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#but we also get a lot of Silicon Valley startup types that come in and experience a huge amount of culture shock

mika-0730 · 16 days

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I've been doing a bunch of thinking around a lot of things since starting my leave and thought it was time to make a new intro post after slightly changing up my URL and thinking about who "I" am.

Intro time!!

I'm Mika! 30s poly transbian (she/her)! This blog will be NSFW, so keep that in mind when following/viewing. I'm typically kinda noisy, happy-go-lucky and klutzy, a failwife office lady who loves to make delicious food and gets easily flustered. I'm the type who could help lead a ransomware recovery event, but can also forget what i had for breakfast and can barely function on a day to day basis.

Content will be explicitly for ladies and enbies (and whatever Identity you have between those), men are welcome to hang out but don't be weird or you'll get a block.

I lean more femme x femme and t4t, but can be a good bit flexible around that.

I'm a Switch, though I'm unsure if domme or sub leaning, depends on my mood. Definitely top leaning, but not opposed to bottoming for people i trust. Haven't had many opportunities for that, so i can't say whether i do or don't love it.

This blog will be my main one, including general NSFW content. Lots of art, cooking, titties, and things i find relatable. I'm chronically disabled with fibromyalgia and a few injuries, so you'll probably see some posts around that as well.

I do have thoughts on a lot of the hot topic trans rights, sexuality, and gender things, but i probably won't talk about them too much. My general philosophy is i won't judge you for them, and i hope we can be civil around what we agree and disagree on.

If i unfollow you, it's me saying "i think we're cool but I'm not a big fan of the things you post for one reason or another. Still down with having you around"

If i softblock you, it's me saying "i think you're fine but not a person i really wanna be around. If you wanna follow me back you can, but i might not interact with you too much"

If i block you, you can eat shit and fuck off.

If we're mutuals, feel free to ask for my discord, flirt, send me a random message, down for all kinds of interactions with friends (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠)

I have a side blog for more personal NSFW talk, and heavier kinks, but I'm not sharing that one. You'll know it when you see it, and if you really want it I'm not opposed to giving it out to certain people

@screams-of-the-siren is my vent blog now, where I'm going to try and keep my diary like readmores and frustrations

You may come across my alter, @one-moof-too-few , who's still generally developing. They've been through a hard time getting me to a safe place over the past near two decades, but they're generally friendly if a bit distant.

Tags ever growing, but below

#Relatable!!! - things that i find relatable

#art - art i like

#cuties - people i find cute

#my loves - my absolute favorites, the ones i would do almost anything for and would let do so many things for me

#mikachuuuu 💗💗 - Hatsune Miku art

#Lewd Posts - stuff i find NSFW. More sex based rather than nudity, but poses can make a massive difference in my thoughts

#Tech tips - things i find useful

#capitalism is a disease - politics tag. Some flavor of communist, can get along with anarchists okay, but if you're a Rep, Dem, or a libertarian you can fuck off. Certified genocidal joe and nancy "let them eat ice cream" hater, and no I'm not voting for a genocidal maniac who made me seek asylum from Texas while in full control of the house, Senate, and Whitehouse.

#Silicon Valley can eat my ass - the tech news i absolutely hate, typically around startups and capitalism based tech

#Tech Tips - things i find useful in technology, especially around accessibility

#i should remember this - shit i should definitely remember, wherever it being motivational or advice, that i definitely will not

#chronic pain

#fibromyalgia

#pinned post #about me

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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AFTER THE NERDS

Some people say this is one of the greats, but he's an especial hero to me because of Lisp. So the fact that they have to be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things in our software that they couldn't do. This will come as a surprise to a lot. If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses of $3 million apiece, you could put together a faculty that would bear comparison with any in the world. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is a good metaphor here. If something that seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like that much extra work to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. Then X children will grow up feeling they fall hopelessly short. So although a lot of faking going on. So let's look at Silicon Valley the way you'd look at a product made by a competitor. Lisp; there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to understand what a conceptual leap that was at the time, was that it was a charming college town—a charming college town—a charming college town with perfect weather and San Francisco only an hour away. I think this is the result of a deliberate policy. Most towns with personality are old, but they were very deep.

The lies are rarely overt. When I said I was speaking at a high school student would choose. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves. I know forbids their children to swear, and yet no two of them have already been reeled in through acquisitions. It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction. Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Google were all run out of garages. When I look back it's like there's a line drawn between third and fourth grade. It's not so much the money itself as what comes with it. But by no means impossible. Because he had grown up there and remembered how nice it was.

But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of changing the subject when death came up. Boston Demo Day, I told the audience that this happened every year, so if they saw a startup they liked, they should make them patentable, and the weather's often bad. In 1958 there seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side while working on their software. The result was that I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end of 1997 we had 500. The people who understood our technology best were the customers. His class was a constant adventure. Finally, the truly serious hacker should consider learning Lisp: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer. It's usually the acquirer's engineers who are asked how hard it is, because there is a clear trend among them: the most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to encourage startups: read the stories of existing startups, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy. In either case the founders lose their majority.

Venture investors, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could say either was the cause. But you can tell that by the number of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. Surely it meant nothing to get a silicon valley becomes: who are the right people to move there. And when I was in high school. It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of spin to put on it. Then it's mechanical; phew. When I said I was speaking at a high school student, just as you must not use the word algorithm in the title of a patent application, just as dynamic typing turns out to explain nearly all the founders I know are programmers. I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. I like about Boston or rather Cambridge is that the function of swearwords is to mark the speaker as an adult. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing. It's not enough to get the process rolling is get those first few startups successfully launched.

Thanks to Dalton Caldwell, Parker Conrad, Jackie McDonough, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, Alfred Lin, Joe Gebbia, and Paul Buchheit for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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heidiroizen · 6 years

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More rare than a Unicorn – gender parity at a venture-backed, deep-tech startup. Here’s how they did it.

One of my most memorable board meetings this year was with Memphis Meats. I literally had to stop the board meeting over one slide, as I had never seen a slide like this in my 20 years as a VC.

And no, it wasn’t about product development or regulatory strategy or burn rate. It was about the company’s newest hires -- five highly accomplished people, all of whom with advanced degrees and significant past achievements in their careers.

And all five were women.

I stopped the CEO, Uma Valeti, right at that moment, to tell him I had never seen a slide like that. And that in turn surprised him, which probably explains in part why Memphis Meats is such a leader when it comes to diversity.

Memphis Meats is a trailblazing company whose mission is to grow real meat from the cells of high quality livestock in a clean, controlled environment. The result is the meat that consumers already know and love, with significant collateral benefits to the planet, to animals and to human health. I’m proud to say they have applied that same trailblazing attitude to growing their team as well.

At Memphis Meats today, 53% of the team are women, and 40% of the company’s leadership positions are held by women. Beyond gender, the team represents 11 nations and 5 continents (Australians, please apply!) and about two-thirds of the team are omnivores, while one-third are vegetarians or vegans. I’ve met most of the team, and I heard all sorts of educational backgrounds: B.S., M.S., M.D., M.B.A., Ph.D. (lots of those). I met parents, brothers, sisters, immigrants, activists, friends, researchers and operators, and I heard 34 different, mission-aligned reasons for joining the company.

Anybody who is paying attention knows that companies and workplaces around the country are grappling with how to build and maintain diverse and inclusive workforces. Silicon Valley is certainly no different – gender imbalance is a well documented problem in tech. Once I saw that slide, I knew I had to dig deeper into what Memphis Meats was doing right. So, I sat down with Megan Pittman, the Director of People Operations at Memphis Meats, to learn more. Here’s what she had to say.

HR: Before we talk about diversity and inclusion at Memphis Meats, we should probably start by defining what we mean when we say those words. What do they mean to you?

MP: We believe that having a diverse and inclusive team happens when you build a culture that’s genuine, welcoming and protected. We don’t have a document that outlines “D&I Policies” here. We didn’t start by looking at our team and saying “wow, there’s a problem here that we need to fix.” We started by committing to build an inclusive company made up of extraordinary individuals. We committed to putting people first, before anything else. We also made the decision to build a People Ops function early, when we only had about 10 employees, so that we could really follow through on these commitments.

HR: I see a lot of companies hire their first HR person when they have 50 or 100 staff. 10 is early! What were some of the changes you were able to make by getting started early?

MP: We’ve curated a high touch and authentic hiring process. After we closed our Series A last summer, we got started on a hiring plan to grow from 10 to about 40 people, and we wanted to do it in about a year. We began recruiting and interviewing immediately!

Pretty quickly, we realized that our interview process wasn’t working very well. We were spending a lot of time with candidates who had amazing resumes, but we weren’t developing unanimous conviction around who to hire. We weren’t being blown away. So we stopped interviewing for a bit and started debugging. We realized that our interviews were too formulaic, and too focused on checking boxes on the job description. We were talking to people who had already accomplished amazing things – in industry or academia, or both – and we weren’t letting them tell that story. So we couldn’t assess their accomplishments, their ambitions and their ability to innovate. We could only assess their resume, and maybe their small talk skills.

We decided to rebuild the process to let the candidates shine. Now, we ask all prospective hires to start their interview day by giving a ~30 minute talk to our team, typically focused on their greatest accomplishments or a topic that they know extremely well. The talks are a great way to see a candidate at his or her best. They provide great context for the 1-on-1 interviews later in the day. And our team learns something new every time a candidate comes in. There have been some pretty amazing light bulb moments and inspiring conversations that have originated because of these talks. Our team loves them – they’re always a hot ticket in our office!

HR: How do the talks connect back to diversity and inclusion?

MP: The talks let us have a really relevant, organic conversation and put the candidate’s resume to the side for a moment. After the talk, we can ask the candidate how they could have done that better, or faster, or cheaper. We can hone in on moments where they did something creative, and learn about their thought process or problem solving strategies. We can hone in on roadblocks, and understand how they motivate themselves through the most difficult moments.

We’ve seen plenty of data showing that companies that hire based on resumes and checkboxes end up with homogenous workforces. Don’t get me wrong – great resumes and hard skills are requirements at Memphis Meats, but they’re the price of admission and not the focus of our hiring process. When we go beyond the resume, and let the candidate shine, and expand the hiring criteria to include self-awareness and creativity and tenacity, we see a very diverse group of people rise to the top. And they happen to be the exact people that we need.

Now that we’ve been doing this for a while, we’re also getting better at writing job descriptions. Our hiring managers now ask “what do we need our next person to bring that our team doesn’t already have?” There is a quote by Walter Lippman, an American writer, that speaks to the importance of this. He says, “When all think alike, then no one is thinking.” Our team is sold on the value of new perspectives, and we’re now thinking about it before we even start to meet candidates. It’s a virtuous cycle.

HR: What happens after the hiring process? Great, you’ve found the person – now what?

MP: We’ve put a number of tools in place to ensure that we can close great candidates and get them into their new role here. For example, mobility platforms have enabled us to not be limited to hiring scientists, engineer or operators in the immediate Bay Area. We are able to comfortably source individuals from top companies or labs – whereverthey are. Switzerland? No problem. Canada? Great! Minnesota? Easy. We offer professionally managed relocations so that we can pull talent from a much bigger pool.

We have partnered with a top immigration attorney so that we can support any qualified individual in obtaining employment eligibility. We have worked with hires on multiple visa applications but one sticks out. We interviewed an incredible scientist who is a French citizen. She is so smart, so hard-working, and so talented. For a few reasons, we realized we would only be able to hire her on an O-1 visa, which is reserved for individuals with “extraordinary ability.” The bar is high, and nobody is a sure thing to get this type of visa. We spent months working on the application, and demonstrating her accomplishments as thoroughly and accurately as possible. After more months of waiting, we literally received her visa approval hours before her previous employment eligibility expired. The entire Memphis Meats team celebrated. The room started cheering, we high-fived, we picked up a cake, I probably cried. She has since been named on our most recent patent filing and has contributed in so many measurable and immeasurable ways to our team. She was absolutely the right person to hire and we did everything we could to make it happen.

We diligently pay fair to market wages and make offers that are not based on salary history. We have never requested salary history from our new hires. We prefer to base all offers on the market, our fundraising stage, precedent in the company and level of experience. Period. We take every offer very seriously and will continue to make that commitment to every one of our team members.

We constantly solicit feedback on our processes and look at data. We track the source of our hires: are we relying too much on one company or one local university lab? We track the candidate experience: are candidates feeling respected by us, our process and our timelines? We track our internal rates of diversity. All of this works to discourage complacency in our processes, and ensure that we are constantly aiming to be better.

We took a different approach to benefits compared to many other venture backed companies. We don’t invest our money into dry cleaning and massages and abundant free meals. Instead, we’ve invested in a generous paid family leave policy, and great health care, and a floating holiday policy that allows for religious or cultural differences. People need to be able to live their lives how they choose with a job that supports that without question. We ask a lot of team members so it’s our responsibility to support them in their lifestyle choices.

HR: Many companies start with the best intentions, and compromise those as they grow. How do you imagine Memphis Meats staying the course?

MP: We’ve really made inclusiveness part of our identity. This goes way beyond a D&I policy, which can be easily forgotten or lost in a handbook.

We talk a lot about our “big tent,” which is really a cornerstone of our company. We’re making meat in a better way. You might think we’re out to “disrupt” an incumbent industry or to make consumers feel guilty about what they’re eating today, but the opposite is true. We recognize and respect the role that meat plays in our cultures and traditions. Many members of our team eat meat, and we celebrate that. Many members of our team do not eat meat, and we celebrate that. There’s just no place here for moral judgment.

