FIR) application isn’...

Why Everyone Agrees with My Mom’s Cat Jacket – And How to Avoid That Trap

Why Everyone Agrees with My Mom’s Cat Jacket – And How to Avoid That Trap My mom has a jean jacket with cats embroidered on the back. She thinks it...

Ambiguity Tolerance in Startup Success

Ambiguity Tolerance in Startup Success In the unpredictable world of startups, one key trait can make or break a founder’s success: ambiguity toler...

The Critical Role of Sales Aptitude in Startup Success

In the early stages of a startup, sales aptitude (AKA The ability to sell) isn’t just a valuable skill – it’s a necessity! While product developmen...

Why Coachability is the Most Important Trait for Founders in a Venture Studio

In the world of startups, coachability is often cited as a crucial trait for founders, but it takes on a unique level of importance when working wi...

How to Get Rich

Introduction This is a 33-page distillation of Naval’s 100-page blog post which is a transcript from a podcast that expands on his tweetstorm on th...

Approaches to Venture Studio Valuations

Disclaimer: nothing here should be taken as financial or investment advice! The Problem Many of the established approaches of valuing traditional...

Unicorns vs Mountain Goats

by Tim Connors and Jeremy Burton, November 2023 Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures) has hit the ten year milestone of her coining the term "unicorn”. Un...

Life Lessons, Disappointment, and the Unexpected Paths We Walk

Life Lessons, Disappointment, and the Unexpected Paths We Walk Disappointments in life are as inevitable as the sun rising each morning. They arr...

10 Factors for Assessing Generative AI Startups

At Platform, we’ve now built and funded a number of startups leveraging Generative AI. A majority of the pitch decks we receive include some refere...

The Perfect Investor Pitch

If you’re in a hurry, or don’t like to read, I have good news: upload a pitch deck to DeckSend and it will use GPT to analyze your deck and make su...

Never let a crisis go to waste

This is not an article about Silicon Valley Bank. You don’t need any more analysis on that shitshow, and you certainly don’t need it from me. Ins...

Read this before you send your pitch deck to a VC

Are you currently fundraising for your startup and pitching/thinking about pitching to venture capital (VC) firms? A few weeks ago, Platform Vent...

The New SVB

So tech has their deposits back (phew!), and now needs a new bank. What should the “New SVB” look like? Some thoughts: ======== People: Hopefully ...

Can we save SVB?

Is SVB cooked? Or can the startup community rally and together raise the funds needed to buy SVB rather than having it be sold piece by piece by ...

Unit Economics: Facebook

Facebook/Meta released earnings yesterday with the "metaverse" topic getting overshadowed by the focus on the "year of efficiency". CFO said the 1...

Why do pivots fail?

The "pivot" is part of startup lore. Most startups experience the need to pivot at least once, often early in their journey. However, pivots often ...

The death of distance

Twenty five years ago, The Death of Distance was authored. It took a couple more decades of tech development, and then covid, to finally have the ...

Being a 0-to-1 Founder - Why It's Hard

A founder has to wear multiple different hats - this is reasonably well known. What makes it truly hard is in the interaction between those hats, a...

The Hypergrowth Part of the Learning Curve

Most of us have read books and articles about the proverbial learning curve and how difficult it is to attain expertise in a given field. In his bo...

Five Fatal Mistakes of Startups

Over the course of my venture career, I have advised many founders on how to best build and scale their venture-backed companies. Unfortunately, ov...

Three things I love about startups that correlate to life:

The first thing I love about startups is that you get to stand for something. I don’t think that this is true of every startup, and I don’t think ...

Breaking the Low-Code Stigma

A few months ago, I wrote about how various low-code tools such as Bubble and Webflow can supercharge your startup’s MVP/MAP. More specifically, I ...

Founders - Start Your Venture Now

If you’re a current or hopeful startup founder, and creating a venture is new to you, you are likely deeply concerned about the economic climate in...

Why you should NOT work with Platform

I spend a lot of time talking to aspiring founders about why Platform is the best Co-Founder they could have. However, Platform is not for everyone...

This Week

There is much to be said about the startup environment and the turbulent times we are in. I will be discussing this in next week’s post. Meanwhil...

A Gift for Great Entrepreneurs on this Thanksgiving 2022

Never forget that you, the entrepreneurs who are building transformative ventures, are "Trim Tabs." This quote from Buckminster Fuller explains y...

The Heilmeier Catechism: A Powerful Tool for Entrepreneurs and Investors

In 1957 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Agency) was formed by the United States government in response to the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of it...

Rules of Life

1. Don’t fool yourself. There are no rules of life. As wise as you think you are, there’s no limit to the new mistakes you will make. 2. ...

The Two Miracle Problem

When a VC mentions that a startup has “The Two Miracle Problem,” it’s a shorthand way of explaining that a startup is too risky for investment. Let...

Ideas for Elon @ Twitter

So Elon now is leading innovation at Twitter! Going to be fun to watch what he does. Innovating in cars and rockets and tunnels take decades to b...

Almost No One Gets the Venture Elevator Pitch Right

Throughout the millennia of human existence, storytelling has always had a powerful role. Stories are a way to understand and explain to ourselves ...

When You Develop a Breakthrough Idea, You Will Follow These Stages

A little more than two years ago I was talking to Vijay Pande, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a professor at Stanford, and in his own ri...

What are Venture Studios and Why are they critical to our Future?

My last post described the tectonic shift that is happening in venture capital. Namely, that the venture world post-COVID-19 will never again be th...