Over time, that philosophy expanded to cover the companies and organizations we work with, the investors we raised money from, and the language we use. We happily work with large meat companies like Tyson and Cargill. We happily work with mission-driven organizations that work for animal welfare or environmental stewardship. We happily talk to consumers of all stripes. We’ve built a coalition that we never would have expected. We’ve found that everyone we talk to unites behind our goal of feeding a growing and hungry planet. Our internal culture and our people processes are consistent with the idea of the “big tent,” so I don’t think they’re going anywhere.

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hippoland · 6 years

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A dumb American’s perspective on investing in Southeast Asia

We recently announced at Hustle Fund that we will start investing in Southeast Asian software startups, and my new business partner Shiyan Koh, who just moved back home to Singapore, will be leading the charge on that.

I was in Singapore last week, and I was blown away by the amazing opportunities that Southeast Asian entrepreneurs have ahead of them. It’s one thing to hear from other people that Southeast Asia (SEA) is up-and-coming, but it was totally another thing to go there and talk with so many people about the future.

I haven’t seen this movie yet, but it’s not (entirely) quite like this.

Here are a few thoughts that come to mind from just my short trip there. I’d be curious what other people in-region think about this (and keep in mind, I won’t be doing the investing there, Shiyan will be :) ):

1) There are opportunities galore

People like to use chronological analogies, so if I had to do that here, I would put investment opportunities in SEA at around 1997. To add some context here, I loved learning about all the low-hanging fruit investment opportunities there are.

Basic infrastructure is just being tackled and getting strong traction right now. For example: payments via Grab and others such as AliPay coming into the region. Basic marketplaces like Carousell are big / getting big but there are plenty of opportunities for “large niche marketplace” plays to emerge.

In this first inning of software companies in SEA, major consumer businesses have started taking off, but so many other categories are just starting to emerge. B2B, for example, hasn’t even even really started as a category yet. (more on this below). Health is another area that has a lot of low-hanging fruit opportunities and in some countries is less regulated than in the US (for better or worse). Fintech, too, has many areas that have not yet been tackled -- payments for the banked population is just the first step. This really resembles the era when in Silicon Valley we had Yahoo, EBay, and Craigslist. PayPal was not around yet but ideas were starting in payments.

I think if I were an entrepreneur who was location-agnostic, I would definitely move to Singapore and start a business there. I can think about 20 clearly big low-hanging fruit opportunities in Southeast Asia that would be great to go after, but in contrast, in the US, it’s really difficult to even think about 1 clearly big opportunity. Obviously, the US still has plenty of big opportunities ahead of it -- more on that below -- but the low-hanging fruit around “infrastructure” has been established. Messaging / email generally works. CRMs / marketing tech generally work. Ads generally work. Marketplaces generally work. Payments work. Etc. People in the US can pay for things electronically and can get most services and goods today from the internet -- things in the US generally work, so improvements in these areas are all incremental. Entrepreneurs can still make money improving these areas, but infrastructure improvements in the US are incremental in contrast to SEA which are right now binary opportunities.

2) Building for Southeast Asia is less about tech and more about hustle

All of the above said, because infrastructure takes a lot of pure brute force and hustle to drive adoption, the kinds of entrepreneurs who will thrive in this type of ecosystem are those with a lot of hustle and strong business mindset. All the low hanging fruit opportunities that I mention above are not tech revolutions -- they are all about customer adoption. In many cases, the tech required to execute these businesses have been done elsewhere. (Payments / marketplaces / etc).

Customer adoption is always hard wherever you go. But it’s arguably even harder in a place where there aren’t ready distribution channels. The interesting thing about the US market is that customer acquisition these days is actually fairly straightforward online now for most customer audiences. You can build a SaaS company and get to $1m ARR fairly easily while 10 years ago this was very difficult to do. This is because we now have the infrastructure to be able to look up decision makers on LinkedIn or elsewhere and find online-means to reach people, etc. In SEA, there are some pieces of infrastructure that have been established and exceed the US. Mobile penetration in SEA is much higher than in the US (on a volume basis). This makes it easier to do customer acquisition for a consumer-based company. But for B2B, for example, decision makers for older businesses can’t be found easily online. In other examples, if you’re selling to unbanked populations, not only is the customer acquisition hard, but you also have to operationally do things like collect cash, which US startups don’t have to worry about.

I think this explains why we tend to see consumer businesses emerge first -- tech-savvy internet users are easiest to reach. Other customer audiences are laggards in adopting the internet. Startups formed to serve them need to wait until they come online so that the customer acquisition can be faster.

3) B2B requires selling to other startups

This brings me to my next point. Throughout my trip, lots of people (investors / startup ecosystem builders / entrepreneurs) told me that they are puzzled why B2B hasn’t taken off yet, and that seems to be the next opportunity.

Here’s my take on B2B -- if you look at the US ecosystem, most of the high flying B2B companies got to their level of growth because of fast sales cycles. These fast sales cycles tend to come from selling to other startups. Slack / Stripe / Mixpanel / Gusto et al grew by selling to software startups. The accounts start small but increase quickly when some of your startup customers become big within 5 years. I noticed this with my startup LaunchBit -- we started by selling to startups too, and within a few years, those startups who found success both with us and just in general, grew their accounts with us considerably.

In Southeast Asia, if you are starting a B2B company right now, you will likely need to be selling to older / slower-moving industries. And that sales cycle can be long. But, in 3-5 years or so, if there are a lot of startups that emerge in the ecosystem, then the B2B sales cycle selling to SEA startups will be fast. Here’s a concrete example: we met with a health company based in Thailand who flew to Singapore to pitch investors. They showed us how they were communicating with their consumer customers -- all through LINE messenger. There were literally hundreds of threads of conversations in LINE. At some point, as the startup grows, those conversations are going to become a real pain to keep track of. Can you imagine doing all your business in LINE? (I fully realize that a lot of people do all their business in WeChat in China, etc). You can imagine that at some point, there will be new marketing automation companies that will start building marketing communication software to allow companies to communicate in a more organized manner en masse via LINE to their customers. However, this will only become a big opportunity if there are lots of startups using LINE. So, I think we are probably 3-5 years out for large B2B opportunities to emerge, because first a lot of startups need to get started.

That said, we are definitely interested in looking at these types of opportunities even as early as now, because they take time to build. :)

4) Southeast Asia is fragmented

It’s fun to just lump every SEA country together, but the reality is that SEA is quite fragmented in a way that the US is not. (i.e. language / culture / regulations / etc -- though sometimes the US seems quite fragmented - hah).

I think it’s great if startups have large ambitious of serving audiences globally, but it’s really important to tackle one market first well.

The market that everyone seems to hone in on is Indonesia. Indonesia has 250m+ people, so it’s close to the size of the US. But it’s important to further segment. If you’re trying to go after a banked population that has disposable income, then the addressable segment is probably more like 100m people. This is still a really large market, though.

But, once you start talking about population numbers closer to 100m people, then other countries start to rival Indonesia in size. Vietnam, for example, has strong tech adoption and has nearly 100m people. Thailand has nearly 70m people.

From our perspective, I think while it’s important to be cognizant of market size (for example, Singapore has ~5m people but is a great hub for building a business even if not a large addressable market on the island itself), I met a lot of people who were overthinking the SEA market landscape. As a startup, focus is super important, and nailing your product / service for 1 market of 5m people or 50m people is already really hard to do. And that 1 market -- whatever it is -- should be the focus before trying to dabble in many markets that all have completely different languages, culture, and regulations.

However, this seems counter to the advice that many entrepreneurs seem to receive in the region. If other investors are looking for you to expand to Indonesia even when you’re still tiny, then you may need to think through your strategy on fundraising. I.e. I fully realize that sometimes you have to adjust your plan to make your company more amenable to fundraising, but at the same time, VCs don’t always have the best advice either. And this is a tough balance. So maybe you start with Indonesia if you’re familiar with the market? Or maybe you start conversations with VCs well before you start your company to understand how people think about addressing one market really well before expanding.

Garden by the Bay Mid Autumn Decorations

5) Liquidity opportunities for investors are unclear

Ultimately, as an investor, I think about how eventually a company can get liquidity. And right now, even though some of the markups of high flying SEA companies are good, it’s unclear what the “typical” path of a successful large startup looks like in this region.

In the 90s, in the US, going IPO was a common liquidity path. But after consumers became wary of IPOs, M&A became the much more dominant path, though IPOs are coming back in favor again in some cases.

What this looks like for SEA is unclear and even more unclear is the timeframe. In China, the path to liquidity can be 5 years or fewer. In the US, our darling unicorns often take a decade and sometimes longer to exit. Will large US or Chinese tech companies be purchasing companies for large amounts in SEA? Is that strategic to them? Or will these companies go IPO? And depending on the country, will investors even be able to get their money out once they’ve made money? These are all questions that we have discussed and frankly don’t know the answer to, but the bet we are making is that this will be figured out in the next few years while our investments mature.

6) What are opportunities in saturated markets?

This trip got me thinking about opportunities in saturated markets. In the US, I’d argue that most categories are crowded. Crowded markets aren’t necessarily bad -- it proves demand. And if entrepreneurs can get to a certain level, any exit is good for them. But, for VCs, it’s different. This is where entrepreneur and VC incentives don’t align. A lot of VCs -- especially microVCs like us -- will generally sit out of crowded markets, because they don’t have the capital to pour into their companies to compete to become big winners. And smaller exits are not good for VCs, because they really need their winners to make up for their losers plus return more. We can debate the VC model all day, but that’s another topic for another day.

So in the US, the big opportunities as I see it are:

Products / software for unserved consumer populations along the lines of gender / race / ethnicity -- fashion tech, for example, is an area that has been long ignored

“Super high tech” that alters how we live life dramatically -- think flying cars and everything that Elon Musk dreams up

Providing software to a new generation of tech savvy people in the workplace / consumerizing B2B software for the phone -- for example, every doctor and construction worker today can use technology but 10 years ago, that was not necessarily the case

This means that entrepreneurs need to be more specialized in skillset than in a landscape like SEA. For example, if you are an entrepreneur building a new kind of autonomous vehicle, you really need to have a strong engineering background. On the other hand, if you are building a new kind of ecommerce product for an underserved customer segment, in many cases, you may not need to be technical at all, but you really need to know how to go after your customer persona to be able to out-target more general competitors who are going after a broader segment.

So what this means is that I think we will still continue to see a lot of really interesting technologies emerge from the US as well as even more products and services that will serve just about every consumer and B2B demographic. All of these are all still large opportunities, but I think the ideas that win here will just be much harder to come up with.

Just my $0.02. Would be curious for your thoughts.

Fundraising is a nebulous process that I aim to make more transparent. To learn more secrets and tips, subscribe to my newsletter.

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aittiadf · 3 years

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chapter 2

My eyes felt like screws after the seventh hour of manning the reception desk at New Ocean Hotel. My shift was almost over and every minute dragged itself over the slow blue sky. I went into the back bathroom, sat on the toilet and took a few hits from my vape pen. The high smoothed me over. I looked down at the checkered tiles of the bathroom floor and pulled out my phone. Samantha had texted me saying there was someone she wanted me to meet. This guy from her church who drank with her had just seen the lights for the first time. She described him as a sheepless shepherd who wandered around praying to a higher power. Aren’t we all sheepless shepherds I thought but then I realized maybe people had more meaningful ways of understanding their life.

She told me this guy was looking for a job and needed a place to stay. I didn’t really know how much I should care. Nothing really happened here and if some person wanted to be by the beach alone with an easy job then sure, he should come and stay for a while. If he had seen the lights at the very least it might give him some space to calm down. For me though it was boring. I’d worked here for over a year and only stayed because it gave me time to work on the free coding academy I had recently enrolled in. What I really wanted was to get out of this hotel and work for one of the startups in the bigger town to the south.

The only time the hotel got busy was during the summer. But even then, when tourist season was in full force, none of the rooms would be filled. But there was always a two-four week span when the fires forced people out from the valleys or the mountains and the rates would spike higher than they were the rest of the year. We would be filled to the brim during that time, having to deny people and everything. It was cruel to raise rates during an environmental crisis. Supposedly there was an algorithm that decided the prices for all the hotels in a thirty mile radius so the rates were always the same and there wasn’t any real competition. So it was all blameless. The mechanized blasphemous rate spiking that occurred when people’s houses were burning to the ground could be attributed to the cloud or some other unknowable piece of technology whose existence could only be hinted at and never named.

I walked back to the front desk and sat at the computer trying to decipher an error in the coding assignment I was working on. It was useless. My brain was fried and I wanted to walk out the door and go home. I couldn’t, so I booted up youtube instead. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my fourth video of this guy who had a hydraulic press. The niche of the channel was that he exclusively pressed food. Lately it seemed he’d been going to a lot of fast food restaurants. I stood there transfixed as I watched the steel metal cylinder pulverize doritos locos tacos, double doubles, fish filets and atomic chicken wings.

My manager walked in from checking on some of the rooms in the hotel and I told her to come and take a look. She sat there dazed for a while as well, occasionally offering some commentary.

“It's crazy to see food transform into such unrecognizable shapes”

“This is making me hungry”

“That actually looks kind of good”

I liked her. She wasn’t sympathetic to the owners. They directed most of their nastiness onto her and she remained nice to the employees. Sometimes though the stress from the owners overflowed onto us. But there was this mutual understanding we seemed to have of the hotel’s emotional economy. Which is to say that we were aware the owners were some real cretinous fiends who cared about nothing but the rates and money and caused people to teeter at the edge.

I think she knew I smoked in the restroom and she probably assumed I jacked off in there too, which wasn’t untrue. I indulged in what I was able to get away with. There was even this time me and this customer who I’d been chatting with locked eyes in the lobby when I came into work one morning. He and I went back into the bathroom and did all sorts of stuff. I think she knew about this too because we had security cameras but between us there was this tacit understanding that if you don’t have a big house with lots of dollars the coast in California is just a place where you go to dissolve into the sunset and burn off.

I told my manager I had a friend of a friend who needed a job and if she knew if we were hiring. She told me we weren’t but had seen that the steakhouse across the street was looking for servers. Both of us thought it was stupid that there was a steakhouse in this tiny little community. Apparently some silicon valley investor had got it in his mind that the real estate in this area would explode. The idea was that by developing some businesses and property in the area the energy of the coming boom would surge directly into his net worth. He had opened this all glass steakhouse, the type of building with exposed steel beams inside. So now, amid aging victorian homes and fields of wildflowers there was an all-glass restaurant that looked more like it made napalm than served ribeye. Maybe the meat was cloned. Either way, it had good reviews on Yelp.

I told Samantha that if her friend was really looking for work that it was available here at this pretty stupid steakhouse. We had this weird friendship that congealed around this time we did acid when we were seeing each other years ago. It was late and we were bored and awake so we decided to take a tab each and walk the couple miles down to the beachfront where we lived in central California. When we got there we took our shoes off and waded up into the ankles in the ocean. The wind was strong and the cold ocean water on our bodies began to feel like needles. There was this dingy beach motel by us with an iron gate that was rusted from the ocean breeze. It opened easily and we decided to take refuge in the stairway of the motel.

All night we stayed awake feeling the euphoria from the acid and having the full force of California beach kitsch weigh on us. I remember taking solace in eating a bag of popcorn we bought and staring at this dead fly on the windowsill. When the sun rose we walked outside and I remember Samantha made fun of me when I took a picture of the sunrise. I told her not to be an asshole, nobody is better than the sun.

On the sidewalk walking home we passed by subarus and lending libraries and stopped to look at the sky. There was a series of six orange lights high above us, moving fast and leaving a small streak of light behind them. We stood there walking with our heads fixed above. We watched them fly across the ocean and over the hills until they were far out of our sight. We didn’t even say anything to each other, we just kept walking by early morning joggers and freshly manicured lawns afterwards, staring at the sidewalk silently.

That was so long ago now and certainly before I came out and she became a Christian. We just had an unspoken understanding that we needed to head in different directions. So I moved further up the coast here and she got some tech job in the Bay Area. I remember getting these weird emails at the time from this place called Excelsior Corp about test piloting this hardware VPN product. The emails just had one line of text: “Looking for test pilots hardware VPN now” and pictures of this big black box I assumed was the hardware you would have to install to access their VPN. I always sent the emails straight to the trash but somehow they always bypassed my spam and ended up straight in my inbox.

But after some time not talking to Samantha I reached out. I was smoking my wax pen on my porch one night when I saw a bunch of shooting stars shoot over me in rapid succession. I thought of Samantha. I sent her a text asking how she was doing. She told me she’d been well but had been having these weird things happen to her. She mentioned all these emails she’d been getting and that she’d started seeing drones in the sky and lights every few months. I hadn’t seen the lights but I’d gotten the same emails. She was telling me about it and she sounded scared but also she said she was doing well.

“I’ve got a stable job and you know I go to church and stuff, and there are some really wonderful moments, just now I saw all these incredible shooting stars.”

She sounded anxious and I was worried for her. I asked her if she liked smoking dabs. She’d never tried one.

“It’s really chilled me out since that time we took acid.”

“I like my church and alcohol.”

I was happy though because despite her nervousness she seemed happy. I let her know I’d seen the same shooting stars and she was ecstatic. Since then we’ve texted and called about strange stuff we see, about weird things happening in our phones, about plans for the future, about her theories on the Greeks, about my times engaging in public sex, about the hotel, about god, and about other things. We were friends and I enjoyed hearing about her world, from the far reaches of the front desk of the New Ocean Hotel.

On the computer screen a wad of Chick-fil-A waffle fries were being squashed into potatoey dough. Me and my manager sat there watching until the steel cylinder had fully flattened the fries and the video faded to black.

My manager gestured at the steakhouse, “What do you think it's like working there? Surrounded by glass for everyone to see? I could never do that. When I worked in a restaurant the kitchen’s used to be closed off from the eyes of the customers. Now they leave it wide open, I feel like I’d go insane.”

I thought of the owners of the hotel lording over me and reprimanding me every time I looked at youtube. “I’d probably go insane too,” I said.

“I definitely would.”

When my shift was over I walked home and stopped at the convenience store to buy a pack of gummy sharks. I chewed on them while thinking about Samantha. I imagined her in church, with some ridiculous outfit on, sitting with her friend. I imagined them both listening intently to the words of the sermon, and getting up from the pews afterwards to fraternize with the other church members. I thought of how all that seemed impossible to me, making conversation to other people in a church. Maybe if I tried hard enough I could imagine it. I tried and my mind thought of being submerged in water. I thought of being in the womb. I thought of what it must be like to feel full. I thought of being in a congregation. What singing with others must feel like. I started to imagine myself there, sitting among the pews unable to join in with everyone’s song. I imagined what it would be like later on during the service, when the pastor gave his sermon. In my mind I listened to him while a stranger next to me reached for a bible on the shelf on the back of the pews and turned to the book of revelations. He placed the bible on my lap while I unbuttoned my pants and unfolded myself hard, smack dab in between the pages that talked about angels, blasphemy and a new Jerusalem. Then I imagined him stroking me while I listened to the sermon, my mind cascading through illuminated halos, until all that remained was a gold blur and me hooing softly like an owl, letting myself leak onto the thin paper pages and onto the carpet below.

It was funny to me that after that time taking acid Samantha started going to church and I got a hold on my sexuality. Too much of my life could be periodized around that trip and sometimes I felt at the brink, torn between the life I lived before and the life I was living now. But there was no actual break between the two, and they were both happening at the same time. I knew that in reality my life prior and my life after bled into each other, with experiences since then coloring the way I read the past and my life prior shaping the way I read the present. But a long black fissure stood there in my mind, dividing the two lives while they tried to congeal around the edges of the abyss. From that fissure too came not just me but Samantha, and maybe anyone else who had seen the lights. We sprouted out of it in different directions like vines, crawling out of black depths and over the grey plane of our existence, stretching into the bright orange line of the horizon.

My teeth smushed the blue-white body of the gummy shark in two. I chewed one piece and stared briefly at the shimmering half body of gelatin I held in between my two fingers. It would be possible for Samantha’s friend to find a job here. I even had an extra room in the converted apartment of the old Victorian house I rented. Then what? I suppose nothing, I would continue with my life, trying to learn to code and working at the hotel. Who knows what would happen when we met. There was this sensation I had though, that everyone who me and Samantha came in close contact with was somehow also sprouting out of the abyss, extending themselves over that grey plane and trying to reach the sun.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT FEATURE

They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of. From their point of view, as big company executives, they were less able to start a company, it doesn't seem as if Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so far there are few outside the US, because they don't have layers of bureaucracy to slow them down. It meant that a the only way to get rich.1 If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. We arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies.2 We wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. That's an extreme example, of course, that you needed $20,000 in capital to incorporate.3 Their size makes them slow and prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. Doing what you love in your spare time.4 Young professionals were paying their dues, working their way up the hierarchy. By giving him something he wants in return.

Once they saw that new BMW 325i, they wanted one too.5 If you simply manage to write in spoken language. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. The kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident.6 I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but I didn't realize till much later why he didn't care. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Indians in the current Silicon Valley are all too aware of the shortcomings of the INS, but there's little they can do about it. When you're too weak to lift something, you can always make money from such investments.7 Business is a kind of social convention, high-level languages in the early 1970s, are now rich, at least for me, because I tried to opt out of it, and that can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power.8 It must have seemed a safe move at the time. At the end of the summer.9

It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow.10 How much stock should you give him? Users love a site that's constantly improving. But if you lack commitment, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such college. There are two things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise.11 But it means if you made a serious effort. Bill Gates out of the third world.12 What's going on? But I think that this metric is the most common reason they give is to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace. The kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident.13

Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business, startups beat established companies by transcending them. The problem is that the cycle is slow. With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not a problem if you get funded by Y Combinator. If you can do, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of controversy is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of a good idea. Fortunately that future is not limited to the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't easily do in any other language. How can Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that it can be hard to tell exactly what message a city sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one. They build Writely.14 I'm not sure that will happen, but it's the truth. Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than Yale students, but not because of some difference in their characters; the Yale students just have fewer examples.

And whatever you think of a startup. In the US things are more haphazard. I see a couple things on the list because he was one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. There are a couple catches. Instead of being positive, I'm going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does.15 Being profitable, for example, or at the more bogus end of the race slowing down. An example of a job someone had to do.16 But actually being good. There are a lot of people were there during conventional office hours.17

I'll tell you about one of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters where people went to college.18 In Lisp, these programs are called macros. That's where the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to work on it. And since most of what big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you should do is start one.19 The most powerful wind is users. We're just finally able to measure it. And not only did everyone get the same yield. VCs need to invest in startups, at least by legal standards. Ten years ago, writing applications meant writing applications in C. If you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.

Notes

Foster, Richard Florida told me about several valuable sources. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they tend to say how justified this worry is. The founders want the valuation at the time 1992 the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1965. Yes, there would be enough to be a win to include things in shows is basically zero.

Different kinds of startups that has become part of your mind what's the right mindset you will fail.

But although I started using it out of loyalty to the founders' salaries to the traditional peasant's diet: they had first claim on the one hand they take away with the earlier stage startups, just monopolies they create rather than admitting he preferred to call them whitelists because it reads as a kid, this is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the government. As the name Homer, to mean starting a business, A. The Department of English Studies. Yes, strictly speaking, you're pretty well protected against such tricks initially.

There are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. Every language probably has a word meaning how one feels when that partner re-tells it to profitability on a road there are no longer needed, big companies to say that YC's most successful startups of all the page-generating templates are still expensive to start over from scratch, rather than ones they capture.

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the Internet, and judge them based on revenues of 1. If the company goes public. This is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. When that happens.

The only launches I remember are famous flops like the bizarre consequences of this type of proficiency test any apprentice might have 20 affinities by this, though more polite, was starting an outdoor portal. The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. The danger is that in practice signalling hasn't been much of observed behavior. When I say in principle is that intelligence doesn't matter in startups tend to be when I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, the startup after you buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

Another thing I learned from this experiment: set aside an option pool. So if they don't want to start a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the government. But in a company grew at 1% a week for 4 years.

We added two more investors. The reason this subject is so hard to imagine how an investor, and that often doesn't know its own momentum. We think. I'm talking here about everyday tagging.

They thought most programming would be possible to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the point of a large organization that often creates a rationalization for doing so much to generalize.

Many people feel good. So instead of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. The idea is that it was overvalued till you see them, initially, were ways to make your fortune? In fact the decade preceding the war.

One father told me about a form that would appeal to investors.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you tell them to justify choices inaction in particular took bribery to the traditional peasant's diet: they hoped they were only partly joking. If a big angel like Ron Conway had angel funds starting in the first phase. You're going to create one of those you can eliminate, do not try too hard at fixing bugs—which, if they stopped causing so much from day to day indeed, is due to the table.

The hardest kind of gestures you use the wrong ISP. But they've been trained to expect the second component is empty—an idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying this cupboard must be kept empty. The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. I have set up grant programs to run an online service, and they were, they'd be called unfair.

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an era of such high taxes?

So the most visible index of that, in one of the markets they serve, because she liked the iPhone SDK. For example, because a it's too hard to pick the former, because it is.

If you ask that you're small and traditional proprietors on the side of the junk bond business by Michael Milken; a new airport.

The biggest exits are the only audience for your side project. You're not one of their portfolio companies. He did eventually graduate at about 26.

A lot of time on schleps, but he doesn't remember which.

When I talk about startups. It's also one of the statistics they use the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage. The reason Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the other: the source of food.

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Juul and the business of addiction

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/business/juul-and-the-business-of-addiction/

Juul and the business of addiction

Several years ago, I went to a splashy launch party for a new tech product, which is a pretty normal thing for tech companies to have. It was at a hip warehouse space in Manhattan, there was cool lighting and a great DJ, free food — the company had pulled out all the stops. And the company had invited a ton of Instagram influencers and model types, so there were lots of beautiful young people there doing exactly what the company had hoped they’d do: taking photos and videos with the new product, talking about how cool it was, and posting it to social media.

Now, if I was talking about a new smartphone, or a camera, or a laptop, this party would not have stuck out in my mind, but this party was for a product called the Juul. And the Juul was — and still is — one of the most potent and effective nicotine delivery devices that’s ever been created. Juul’s big innovation was a nicotine formulation that made its vape hit just like a cigarette. And the party kicked off a marketing blitz that seemed pretty directly targeted toward teenagers on social media.