A Point of View on Lawyers, Stealth Mode, Patents, and Secrecy

When you start your venture, you embark on a creative, complex, and difficult process. Your natural inclination might be to conceal as much as poss...

Venture Capital's Tectonic Shift

We are in the midst of a challenging economic period, and fundraising for nascent ideas and fledgling businesses will no doubt be much more difficu...

Why Do Most Startups Fail to Make A Compelling Demo?

No, it isn’t because of Murphy’s Law! Yes, Demos can fail for many unfortunate reasons, like losing internet connectivity, or having an app crash, ...

Great Founders are Created, Not Born

Great Founders are Created, Not Born Running a successful startup requires inspiring a fantastic staff to work hard. Thus, the founder's aptitude ...

The Venture Truth Table: The Most Compelling Part of Your Venture Presentation

When you present your venture for investment, VCs will evaluate your venture across a number of dimensions. It is a difficult task, and talented in...

Team Sport Culture

For many of us, sports have often served as a metaphor for collaboration, endurance, and accomplishment. Individual success in athletics is usually...

Never Say These Five Things to a VC

When founders of startups seek venture investment, they often make egregious errors in how they approach VCs - so damaging that a venture capitalis...

Scaling Early-Stage Hires

Scaling early-stage hires can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to feel this way. I’m often asked, “How do we compete with FAANG and...

Platform Themes

What you choose not to work on is as important of a decision as what you do choose to work on. If you’ve been in the guild for long, you know tha...

Negotiate Using Empathy

What does it mean to negotiate? The Oxford Dictionary defines 'negotiation' as a discussion to arrange or agree to something. We all negotiate e...

Effective Daily Standups

When building a startup, time is your enemy. It’s a race to find product-market fit and get your unit economics working, before you run out of mone...

How a VC Thinks in The Year 2022

In response to Covid and its impact on economies around the world, governments all over embarked on a massive stimulus. Interest rates declined, mo...

Motivation is essential – now more than ever.

Motivation refers to the internal and external or environmental variables contributing to a person's desire to remain dedicated or interested in a ...

Supercharge Your Startup with Low Code Software.

The concept of “Low-code” has grown increasingly more popular in the last few years, but an overly-crowded market and lack of exposure can cost st...

Is Your Venture a Feature or a Solution?

The fundamental requirement of any breakthrough venture is simple to grasp, but far from easy to execute. Namely, a founder must recognize a large,...

Remote work is here to stay

Remote work has impacted us all; employees learned to function in a world without an office while juggling kids and family, and to prioritize our h...

The Five Wrong Ways to Reach Out to VCs

A founder of an early stage startup wrote to me recently. He had reached out to more than 60 VCs through email, and…received not one response. Th...

Tips for Screening Candidates

You have your hiring plan, and your job description is live. Now it's time to interview candidates of interest. Screening candidates can feel daun...

Most Technology Startup Entrepreneurs Have a Terrible Disease and Their Startups Needlessly Die

Over the length of my career at SRI, I have seen entrepreneurs propose hundreds of technology startups. The concepts were based on new technologi...

Virtual Interviews

Video (Virtual) interviews have become the new standard. As of April 2020, 86% of organizations were incorporating new virtual technology to prepar...

To Be a Great Leader: Have the Courage to Be Stupid

It's a well known maxim in the venture capital community that entrepreneurs from outside any given ecosystem are often those most likely to disrupt...

Take-home Exercises

Take-home exercises can be beneficial – if done correctly. Below are some helpful take-home exercise tips! Align it to the specific role The assig...

What’s the Greatest Killer of Breakthrough Ventures?

Back in 2007, I was leading Stanford Research Institute’s venture division, and we began conceiving of a venture that would become known as Siri. T...

Work Isn’t Family

“Welcome to the [insert company name] family!” “We’re a family here at work.” “We’re a family that lives and breathes the company mission.”  We’...

How Do You Find Your Groundbreaking Venture Opportunity? … (Almost) all you need to know in 10 minutes …

We think of a groundbreaking venture opportunity as a venture that will transform millions of peoples’ lives in a positive way. You have a passion ...

Introducing Your Venture Coach

To create and build a great venture is an all-consuming work of love. You are investing your time, energy, creativity, and passion into your startu...

Announcing the Platform Founder Climate Launchpad

If you had to design a disaster to destroy human civilization, what attributes would you choose? To maximize the impact, I would design the disast...

The Truth About Advisors

Startup founders are strongly encouraged to find advisors. The theory being that advisors with deep expertise and networks can significantly increa...

The Minimum Awesome Product (MAP)

I like to use the term Minimum Awesome Product (or "MAP") rather than the common term, Minimum Viable Product ("MVP"). The distinction is importan...

How do I build a winning team?

Starts with picking an important mission: someone you care about deeply with an unmet need that is real, and that is very important to them and to ...

Bricklayers or Cathedral Builders

I really love what KPMG did here with resetting their culture around purpose. https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-an-accounting-firm-convinced-its-emplo...

Don't panic!

The public equity markets are choppy right now and it is creating a whipsaw in venture capital. Lots of wealthy growth VCs are seeing their perso...

Netflix will be an advertising juggernaut

Remember a few weeks ago when Netflix stock tanked and they announced an advertising model? Let's take a moment and go back to those sweet, simpler...

On Women's History Month

On Black History Month

Some thoughts from Platform Founders-in-Residence and Founder Associates: Iesha Magalanes, Founder Associate, Ethically Black History is American...

Could the Future of Venture be Like Github?

It’s arguably never been easier to create a tech startup. While there are depressingly persistent inequalities for founders, there is more venture ...