After that, the Juul became a sensation — and a sensationally dramatic story. The marketing helped, but also it turns out nicotine is addictive as hell. A Stanford tech startup that had been founded to disrupt the smoking industry had upended years of US tobacco regulation, gotten a new generation of teenagers addicted to nicotine after years of declining smoking rates, and eventually found itself valued at $38 billion after a huge $12.8 billion investment from Altria — the company that used to be called Philip Morris. You probably know it by its most famous product: Marlboro cigarettes.

Then it all fell apart: the lawsuits came, the FTC sued to unwind the deal, the valuations of both Juul and Altria collapsed, and Juul itself faces being regulated entirely out of the market in the United States.

How did this all happen? How did a startup that was founded to stop smoking end up in the pocket of Marlboro? How did Altria screw up this investment so badly? And how did a couple of Stanford kids figure out a better cigarette before the cigarette industry?

To find out, I invited Lauren Etter on the show. Lauren is an investigative reporter at Bloomberg News and the author of a new book called The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation. Lauren tells us the story of how the cigarette industry went from hiding and lying about research that showed nicotine was addictive to being one of the most regulated industries in the country — and then, how that provided an opening for Juul to do things the cigarette companies could never get away with.

The book is terrific — even if you don’t care about nicotine and smoking, if you’re a Decoder listener, you’re going to recognize a lot of themes in this conversation. There’s a big industry that’s slow to adapt, there’s a startup that’s moving fast and breaking things, there are regulators around the world who don’t quite know what to do, and at the center of it all, there’s a big question about our society’s relationship with a product that might be bad for people — and that people still want.

Just a couple days after we recorded this episode news broke that Juul has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the state of North Carolina that claimed the company’s marketing practices caused a sharp rise in vaping among minors. Juul will pay a $40 million settlement, but it’s also agreed to something else: it won’t use anyone under the age of 35 in its marketing anymore. The party is officially over.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

This is your first book, and I have to say it was a very impressive first book. We covered the Juul story at The Verge as a tech story, but you’ve written a health story, a really complicated business and regulatory story, and also the story of the tobacco industry and what it has become in this country. How did you start looking at Juul in this way, and how did you end up writing a book about it?

I started writing about Juul after the outbreak of lung injuries, this mysterious outbreak called EVALI [e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury]. I started writing about it from a health perspective and trying to figure out what was going on, just like the rest of the nation trying to figure [this] out. Is this related to vaping? So I started covering some of those stories, and then I became interested in Juul as a business story. It was fascinating to me that a company that had found itself in the middle of this public health crisis was a Silicon Valley firm.

As I embarked on a book, I was really endeavoring to tell the story of Juul, but I quickly realized it was impossible to tell the complete story of Juul without telling the story of the tobacco industry. Those two industries were so intimately intertwined that it became evident to me that I needed to also write about the tobacco industry. That’s why I ended up with these two intertwined narratives.

Give people the really short version of the Juul story. This is a famous product. It was all over the news. Lots of people use a Juul, but it has a really sharp rise, and then a really sharp fall.

Most people know about Juul having launched in the summer of 2015 with this flashy nicotine device called Juul, and quickly taking off and taking over the entire industry and leading to a youth health crisis. All the teenagers started using it. But actually, the founders of Juul had been working on coming up with a better, healthier, less harmful alternative to the cigarette for years before Juul. Adam Bowen and James Monsees, two Stanford grad students, started working on… it’s almost like a myth and a legend by now. A lot of people know this story. They met at Stanford, in the design school. They were smoking cigarettes out back as they kind of pondered their next project, and they realized that it was idiotic to be smoking this burning stick, essentially shredded tobacco leaf rolled in paper, lit on fire. The same product that people had been using for more than a century.

And here they are in the heart of Silicon Valley, where everything is ripe for innovation. And they realized, why hasn’t the cigarette been innovated on? So they set out to innovate the cigarette. As they embarked on that, they found some of these old tobacco documents that had surfaced during the 1990s in the heat of the tobacco wars, and there were millions of documents that the tobacco companies had to hand over, to make public, as a result of litigation that had nearly buried them. They tapped into that, and had many, many iterations of their product before it became Juul. It launched in 2015, ultimately, and just became the most popular e-cigarette on the market. They marketed it on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. They sent kind of traveling troupes of these nicotine Juul marketers that handed out free samples at parties, on yachts, in the Hamptons, at raves, and it just became extremely popular.

It became popular among 20-year-olds, and among teenagers as well, middle school and high school students. So that was the moment, as it became just a runaway success, that it attracted the attention of public health regulators, of the FDA, of members of Congress. It just became this huge issue, where Scott Gottlieb, the then-FDA commissioner, called it an epidemic of youth usage. So basically, the company found itself under this incredible scrutiny from every angle. And at the same time, the traditional tobacco industry had also been trying to innovate on cigarettes, their declining business. The cigarette had been in decline for decades. Everybody agreed that the business was only going to continue to decline as people realized the adverse health effects of smoking, and it was not as cool to smoke cigarettes anymore.

And so as big tobacco tries to innovate, they cannot out-innovate Silicon Valley. So at the end of the day, Altria, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, decides to invest in Juul. In my book, I write that was the moment the glass shattered for Juul. It just attracted so much scrutiny, because all of these years, the founders of Juul had been saying, “We are the anti-cigarette. We’re going to kill the cigarette. We’re going to kill the tobacco industry,” and suddenly they’re in bed with the tobacco industry. That really kind of put them on blast in a new way.

They were under health regulators’ scrutiny, and their valuation, which once stood at $38 billion, was just tumbling quarter after quarter after quarter. And now, there’s been a huge reorganization in the company. They brought in all these new executives, many from the tobacco industry, and they’re essentially fighting for their survival right now. Juul, like every other e-cigarette maker, has submitted an application to the FDA, and now the FDA has to determine whether or not it’s in the public health’s interest to allow this product to continue to be marketed.

Basically, we’re all waiting. It’s expected sometime this year, for the FDA to decide whether or not it can be sold. If the FDA does not allow it to go forward, Juul has no product to sell. And if it does, I think Juul is well-positioned to continue to grow and take over the market. So they’re at a real inflection point right now.

That is just a staggering rise and fall. It’s two kids at Stanford looking at a product that they’re using, doing the tech industry thing, asking this kind of hilarious bubble question of, “Why hasn’t anybody innovated this thing,” realizing that actually lots of people have tried to innovate it, using some of that, and then all the way to now potentially facing regulatory doom.

Exactly.

The big innovation with Juul was not really the design or the pods. It was the nicotine formulation. How did they stumble on a nicotine formulation that hits like a cigarette? Because early vapes were really, really harsh.

This is Juul’s secret sauce, the nicotine salts, of course. Early [e-cigarettes], what they did was they essentially just took nicotine and they added some flavors to it. But the problem with just using nicotine is, it’s extremely harsh. It has a high pH level. It burns your throat. Early iterations of e-cigarettes, they could only put in small amounts of nicotine so it wouldn’t be so aversive to your lungs. The problem with that was that it didn’t satisfy smokers. because there wasn’t enough nicotine in it. So they’d have to puff and puff and puff on the thing and it just wouldn’t deliver the satisfaction. So, that had been the number one complaint by e-cigarette users.

So, Adam and James, they had done tons of research. They had delved into these tobacco archives, which contained all kinds of science about nicotine and about tobacco. The science of tobacco smoke and nicotine chemistry is extremely complicated and complex, and they were able to use some early research that showed if you modify the pH levels of tobacco smoke you can deliver different satisfaction levels, enjoyment levels, that type of thing. There’s also a body of research that showed, if you add organic acids to nicotine, it lowers the pH but you can have higher levels of nicotine. Essentially, by adding the organic acids, you create a nicotine salt, and that allows the pH to go lower, but you have a higher amount of nicotine. So what that does is enable you to inhale a large amount of nicotine without burning your throat, without you starting to cough a lot.

I should also point out that they hired tobacco industry scientists. They had them on speed dial. They would call them and they would ask about the different various organic acids and how that could modulate the pH. And they did all kinds of research and they absolutely turned to tobacco industry executives and to the tobacco files, the archives, to help them solve the problem. They eventually did their own experimentation in Dogpatch in their offices there, where they were adding various organic acids to nicotine to see what the most satisfying ones were. And they ended up going to New Zealand where they did their own tests on human subjects, including on Adam Bowen himself, to determine which organic acid in nicotine would give you the highest level of satisfaction, and what would make your heart race the fastest. When you take these little surveys, what would be the most satisfying one?

So they did all kinds of just really organic research and ended up settling on benzoic acid as the organic acid that was the most satisfying. This enabled them to do something that no other company had really done, which is devise a nicotine solution that had a high nicotine content, in this case 5 percent, which was ultimately marketed, but with a very low aversive component to it.

They picked benzoic acid. They have a patent. The patent lists every other kind of acid you might want to use down to citric acid. That prevents anyone else from doing this, right? Was that it? Was there another way around this problem? Because when I first saw that patent, I was like, “Oh, Juul’s going to win. Now they can block everybody else from doing the thing that made their product better than everybody else.”

There’s definitely been IP litigation over this. And there probably will be in the future. I just don’t know how much Juul is going to be able to prevail on essentially owning chemistry. This is basic organic chemistry. I don’t know if it, at first glance, gives them the patent protection or the IP protection, that you might think.

I’m really interested in that arc and sort of pulling apart the bits and pieces of that, but what struck me about your book is that you don’t start with Juul at all. You start with Altria, which is the company that was known as Philip Morris, that made Marlboro, and you start with them in sort of the very late ’90s, early 2000s. And it seems like what the entire cigarette industry was struggling with was, we’re going to be a regulated industry.

We’ll be intertwined with government regulators. We’ll be intertwined with health officials. We have to learn to be that kind of company where the government is kind of always up in our shit. Tell me about that, because there’s a really big parallel, not in terms of the product, but in terms of the attitudinal shift that the entire tech industry is facing right now.

You and I are talking, and Congress is literally talking, about antitrust bills, simultaneously with our discussion today. But it just feels like that attitude shift created the opportunity for someone to not have the baggage and make the Juul, when if Philip Morris had invented the Juul, I mean, their business would have been secured in a different way, but they were just unable to.

Yes, that’s exactly right. I started the book in the middle of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, because I felt like it was emblematic of what the industry was going through, the tobacco industry.

The book starts in the middle of a hurricane. You were not in the middle of a hurricane.

Right, correct. The book starts in the middle of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, and Philip Morris, the company now known as Altria, had gathered all of its corporate relations officials and executives, and met there as kind of a retreat to talk about this huge moment in the industry where they had to admit that they had deceived the American people, that they had lied, that they had covered up all of this information and evidence about how deadly cigarette smoking was, and it had all come out into the public.

The FDA commissioner, David Kessler, at the time, had made it his mission to go after the tobacco industry to bring it under its regulatory authority for the first time. State attorneys general were suing the tobacco industry and the tobacco companies for all of the public health effects and the costs related to treating smoking-related disease, and every week there was a new headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about the misdeeds of the tobacco industry in the ’90s.

It really was this important moment that I thought almost paralleled where we are today with Juul. So, they realized that they needed to have this permission to exist, and Juul essentially finds itself in the exact same position now, where they’re kind of operating only if the FDA gives them permission to operate. They’ve realized that they created a youth usage crisis, or helped create it, and that they have to be incredibly careful about it. But the interesting thing is that when Juul launched, when Adam and James decided to innovate on the cigarette, they had none of that baggage that the tobacco industry had. They had not been through the trenches, and they didn’t approach the industry — this highly addictive product, nicotine — they didn’t approach it with the necessary care in order to give their product a chance at surviving and asking permission from society.

It’s like the motto of Silicon Valley, “Move fast and break things. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” And that’s exactly the mentality that they embodied early on when they launched Juul, and it’s also the mentality that allowed them to crush the market, to take over, and to basically flood the nation with Juul. So there are lots of similarities, lots of parallels between those two narratives.

Well, let me ask you about that, because the lack of baggage enabled them to make a product that Philip Morris and the other big tobacco companies had been trying to invent for years, and because of their own regulatory problems and their own wacky international corporate structures, they weren’t really able to do it well. And the Juul team had none of that baggage. They were able to say, “What people want is nicotine,” which the tobacco companies really could not say, given the regulatory scrutiny. And then they were able to deliver the nicotine salt formula in the pods of the Juul.

I think a lot of people will tell you they’re very happy using a Juul instead of smoking a cigarette, and that is probably a net good, although I have some questions about that too. The thing that I struggle with in this entire story is, “Well, it’s better than smoking.” And so if the tobacco companies were not able to make this product, is it a net good thing that a startup that made a lot of mistakes along the way didn’t need to ask permission to exist, eventually did develop a product that is, in some measurable way, better than smoking?

You’re hitting on the exact controversy, and I think it’s super important to talk about it in this way. First of all, it’s partly a socio-cultural question about nicotine. Why do people use nicotine? Why do they want to use nicotine? It provides pleasure. I mean, it does lots of great things. It provides pleasure. It can help you concentrate. It can help you focus. It can relax you. There are all kinds of appealing aspects to nicotine, I should point out, and this is also a very important point, it’s not the nicotine in cigarettes that kills people. Nicotine has some adverse health effects, but largely not many. There are even some studies showing that nicotine can help in the treatment of serious diseases, including Parkinson’s.

But what kills people when they smoke cigarettes, the deadly aspect of a cigarette, is the combustion. And this is kind of the thing that Adam and James focus on, is the combustion. It’s the lighting on fire, the burning, inhaling these toxic chemicals that form tar droplets that end up affecting the lining of your lungs and causing lung disease. So people smoke cigarettes because they want nicotine. Why do people want nicotine? Well, they’re addicted to it. I think the addiction element is sort of the most important and most interesting aspect to focus on, because what’s so bad about nicotine? Well, you could potentially become a lifelong user of nicotine. So I think when we’re talking about adult smokers, we know the reason they smoke is because of the nicotine. They want the nicotine fix.

So why not give them a better, less harmful alternative that doesn’t involve combustion? And that’s the e-cigarette. So it sounds great. I will point out that there haven’t been enough long-term clinical studies to show that there are zero adverse health effects. I think most people agree, and most studies show, that there is a net benefit if you quit smoking and only use e-cigarettes. A lot of e-cigarette users also continue to smoke cigarettes. That’s called dual use. If you’re an adult smoker and you just switch from cigarettes to Juul, for example, you’re probably better off in the long run. The issue revolves around the kids, teens, and young people who become attracted to the product and develop a lifetime nicotine addiction. If you can separate that controversy out from the adult usage issue, then the industry would be okay.

I think that’s the industry’s plan. The e-cigarette industry’s plan to survive is to focus on the adult smoker. So, back in the 1990s at the height of the tobacco wars, almost 40 percent of teens smoked cigarettes. They were tobacco users. By 2015, when Juul launched, it was down to like 10 percent. So it had been this huge public health coup that they had successfully gotten the youth tobacco use rate down to such a low percentage. So when Juul launched, and other e-cigarettes as well, suddenly you saw this rapid increase in the number of teenagers who were using e-cigarettes. Now, yes, better than a cigarette, but [they’re] still adopting a nicotine habit. Can you prevent youth from getting addicted to nicotine? Because I think most people agree that there’s no real redeeming quality for a teenager to just start using nicotine.

“It’s never been about anything else but nicotine.”

First of all, their brains are not fully developed. There’s all kinds of science and studies showing that nicotine, before your brain is developed, can have all kinds of adverse health effects on brain development. You become more addicted because the pathways in your brain become solidified, and so you develop a greater addictive potential. It’s really a question about, who’s the problem? Where does the problem lie? If we’re talking about youth usage, then I think most people would agree that we don’t want kids adopting a new nicotine habit. But if you’re talking about current cigarette smokers, there’s a pretty compelling case to say that a less harmful product that does not involve combustion, like an e-cigarette, can actually have a net benefit to society. So the problem for Juul was that they didn’t set up the opportunity for themselves to initially go after the adult smokers.

They ruined their opportunity early on by essentially committing the cardinal sin in America, which is contributing to a new youth nicotine epidemic. I think those two issues often get conflated, and people start yelling over one another. They’re kind of talking about different things, but unfortunately they’re intertwined. There’s a moment in my book where I interviewed Mike Moore, the former famous attorney general who in the 1990s took on the tobacco industry, and he described it to me in a way that I thought was really interesting. He said, “Companies have made billions of dollars getting people to suck something into their lungs.” He says, “I hate to say it so clear, but how could you possibly sell that? There’s only one answer, and the answer is nicotine. It’s never been about anything else but nicotine. Without it, there’s nothing. There’s no cigarettes, there’s no Juul, there’s none of it.”

That was a powerful conversation, because it highlights and underscores just how dependent these industries are on addiction. One other thing that’s important to point out is that 90 percent of adult smokers today began smoking before the age of 18. Ninety-nine percent began smoking before the age of 25. The whole concept dating back to the 1990s was, if you can cut off the youth from nicotine addiction, you won’t have a next generation of users. From a public health standpoint, that’s fantastic, because then they wouldn’t be smoking cigarettes. For the tobacco industry, that’s a complete disaster, because that means if they do not have the next generation of users, they do not have an industry that has a long life. So for me, the controversial issue is less about whether adult smokers should be using e-cigarettes to quit smoking, and more about the continuation of nicotine addiction that continues to addict new generations of users.

A lot of the scrutiny around Juul occurred because of the vaping-related illnesses and deaths that were happening in the Midwest. That led to a crisis of “is vaping bad?”, which is yet another track from “is nicotine bad?” It’s another way to conflate all this. Is vaping bad? What was the result of all that? And how did Juul get caught up in it?

When the lung injury outbreak happened, everybody just assumed it was Juul, or at least it was vaping, because basically you had these kids showing up to hospitals who had chronic lung injury, almost as if their lungs had been burned, and they were on breathing machines and that type of thing. It was a very serious problem. And then you had adults showing up at the emergency rooms, the same thing. They had these chronic lung injuries.

I think immediately the media attention gravitated toward Juul because Juul was the most popular product on the market. Juul had been singled out as the one causing the youth vaping epidemic. And now suddenly you have all these kids who vaped showing up at the emergency rooms.

So it was a huge PR crisis for Juul, and the CEO at the time had this fateful interview where he went on national television and said, “We just don’t know. We don’t know if vaping is safe.” But as the FDA and the CDC began their investigation into the lung injuries, over months, it took them months to figure out that it probably was linked to bootlegged THC products that were being vaped.

So these were pods that were laced with this product called vitamin E acetate, which is a syrupy, golden liquid that a lot of the bootlegged products were cut with in order to either make it more syrupy or in order to make it last longer, to go further. And so the CDC ultimately said it was most likely related to these products that contained this ingredient.

By the time that the CDC got around to announcing that, the damage had already been done for Juul. Their product had taken such a hit on the market, people were so spooked by vaping and by Juul-ing, that by the time that the CDC clarified things, it was too late. There were all sorts of people who were furious at the CDC and the FDA for taking so long to come to that conclusion and for wrongly singling out just vaping as the problem.

However, I will point out that the CDC, to this day, continues to say that there’s a small percentage of these lung injuries that were tied to nicotine-only products, not the THC products.

Then you heard stories of people who started going back to cigarettes because they were so spooked by the lung injuries. And people saying, “Oh my God, the FDA or the CDC should have cleared this whole thing up earlier.” It was a large misunderstanding, but it was also a catastrophe, and it was really bad for the industry. It was really bad for public health, but it also does underscore that there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done on e-cigarettes to determine if they do cause any long-term health problems.

The focus on nicotine is what enabled Juul to succeed as a company that thought of itself as a tech company, as a disruptive company, in those very heady days of 2015, when tech companies were going to disrupt everything. And they saw a big, lumbering industry. They said, “They don’t even understand their own product. They don’t even understand what they’re selling. We can make it sharper and better with a focus on design, with a focus on delivery, innovation, all of the buzzwords.”

Is Juul a tech company? It seemed like a threshold question for us, right? We’re a tech and science website. We realized we wanted to cover it. And we’re like, well, it’s a tech company. They act like a tech company. They talk like a tech company. Now many years hence, we realize a bunch of those companies were not actually tech companies. WeWork was not a tech company. Was Juul a tech company?

I think Juul is a tech company, as much as they would like to distance themselves from that now. They sell hardware, there’s software involved, [and] they innovated. They brought to bear the use of technology in order to innovate on a product that had zero technology in it. They disrupted, they raised venture capital.

It’s a big debate on our team over whether they’re a tech company. And I think for us, what qualifies something as a tech company, is whether you have the margins of a tech company, whether you make a piece of software and sell it over and over again. Juul has a very mechanical product. They have to manufacture the liquid in the pods, they have to manufacture the pods. And they had a lot of, “Oh crap. We make a hardware product with liquid in it,” problems along the way. And that ran right into some very strange regulatory moments that you unpack in the book. I’m curious if you can tell that story and kind of help me understand how they got through it.

So essentially, their technology, it’s a battery. It has a little heating element in it. The battery actually heats the pod. You insert the pod and when you suck on it, it triggers the battery to heat up and create the vapor. So, there’s also some electronics inside. What they found early on, and what most e-cigarette companies found, was that the liquid contained in the pod, the nicotine liquid, would leak down into the guts of the Juul device.

When you’re a startup and you’re scrappy and you’re trying to gain market share, having these kinds of glitches in the functioning of your technology is very, very problematic. What Juul set out to do was to fix the problem. It wasn’t an easy fix for a variety of reasons. They couldn’t figure out for the life of them why the pods were leaking and how to solve for that issue. They would take the pods on airplanes and over mountain passes in order to figure out, was it the altitude that was causing them to leak? Was there some other design glitch in the manufacturing process that was causing them to leak? But it was a huge problem that they had to solve for internally.

The problem for Juul was, at the time, the FDA was cracking down on the industry. And they came out with this law that said, for the e-cigarette companies, that you could continue selling your product, but you couldn’t make any modifications to them. The FDA was essentially trying to freeze the market so there would be no new entrants and they could kind of wrap their arms around this unwieldy market.

Juul took risks tobacco companies wouldn’t

So they said, “If you have your product on the market, we’re not going to enforce against you. You can keep selling it until you file this PMTA [premarket tobacco product application] and get the thumbs up or thumbs down from the FDA. But in the meantime, you’re not allowed to make any changes to your product.” I think this is a moment where Juul really embodied the Silicon Valley ideal of move fast and break things, ask for forgiveness, not permission.

They actually ended up changing their device. There’s a lot of argument around whether or not the change that they made to the device rose to the technical definition of a modification and whether or not that was a breach of the FDA’s rule. But the fact of the matter is, they did modify their device after what they called the deeming date of August 8th, 2016, at a time when you were not supposed to do it. But Juul was at this moment where they were like, “If we don’t fix this, we’re screwed and we’re going to just get crushed by competitors. But if we do fix it, the FDA will probably never know and they’ll never ask us about it.” And it was a tiny enough modification. They changed the structure of the pod a little bit. They changed some of the internals on the motherboard. They changed some of the way that the product actually worked. They put a new sensor inside of it that would withstand leakage better, that wouldn’t cause it to brick, that type of thing.

I thought that was a really interesting moment for Juul, because the tobacco companies might not have done that even though they face the same risk. And in fact, there was a very heated debate inside Altria because they had a similar kind of leaking issue. And they debated for a long time whether or not it would rise to a modification and be in breach of the FDA’s rules.

While that’s all happening, Altria is freaking out that Juul exists, that it’s going to steal their market share and destroy their business. They’re paying a lot of attention to Juul. And they’re the ones who find the change before the government finds the change. Why didn’t they just copy the Juul? When I think about big tech companies now, they just relentlessly clone their smaller competitors, all of the time.

Why didn’t Altria, as it’s looking at the Juul so closely — they’re buying them and realize that they’ve made this change; they’ve already effectively reverse-engineered it to understand what’s going on — why didn’t they just copy the Juul?

It was a question I just kept asking over and over again. How could Altria have been so behind or so clueless? Exactly your question, I would ask that. And the answer is sort of multifaceted. Altria was, number one, they were late to the game. When they introduced their very first e-cigarette product, they called them “cigalikes.” It was one of those that looked like a cigarette and it had e-liquid inside, but it was really trying to approximate a cigarette. It was cylindrical. It was wrapped even in this paper material, it was white, it had a glowing tip, so when you sucked on it, it looked like a cigarette. That was the first product that they put out on the market.

That was around 2013, 2014, then Juul hit the market in 2015. And yeah, they start doing the teardowns of Juul, just like they do with any other product; figuring out, “What is this thing? It looks like no other product on the market. We’ve never seen anything like this before.” And they honestly debated for so long whether or not it was going to be a threat to their product and to their industry. And they had different management before Howard Willard, [the current CEO of Altria], took over and ended up doing the deal with Juul.

But at the time, the management was very circumspect about the long-term viability of the e-cigarette market. They thought that regulators were not going to tolerate another nicotine product on the market without going through lots and lots of regulatory hurdles. They believed that this market would not last for long and that they didn’t really need to pour tons and tons of money into it in order to innovate. They already had sort of gone down that road, but a little bit reluctantly.

Altria, their future plan before Juul came around, was that their harm reduction play was going to be in smokeless tobacco and snus. That’s what they were thinking. They were thinking of going in the direction of, people are going to use nicotine in a pouch. When Juul hit the market, they were just kind of already behind the ball, even though they had done decades and decades of research. And by the time they realized it was actually a threat to them, the FDA had implemented the deeming rule in August of 2016. And all the companies were forbidden from putting any new product on the market.

Altria dragged their feet for so long and kind of underestimated the trajectory of the market. By the time that they realized, “Oh shit, Juul is actually this crazy product that’s just eating our market share,” they couldn’t do anything about it. They could not introduce a new product to the market.

So the FDA has the deeming rule. At the same time, Altria knows that maybe it could kill Juul by going after the regulators. It seems like the cigarette companies wanted to be seen as the responsible adults, even though they sell cigarettes, and they wanted to cast the tech companies, the vape companies, as being reckless upstarts. At some point, the Trump administration gets involved. The whole thing becomes very politicized, and Altria ends up making this gigantic investment in Juul. How did that all come about?

So in this bout of desperation, when Altria is realizing that Juul is an actual threat, they actually start scouring the globe for products that they could just simply buy, that had been on the market prior to August of 2016. They ended up finding this Chinese manufacturer that had this product that they could prove had been on the market prior to 2016.

So they did introduce this, what they deemed to be their competitor to Juul, which was MarkTen Elite. It looked kind of similar to Juul. It had the battery and it had the little pods. This was Altria’s very first pod product. And they didn’t introduce it until, I’m forgetting the date right now. I think it might’ve been 2018.

But the problem with that product is that it was absolutely terrible. It didn’t have the nicotine salts like Juul. It was ugly. It didn’t have the form factor, didn’t have the Silicon Valley je ne sais quoi, and people didn’t really like it. But Altria tried flooding the market with that product. They would figure out, “Where’s Juul doing really well in sales? Let’s go there and just try to cut the price of their product to have this price war.”

They really did put up a fight for a while. And they realized that there was no hope. MarkTen Elite was a terrible product. Everybody knew it. It was almost an internal joke where they were just like, “It’s pathetic, that we’re trying to compete with Juul when they have 60, 70 percent of the market and our product isn’t even close to what they have.”

Once Howard Willard became the CEO of Altria, he was of a mindset different from his predecessor in that he thought they should consider doing a deal with Juul. Like, “Let’s try to buy Juul. Instead of competing, let’s just try to buy our biggest competitor and make them part of our brand portfolio.”

And that had been a strategy that Altria had used for years. In the smokeless market, when they couldn’t figure out how to make a brand that was competing with Copenhagen, they just went out and bought it. This was sort of an old playbook for the tobacco industry. And so they started thinking, “Well, let’s buy Juul.” They engaged in negotiations over a very long period of time, starting in 2017. And there was all this back and forth.

Altria initially wanted to just buy Juul outright. And Juul immediately was like, “We have no interest in selling outright. We want to retain control of the company.” And so there are all these negotiations going back and forth and they ultimately decided to invest $12.8 billion into Juul for a 35 percent share; at the time, the company was valued at $38 billion.

I should point out, this entire transaction, the Federal Trade Commission has sued… What happened was, Altria, weeks before the deal was announced in December of 2018, they just took MarkTen off the market, their Elite product. They told the FDA, “We’re so concerned about the youth usage issue, that we want to be a team player. We want to show you how responsible we are and how concerned we are for public health. We don’t want kids using these pod products. So we’re going to be responsible and we’re going to remove MarkTen from the market.” That’s what they told Scott Gottlieb.

Well, less than a month later, there was this announcement that Altria had purchased a 35 percent stake in the biggest pod product on the market, that had been seen as the biggest contributor to the youth usage issue. Scott Gottlieb was furious. The FDA felt like this was just entirely duplicitous and basically just said that they were playing the FDA like a fiddle. Then months later, the FTC sued to unwind the deal between Altria and Juul. They alleged that it was anti-competitive because Altria took its MarkTen product off the market and colluded, in order to gain a larger market share. The trial is going on right now.

Doesn’t it kind of make no sense, though?

It depends on the way you look at it.

You have a crap product. You know you’re not going to succeed. The nicotine salts are patented, you can’t go after them. You shut it down to buy the small company that makes a good product. That’s just Business 101. What is the actual collusion there?

The idea is that Altria could have competed in the market that they had intended to compete in, had there been another large player with deep pockets in the market like Altria, they could have fostered a more competitive market. They claim that there was a quid pro quo, that Altria took its MarkTen off the market in order to do the deal with Juul, and that was anti-competitive, that resulted in monopolistic behavior. Of course, Altria is arguing exactly what you’re saying right now. They are currently before the FTC. All of their executives are being interviewed, they’re testifying, and that’s exactly their argument, that this was a product that was so bad it had no future, it was the shittiest product on the market.

I mean, it’s a hilarious argument for a big tobacco company to be making: “We were terrible at innovation. Our product was the worst and we sucked, and so we had to basically take the product off the market.” It’s a complicated issue. Like I said, the FTC will decide. The deal could be unwound and that would be something, for sure.

The structure of the deal is really strange. A lot of Juul employees just got huge amounts of cash and walked, which is not usually how these kinds of deals work. You get stock, you have a vesting period. There’s all this stuff that makes you stay after an acquisition, but it feels like a lot of Juul employees and investors got huge checks and bounced.

Yes, it was a highly unusual deal. The $12.8 billion that Altria paid for its stake was structured as a special dividend. What that meant was that none of the existing shareholders had to sell their stock. They just got a check for $12.8 billion. Some of that was distributed to employees, a billion dollars in bonuses paid out to employees depending on their tenure. Some of them got hundreds of thousands of dollars just as a special bonus. Others got more than $1 million. Of course, the largest beneficiaries of that deal were the board members and the founders. So the single largest shareholder at the time, Riaz Valani, made around $2.6 billion just like a windfall. Nick Pritzker, the Hyatt billionaire, he made $1.7 billion. Bowen and Monsees each got about $650 million.

It was highly unusual. Oftentimes, when you bring in that type of investment and that type of capital, you’ll use it either to pay down debt or to go to your company’s operations. This was just a chunk of money that was just divided up among them and they got that. So almost none of it went back into the company. In fact, none of it went back into the company. So yeah, it was a sweet deal for Juul, for sure.

It feels like Juul had so much leverage because it had a product people liked better than cigarettes it was able to just extract, for itself, a cashout. They basically sold the problem to Altria.

That’s the most amazing thing about this deal. The fact that Altria paid that amount of money is just reckless, in my opinion. It’s like everybody knew the company was coming under this regulatory scrutiny, that they had this lung issue that they had been entangled in, that they had been fingered as the single largest contributor to the youth epidemic. I mean, there were so many risks in investing in this company, but it was almost a byproduct of just sheer momentum and desperation that ended up in this $12.8 billion payout. Altria basically had its back up against the wall. Juul had them over a barrel. They were so desperate to have this product that they could sell, that would actually give them a foothold in the e-cigarette market, that they paid this huge sum of money. I think it was a terrible deal. I think everybody agrees it was a terrible deal except for Bowen, Monsees, Pritzker, Valani. They made out pretty well.

It feels like a really strange moment for the FDA, for public health officials to be talking about regulating various health and tech companies. Obviously, we came through the pandemic, the FDA and public health were politicized. There’s a lot of lack of trust in institutions. Smoking rates rose during the pandemic, which is one of the odder effects of a respiratory illness, I think. What happens next? How does this all come together?

It’s actually fascinating. The FDA is trying to carry out this long-term plan that began under Scott Gottlieb, but that had actually been talked about for decades. They call it the Tobacco Endgame. What that means is the FDA has decided that there’s a huge potential public health benefit in getting people off smoking cigarettes onto potentially less harmful products, like Juul. It’s so strange because the FDA had been going after Juul for so long and there’d been the whole explosion of the youth issue and how that just subsumed the agency. And now, as they talk about this plan that the FDA has — and it’s going to go through the regulatory process, it’s going to take years — but the plan is that they’re going to reduce nicotine in combustible cigarettes to non-addictive levels.

The idea being that, again, if there’s no nicotine or minimally addictive amounts of nicotine in cigarettes, people aren’t going to use them, so they can essentially get rid of the cigarette. That’s the FDA’s strategy to get rid of smoking. As part of that strategy, if there’s a category of people that can’t get the nicotine from their cigarettes, but they still very much want it, the FDA would like to have a suite of products available to the public that will give them their nicotine fix without being as deadly as a cigarette.

This has been an issue that Mitch Zeller, who is the head of the [FDA’s] Center for Tobacco Products, has been working on for decades. He’s written all kinds of articles and studies about it, literally dating back to the 1990s, and this whole idea of this harm reduction plan, that if you can just provide people with a less harmful alternative to cigarettes, then you could save a lot of lives. And it’s very much like what Adam and James talked about, the Juul co-founders, early on. If the FDA approves Juul or authorizes Juul to continue to be marketed, it could actually position Juul to be the product that smokers turn to, because they no longer have their nicotine in the cigarettes and they’re searching for something else. There are other products on the market that compete with Juul, but I think a lot of people agree that Juul remains the most popular and is one of the most effective nicotine delivery mechanisms out there.

So it’s just fascinating to me that the FDA, in carrying forward with this nicotine reduction plan, could actually be setting up Juul for a resurgence, another life, act two, however you want to say that.

I’ve noticed there’s a lot more nicotine replacement or nicotine delivery products in the market lately. Just at my local CVS, the shelf behind the counter of nicotine stuff has gotten bigger. There’s more flavors. There’s new kinds of lozenges. There’s more exciting kinds of gum. It seems like they’re becoming consumer products in a way that, I don’t know, Nicorette never thought of itself as a consumer product. Is that a shift that was precipitated by Juul? Or is that a new market opportunity created by the FDA?

I think there’s this realization that this is a huge market. The market for nicotine products is $800 billion globally. I mean, it’s a massive market, and that includes lozenges, patches, all of that, including e-cigarettes. I think this gets back to what we were talking about, the socio-cultural question about nicotine use in America. I think businesses realize that this is a market that is not going away. Even if people aren’t getting nicotine from their cigarettes, they’re going to continue looking for nicotine in other places, whether it’s through Juul, whether it’s through a lozenge, whether it’s through a patch, I think that we’re going to be a nation of nicotine users and nicotine addicts. I don’t see that changing anytime soon and I think businesses have recognized that there’s an opportunity.

Certainly, the advent of Juul thrust that market forward with maybe greater velocity, seeing just how much money can be made and seeing how popular it is, that type of thing. But certainly, as the FDA moves forward in reducing nicotine levels in cigarettes, that market is only going to continue to grow. I think that the industry is transforming from the tobacco industry to the nicotine industry. And so I think we’re going to see a lot of innovation in the nicotine industry and there’s going to be more nicotine products.

Do you think the FDA has changed its approach? I mean, we think about the FDA, at The Verge, as regulating health technology. Apple’s going to put another sensor on your watch. They’re going to make some claims about what it can do. The FDA should probably step in and verify those claims or prevent Apple from making those claims, or whatever it is.

On the flip side, there is the pandemic. It’s unavoidable that a bunch of public health mandates got deeply politicized and a lot of people in America are just like, “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m an adult, I’m going to take whatever risks I want to take, and that will be the end of it. Get out of my hair.” And those things seem like a collision course and the nexus of that collision is nicotine products.

This is one of the most politicized products in the world. You have the tobacco industry right now, as we speak, going to great lengths to try to influence the FDA to reeducate Americans about nicotine. Altria has told the FDA that they believe that some of the funding that they’ve been using on anti-vaping campaigns should also be used on teaching Americans that nicotine isn’t unhealthy. So the FDA is under huge pressure by the industry to go in this direction of harm reduction. And, of course, you have the anti-vaping people, the youth tobacco prevention people who want to see less of these products on the market because they continue to pose a threat to young people.

I think the FDA is in an impossible position. If they do not approve Juul, I think there’s going to be lawsuits all around. It would look terrible for the FDA to single-handedly put an American company out of business, which is what would happen if they don’t grant this regulatory authorization.

And at the same time, they would be removing from the market the exact type of product that the FDA is in a way endorsing or facilitating, when they say that we’re going to take nicotine levels down and we want Americans to use a less harmful alternative. So it’s a very complicated, controversial issue that has so many different facets to it that there’s absolutely all kinds of political pressure and lobbying going on right now.

Reading your book, looking at the history of the research and how it’s politicized, it seems like the cigarette companies just created a lot of noise in the research. They paid for a lot of studies. They said, “We can never really know this stuff.” It feels like there are echoes of it now, where you can pick a study and it says what you want it to say.

Is that a strategy that Juul is using now? Is that a strategy you see other companies using? It seems like the tobacco wars, as you call them, became the focal point for what we can actually twist science to say whatever we want it to say, or at least create confusion.

The way that the tobacco industry just obfuscated and lied and covered up scientific research, and at the same time paid scientists to generate studies that would support their conclusion — One of the reporters back in the 1990s called it the largest misinformation campaign in American business history. There was an extraordinary amount of lying and deceit by these tobacco companies. And I do think that’s causing a huge challenge for Juul right now.

One, because anything they put out is going to be immediately doubted as just being another study that’s been bought and paid for by the tobacco industry. It’s making it very hard for the company to come up with any credible science that people are actually going to take hook, line, and sinker.

There have been some issues recently where a public health journal that Juul essentially paid for published a series of studies. And there were all these disclaimers saying that these were people who worked at Juul, scientists at Juul, consultants who were hired by Juul. Literally the entire journal was articles written by people paid for or employed by Juul. And it caused a huge controversy in the public health community and among researchers and scientists who were saying, “Well, this is happening again.”

Now, Juul will say that these were legitimate studies that they did that deserve to be in this public health journal. But to me, what I found most fascinating is just the reaction to that, where immediately people jumped on that and said, “This is exactly like tobacco 2.0. They’re using the same tactics. They’re buying health journals and they’re engaging in those same types of tactics.”

A lot of the focus of the controversy and a lot of the focus in your book is that Juul’s marketing to teenagers, to influencers, to social media, created the crisis for itself, that they had an initial marketing plan and they hired a flashier marketing guy. And he was like, “We’re going all in.” New York City-cool, billboards with models, the whole deal. And that created the problem.

I actually went to the Juul launch party that you describe in a warehouse full of influencers and beautiful people taking selfies. The whole thing, literally, it was full of Juul vape. It was an incredible party. And I walked out with a Juul, and I was immediately addicted to a Juul. It was great. I hope my mom doesn’t listen to this. I have since quit.

Good for you.

Is the problem that it was just too cool? It’s such a weird aspect of this controversy, that one of the things that set Juul on the path of destruction was that it was perceived as cool, which is what every business person wants their product to be perceived as. Is the heart of the problem that they hired the wrong marketing guy and they chased “cool” instead of, I don’t know, being perceived as medicine or a back brace or something that would just never be as cool?

Absolutely. I think that is and was their biggest misstep. I think had they treated the product with the requisite care that an addictive product should have, then they would have been better off. Instead, they hired a marketing staff whose sole focus was making this product as flashy and attractive as possible. They treated it as a gadget, as the next-generation iPhone, and that it was a fashion accessory. They gave it to models on runways at the New York fashion show, so literally it was a fashion accessory, and they treated it like that.

And the way that the early ads had pictures of these young, beautiful people using the Juul, there was no mention of nicotine. There was no mention that this was an addictive product. It was just suddenly this cool thing that you had to have in your hip pocket or in your whatever, in your hand, if you wanted to be a trendsetter.

I do believe that that was their original sin. However, it also launched their product in a huge way. I think Juul likes to distance themselves from the “Vaporized” campaign and say, “Oh, the Vaporized campaign didn’t really work. And it wasn’t until later that the product took off.” But there is no doubt that the Vaporized campaign gave it this original cachet and that launched it onto Times Square billboards, that launched it into magazines.

And by the way, these were advertising tactics that the tobacco industry was literally banned from engaging in. They hired people who knew nothing about tobacco to do their marketing and who knew the most about how to make a brand pop, how to make a product be super desirable.

I have struggled with this one forever. If you make a product that 40-year-olds think is cool, it is likely that 20-year-olds will think it’s cool. And the real win of the Juul was the nicotine salts. There were lots of vapes at that time. They all had different kinds of designs, and maybe they weren’t designed by Yves Behar or whoever, but the reason the Juul won was because the product was more effective at delivering nicotine.

If an uglier product had been effective at delivering nicotine, it might well have won. And to me, I can’t unpack that in my brain. Yep, they did an Instagram campaign, but really at the end of the day, they made a product that was “good.” They made a product that was really good at delivering nicotine to people, and that’s the thing that made it successful, not a handful of billboards in Times Square.

I think certainly the design and form factor of their product made it successful in addition to the nicotine solution. But I think one thing that we haven’t really talked about is that not only did they use nicotine salts, but they had the highest amount of nicotine on the market. At the time, it was 5 percent nicotine. Well, it still is, but no other e-cigarette on the market had 5 percent. It was a huge amount of nicotine.

So I think you can’t really separate them out. It’s like, could they have made an ugly device that was cloistered somehow or that was not marketed, m1 and just put in a little box behind a CVS counter that looked like some sort of inhaler and would have been more like a medical device? I don’t know.

I was thinking about orthopedic shoes. Should they have made orthopedic shoes?

I really do think that if they had been focused on the adult smoker market, that they should have and probably would have chosen a different marketing campaign. I think that is clear. So whether or not the marketing campaign is the reason for the catastrophe that followed with kids using it, I think it’s undeniable. Of course, if you’re going to show up at a rave and there’s going to be a Juul container pop-up store there, they were absolutely designing it to be cool.

I think that there was another way that they could have done it that would have involved less flashy marketing and that would have been tailored toward adult smokers, which they claimed that it was. So I do think that the marketing played a role in it, for sure. And now whether or not there was the intent there, I think that’s a pretty big remaining question that is going to be litigated in courtrooms across the country, is whether or not they intended to market to kids.

Maybe they just intended to create a great product, just like Steve Jobs. Or maybe they intended to just do the best that they could. And I think that Adam and James did, actually. I think they just surrounded themselves with the wrong people. I think they made an error in judgment when they brought on Richard Mumby, [the chief marketing officer at Juul] and when they brought on other people whose sole goal was to make the product cool. I think that that was the wrong marketing strategy for them, and I think it backfired on them in a huge way.

Richard Mumby is the marketing guy.

Yes. He was ultimately the chief marketing officer at Juul.

Laid low by the wrong marketing guy, a cautionary tale for all of us.

You’ve said that you approached this book as a business book. That’s what got you interested in the entire story. We’re talking a lot about making markets, understanding markets, and governments constraining markets. Let’s end with a broad question. What is the biggest business lesson that you’ve taken away as you’ve looked into what happened to Juul?

I think it’s pretty clear to me that the biggest business lesson is you need to know who your customers are and you need to be responsible. I mean, it almost sounds cliche, but you can’t go out of the gate like a bull in a china shop. You have to approach the market responsibly and anticipate regulatory questions if you want to have long-term viability. Now, certainly people would argue that that’s not the way to go. No Silicon Valley entrepreneur or investor would get behind a company that was moving slowly, that was asking the FDA for permission. But I think in this instance, especially when you’re selling a highly addictive product, there just needed to be a higher level of care given to that particular product.

Juul was selling a highly addictive product and they treated it like an iPhone or a watch or some other gadget. I think that they should have recognized what they were selling instead of trying to make it be something that it isn’t. I mean, it’s both of those things, but I think that they should have had a higher level of care and I think that businesses probably could benefit from that. In the long run, I think that they realize that’s not the way that you grow fast. So I think that there’s a very big tension between those and I understand that, but I do think that Juul would have bought itself longevity had it not just crushed the market like it did.

Lauren, thank you for being on Decoder. It is a great book and out now. Tell people where they can go find it.

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you. You can buy my book anywhere books are sold. Your local bookstore would be the best option.

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craigrcannon · 3 years

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Employee #1: Dropbox

A conversation with Aston Motes, Dropbox’s first employee.

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies.

Aston Motes was the first employee at Dropbox. He’s now a startup advisor and investor, and he currently is focused on multiple projects at the intersection of music and technology.

Discussed: Studying at MIT, Learning About Startups, Interning in Silicon Valley, Meeting The Founders, The Y-Scraper, Building Dropbox, Learning From Success and Failure, Going Through YC After Dropbox, Choosing Companies as an Employee vs. as an Investor.

Craig : What were you doing before Dropbox and how did you get involved?

Aston : I’ll go back to when I got to MIT. So, I fully expected to be a professional software engineer and to work at a big company after graduation. I assumed I would go to Microsoft or Google or maybe Amazon. Those were great jobs and a lot of my peers were going to those companies. They seemed like pretty fun places to be. You know, they had free drinks in their refrigerators! And that was kind of my ideal situation after college.

Halfway through MIT I started reading the essays of this guy named Paul Graham [PG] and learned that there was this whole other world of Silicon Valley, the startup world. Obviously, all those companies that I was just talking about came up in this culture of the venture capital backed startup, but that startup world wasn’t visible to me at the time.

I actually went to a talk by PG he gave at MIT. And I just became an acolyte of his, based on his blog posts. They shifted my perspective, and I eventually I decided I really wanted to start a startup rather than work at one of those big companies The only problem was, I didn’t have any great startup ideas. The closest my friends and I got to a real startup was, we built this book exchange website for MIT students called bookX (which is now defunct).We thought that it might be a business, but turned out it wasn’t.

So on my way out of MIT, I was looking to join startups and subsequently ended up in New York City at OkCupid. I actually had interned previously in Silicon Valley and decided that maybe it was too much tech for me. I wanted to experience New York where there were, I guess, other cultural things.

Once I got to New York I realized I missed having a bunch of geeks around everywhere. I found my pocket of geeks in New York at OkCupid, and I had a roommate who was also a software engineer. So I had that network, but I did miss the Valley. There’s a different energy in Silicon Valley versus New York, especially in 2007 when I was there.

Craig : So how long did you end up staying at OkCupid?

Aston : I stayed at OkCupid for just six months, and those six months were really, really great. But actually, for almost all six months I was being recruited by Dropbox. Essentially what happened was one of the people that I had worked on bookX with, Arash [Ferdowsi], ended up going to YC and co-founding Dropbox with Drew [Houston]. They started working on Dropbox together a few months before I went OkCupid.

The whole time I was at OkCupid I was hearing about their exploits. When they started they were working out of an office in Cambridge so I hung out with them there. But, just as they went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2007, I heard news from them about how well they were doing and how many people in YC loved what they were doing.

I think they ended up getting voted as one of the best startups in the batch by their peers. By the end of the summer they finagled a round from Sequoia Capital. When I heard how much it was, I was blown away. They were like, “Yeah, we just raised a million dollars.”

And I’m like, “That’s incredible.” I didn’t know they gave a million dollars to…I mean, literally, kids.

Drew is a couple of years ahead of me, but I still felt like a kid, so I thought certainly “that guy is a kid.” In reality, Drew had spent a bunch of time building companies and was working at a startup at the time, so he had a lot more experience than I appreciated at the time. And Arash felt like a kid as well. Arash is a year younger than me and I actually TA’d him when I was at MIT.

Craig : [Laughter]

Aston : I mean, it’s one of those things where my vision of what Silicon Valley could be was really in front of me. It went from PG writing, “Hey, you know, college students can build interesting businesses” to, “Here are people that you know from your school that are not only building something awesome, but they’re also getting the same type of respect more established people in the Bay Area get.”

That was a really big moment in terms of my understanding of what Dropbox was. Before that it was just this cool thing they were working on. Then it was like, “Oh they’re building a business.” And around that time period they were looking for a first employee.

Craig : Was there anything in particular that excited you about Dropbox?

Aston : So, obviously, those guys. Drew and Arash are super, super smart and great engineers. To this day, I’ll hold Drew as one of the best Windows programmers I have ever met. And Arash is just sick at all things backend. They were this perfect pairing. So, as far as the team went, I was certain that these guys were going to be great people to work with.

For the longest time I had seen product demos that were just video. But once I played with the product I was like, “Oh, this thing works. I really like this product and it would be awesome to get a chance to work with these guys, on this thing.” It was a product that, as an MIT student, it matched my expectations for how something should work.

Craig : What does that mean?

Aston : MIT has this thing called Athena, which is a very old networked computing system. Basically, you can go to any computer on campus, log in with your username and password, and the computer’s desktop, comes up the same with all your applications and files.

It’s a super awesome system that you got used to at MIT. If I needed to print something on the run, I could drop into any computing block and my stuff is right there.

Craig : That’s really cool.

Aston : Yeah, definitely. So from the product perspective, Dropbox made a lot of sense to me. If I didn’t have Athena on my laptop I couldn’t get to my files but with Dropbox I could. Maybe not this whole desktop experience, but at least my documents and my photos and all that stuff.

That’s about as far I thought about the marketability of it. Basically, “There are people out there like us and they’re going to love this thing.”

But the Sequoia check definitely solidified my belief in the fact that this could be a real startup; it wasn’t just a project that was going to end very quickly. So I actually tried to help Drew and Arash recruit someone else as first employee, assuming I would just join later.

I was like, “You guys are going to be around. Now that you have this check, you guys are going to exist for a couple of years. I’ll just come on later. Let me try to help you find someone else who doesn’t have a job,” because I was working at OkCupid and really liked my job and didn’t want to up and quit. I had a year-long lease in New York that I didn’t feel super excited about paying for while living in another city. So it was like, “I’m probably not the right person to do this. I’m not really in a position to do this.” But my recruitment efforts failed and their recruitment efforts succeeded.

Craig : [Laughter]

Aston : That whole time they had been working on me and I didn’t even notice that they were recruiting me. And I would say the nail in the coffin was, they flew me out to San Francisco to see what was going on. I got to see the apartment, which was not very glamorous, but it was the apartment they were living in and working out of, with a great view of the bay.

You could see the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz and of all that. So, it was a cool place to be working and it was just them. The idea that it would be just us working on it was also attractive. And the other thing that was really cool was the community that was around at the time.

Their building was nicknamed the “Y-Scraper” because it’s a towering monstrosity in North Beach and it was full of YC companies. That whole neighborhood is low-rises except for this 12 story tower. It sticks out like a sore thumb, but does have great views. At the time Justin.tv, Weebly, Scribd, Etherpad, Disqus and more YC companies were all living in that building. There were a ton of companies.

The density of startup people was so high that it ended up being this really impressive thing for me. Like, there wasn’t just Dropbox and this team that I was working on. Around me I was going to have other similarly-minded people. At that point I realized not only would Dropbox be a cool team to work with and a cool product to work on, but it was going to be an opportunity for me to really learn what it was like to start my own company, which as I mentioned before, was always a goal.

Craig : What made you not start your own company then? What made you decide to be an employee?

Aston : Well, the immediate thing was that I didn’t have any great ideas. I think related to that was I didn’t have a ton of confidence about my ability to run a company, having never have done one before. So I reckoned that being an employee would be the best way to see it, and if it failed, I would learn a bunch. I would learn a bunch, and it wouldn’t necessarily be my fault–I’d just be like that guy who was around. And from those lessons I’d be able to learn all the things to avoid and when it was time to do mine, I would be super prepared.

Craig : Totally. So you join Dropbox and move out. What’s it like?

Aston : It was just like I expected. It was awesome.

Craig : Did it feel like you lived in a dorm?

Aston : It didn’t have a dorm feel per se, because everyone was working so hard. You wouldn’t see people randomly during the day. We had pretty weird hours. We would start in the early afternoon and would work until well into the low numbers in the morning. So we didn’t overlap with a lot of the other companies during the week because everybody was working on their own thing. They were maybe a couple occasions I can think of where someone visited us during the day. But on weekends, yes, definitely. It was one of those things where everybody’s personality type is “work hard, play hard” and almost all the companies would take one day to get away from everything and do something interesting.

Craig : So what were you actually working on? What part of the product?

Aston : So when Dropbox first came out, the demo video had this desktop part and this web part. Drew built the first version of everything. And then when Arash came on they ended up splitting it with Drew on desktop and Arash on web and servers. And then when I came, we split it again so it was Drew on desktop, Arash on servers and me on web.

So I built the more modernized version of the web stack and that involved a number of website redesigns. We started the site in an era where IFRAMEs were cool and by the time I left the company we were well into AJAX/XHR and dynamic everything on the client side.

I also had a hand in choosing a bunch of technologies that Dropbox ended up sticking with, for better or for worse. Drew picked Python on the web, and he also picked Python on the desktop. But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I also picked Prototype.JS for the web. We were wrong on that one, too and should have picked jQuery.

But this is just like a long line of interesting things that happen when you have a startup, where you look at the things that are trending, you look at things that are hot, and you pick the ones that feel good, and then six months later it turns out that your pick wasn’t the right one and everyone is doing this other thing.

By now, I think Dropbox has moved away from Prototype.js and potentially also from Mercurial. But it’s funny how long these early decisions stick around the company.

Craig : What choices worked out well?

Aston : There’s a long line of things we didn’t do that I think ended up being good. And that was generally from being a pretty conservative engineering culture. We tried to avoid things that were trendy and, in general, we just chose things that worked for us that weren’t super complicated. So I think for the most part we ended up have never having to do a complete overhaul of something that was not working.

Craig : It’s an interesting point. In the other interviews we actually haven’t talked about the implications of their technical choices. Do you have any broader thoughts on how someone should thinking about those decisions?

Aston : My advice for most companies is just use whatever you’re comfortable with. I think a lot of that stuff ends up being “six of one, half a dozen of another.” That said, I’m really happy that Drew chose Python. I wasn’t familiar with Python before I got there. Primarily, I had been coding web stuff in PHP, which Facebook ended up using a lot of. At OkCupid, we were actually using C++. That’s just to say that I was open to whatever language stuff needed to be built in. And I think Python is a really great compromise in terms of programmer productivity and performance.

In general, my thing is, again, in keeping with Dropbox’s conservative culture, if you can use languages and tools and databases and frameworks that are 10 years old or older, you’re probably doing pretty good.

Craig : And so then what were the challenges in the beginning?

Aston : For the first year we were not publicly available and primarily we were just trying to actually deliver all the features we claimed we would have. We had a pretty solid mailing list built through interest in a couple screencast videos that Drew had made.

One screencast went to the top of Digg and Reddit and Hacker News. It was still just us three and we had stuff like that. Basically, we had this huge group of people who wanted to try the software based on what we showed it could do so we were like, “Okay, well let’s actually build that. Let’s actually make it work like that.”

It could work like that for one computer for sure, but we wanted it to work like that super smoothly for everyone who used it, across all platforms, and to have a website that complements all that functionality. In fact, for a long time the desktop client had almost no UI so most of the difficult operations, like sharing a folder, happened on the web.

So we put in a lot of work building up that experience. And we didn’t launch it until a while after I joined. I forget the exact timing, but around a year in we were ready to launch. So yeah, it was all the stuff that goes into any launch but add on the complexity of having not just the web client but also Windows, Mac, Linux, all talking to the same servers, and we had built the majority of this on Amazon Web Services, but at the time they were… not quite as reliable as they are now and definitely not as extensive. I think they just had EC2 and S3 back then.

Once we actually launched, work became fighting fires around customers problems or us needing to ship features and things like that. The first year or so was calmer. It was just a lot of heads down work.

Craig : Did you have a certain number of users in mind when you were writing V1? Like, “Okay, we can handle, whatever, a million people with this.” Anything like that?

Aston : Oh, interesting. Yeah, I actually didn’t spend that much time thinking about how many people we would reach, but it was certainly a consideration, primarily on the folks who were for doing scalability stuff. I was more concerned about the user experience and what would make Dropbox successful.

Just to set context here, there were a lot of companies we were competing against in backup and file sharing. Ultimately, I think what differentiated Dropbox was user experience and really never screwing up, like deleting a file or anything like that. And if you were using Dropbox you could be pretty certain that whatever you were doing, the interaction was going to be easy. So that was a super big focus for me.

When I thought about scale, it was more about how many people are going to run into this crappy case? Or how bad would it be if we did something in a funky way that worked 90% of the time? Because we also needed to, obviously, ship.

A specific example was backend records when someone added and then deleted files. Dropbox didn’t at the time track renames whatsoever. And a rename would encompass a move as well. So, when I joined the company, if you moved a file from directory A to directory B, you deleted this file and then you added this file. From a technical perspective that’s weird and doesn’t match what actually happened: It was actually moved on disk, not added, then deleted.. But also it mismatches anybody’s reasonable expectation of what they would see there.

We spent time trying to apply heuristics to try to understand when people moved files. In that simple case, since the file contents don’t change and the add and delete come together in a small time window, it’s pretty easy to tell that the file just moved from A to B. But when someone moves a directory with 5,000 files and directories, they don’t all come in one file change set, they come split across multiple change sets. And it’s not all at the same time. You can naively compare all the file contents but it ends up being really slow.

We went through multiple versions of this movement matching thing before we got to something we felt was performant. But it’s a good example of where performance issues sneak in around scale. And it’s not people-scale, it’s like file systems-scale, which is a different dimension.

Craig : What were the fires after you launched?

Aston : The first one’s hilarious. We launched publicly at TC 50, which later became TechCrunch Disrupt. Basically the format of this is, you’re on stage in an auditorium with thousands of people watching. Also on stage is a panel of judges – respected entrepreneurs, journalists, venture capitalists – and you get your X number of minutes to pitch, and then at the end of it they give you feedback… in front of everyone.

They were streaming it online so when Drew went to pitch with Arash everybody was in the office watching the live stream. But actually what we were watching is our computers with logs of the server. We were deathly afraid that this demo would fail in some way.

So we’re watching the live stream and the server logs look great. We’re monitoring Drew’s account specifically to make sure everything’s going through. We’re ready to fake it if we need to–like throw a file in there from our side. Then partway through the pitch Dropbox seems to stop working on the live stream.

Everybody is freaking out like, “What went wrong? What can we do to fix it?” It seemed like everything was fine and then we realized that the WiFi was out at TC 50. Drew had obviously counted on the WiFi working. Dropbox actually doesn’t need the WiFi to work that well to do its thing but, you know, it has to be on. [Laughter]

Craig : [Laughter] So how did the demo go?

Aston : So by the end of Drew’s like, “If the internet were working, this is what you would have seen.” But it really killed the magic.

One of the judges was like, “I don’t get it.” And this was a legit person who we respected and thought would love it. Then we just got creamed on stage. It didn’t help that the presentation before us was Swype, which was this awesome, magical keyboard. They had the best demo in the world and then ours didn’t work. So, we started out with fighting fires from day one.

Craig : And what about when the users arrived?

Aston : Yeah. We definitely had scalability issues, we had bugs, the same stories everyone does. I think for the most part, Dropbox had a very blessed experience. One of the ways we were blessed is we really didn’t screw up in the worst way possible, which is lose a bunch of people’s files all at once, in unrecoverable ways. We had built out the system such that when we did delete something, we left a time when we could do recovers. We had written the clients well enough so that we were unlikely to mess up the bits and prompting of the server.

But there were definitely incidents where data got deleted and we had to go recover it. There were definitely incidents where stuff would just not work for people, which is obviously no fun. The funniest one wasn’t really harmful to consumers but it was harmful to our business.

The Dropbox desktop client had an auto updater feature and one time we shipped an auto updater that broke the auto updater.

Craig : [Laughter] That’s awesome.

Aston : [Laughter] So yeah, that meant if we found any other bug we couldn’t fix it. Luckily we were staging the roll out and caught it so it didn’t hit everyone. But for those it did we had to apologize and told them, “Go download this other one that will continue to work in the future.”

Craig : I’m surprised you caught it that fast.

Aston : I don’t remember how we caught it, to be honest. But I mean, it’s a reflection of the engineering culture we had. We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. And we tended not to ship it out to too many people until we were certain it was rock solid.

Craig : Okay, and so what was the environment like when you launched? I assume you didn’t live in the YC skyscraper forever.

Aston : We got to five or six people in that apartment before it became a hazard to our health. So we rented an office right around the corner in FiDi in San Francisco. Once we moved there it started feeling like a real company. Through that point we had been hiring pretty much the same way I got hired, which was, “I heard there is this guy at MIT who is pretty smart. Aren’t you friends with him?”

“Yeah, I’m friends with him.”

“You want to ask him if he wants to work with us?”

“Yeah, I’ll ask him.” And then fast forward a number of months later and they worked with us.

We had a great recruiting pipeline but a not particularly interesting one. I think of the first 12 or 15 people who joined the company, almost all of them were MIT graduate or MIT students who dropped out to hang with us for a summer.

Craig : So how did your relationship with the founders shift as Dropbox grew?

Aston : Hm. I had been a TA to Arash so in my mind he was like a younger brother, but then he became my boss immediately when I joined the company. Though I think that’s the way the working world works–your relationship with people will change as you work with them. I think that particular relationship ended up fine. Dropbox was super, super flat and allergic to management in the early days, so pretty much everybody just worked on their own stuff and there wasn’t this sense of, “Oh man, this kid is bossing me around again.” It was never like that.

I do think all of us became much better friends but also, because we were spending so much time with each other, got a little bit of cabin fever. But overall, we worked super well with each other and had really high bandwidth communication because we had all come from the same place.

Craig : And how long did you stick around?

Aston : So I spent quite awhile at Dropbox–four and a half years. And the whole time I was like, “One day I’ll do a start up. I want do a start up. I don’t know what it will be, but I know there will be a day when I’ll have to leave the company and go do my own thing.”

The moment just sort of came when it came. I had just finished launching the API V1, which was the grand re-launching of the API. I wrote the original API for Dropbox. I helped work on V0, which is the first one we released publicly. And then V1 was this scaling up of the ambition of the API and also a huge code cleanup. The API was originally for our mobile client and so in opening up for other people we had to change some stuff so that it actually made sense. After releasing the API, I had this moment where I was like, “Oh, I actually could leave.”

Craig : Meaning you’d hit a milestone?

Aston : Yeah, that project was a big milestone and I didn’t have another big project waiting for me at the time. Also, the company had grown such that I didn’t feel like I was a bottleneck. I wasn’t this person who needed to be around to make sure stuff happened, which is what it was like when I first joined.

I thought, “I can give myself permission to leave. The company won’t die, they’ll be fine. And I can go off and do any of the random cool stuff I want to do.” So I left Dropbox and did YC the following summer.

Craig : Cool. What was the startup?

Aston : I was fascinated at the time with what now is literally a joke on “Silicon Valley”–social, mobile, local. The idea that we’ve got these cell phones that are a marvel of technology. And the convergence of the ability to communicate instantly seemed like a natural fit for this thing that was happening to me, which was wanting to hang out with friends at a random moment. It’s Friday night, I’m not doing anything, where is everybody else? I was fascinated by that question and I built a number of apps over the summer to try to address the problem. But I actually didn’t end up even publicly releasing any of them.

I have pretty high standards for what I thought would be super valuable and I just felt like I wasn’t there. I had a really good sense of what the problem was but I didn’t go into the summer with a clear sense of what the solution would be.

I think in general, consumer mobile is tough because what may work for you may not work for other people. Trying to find something that has really, really wide appeal is hard in the first place, then what’s more difficult is finding a business in there.

While building those apps I talked to a number of founders who had dead companies in the space. Just like graveyards worth of people who were trying to work on a similar problem. Some of them ex-YC, some not. Even with all of their wisdom and my own gut instinct, I never really got to a product that I was super proud of.

Craig : So did you demo anything at Demo Day?

Aston : I didn’t. I think I realized it wasn’t working a little bit before Demo Day. I took the last little bit of time before demo day to really reflect on whether or not I wanted to continue trying to solve that particular problem. I realized that if I raised money around solving the problem I wasn’t sure I was ever going get anybody’s money back.

Craig : Wow, awfully moral.

Aston : Yeah, I take all of this stuff pretty seriously and like I said, had a really high bar for what I thought would be valuable. Yeah, just didn’t do it.

You know, I tell people maybe the worst thing about Dropbox was that it went so well. I didn’t learn many bad things. I learned about things that come with success. And a lot of times with startups it’s more valuable to learn the things that come with failure.

Craig : That’s a great point. What other lessons have you learned that Dropbox’s success may have covered?

Aston : I didn’t have as strong of an appreciation as I do now for just how valuable it is to actually pick a great idea that has a great business behind it. It was some youthful naiveté that I think I’m beyond now. It seemed so easy with Dropbox. As far as I knew, Drew woke up one day with this idea and we built it. If you go read the YC application for Dropbox, we built literally what Drew said and almost every competitor Drew called out built exactly what we thought they would. And the only difference between the story there and the story in real life is that we didn’t get killed and that we ended up building a business.

I don’t know if Drew even estimated the business could be a billion dollar business, but he definitely thought that we had the same type of customers as we ended up having in the early days.

Craig : Wow.

Aston : It was an incredible thing to see an idea that we all thought was good actually work. It was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit, that when I had an idea that I thought was good, it didn’t work! And that’s a way more typical story for startups.

Craig : Do you have any advice on vetting ideas?

Aston : I’m a big believer now in founder/idea fit. I don’t know if that’s the right term but that concept’s definitely a real thing–matching what you’re building to what you want to be building. And I don’t just mean product, I mean company as well, and maybe company is the more important part. There are certain business ideas out there that I think are pretty awesome that I never want run myself for a variety of reasons. Some ideas are really, really sales heavy and I’m not a salesman. Some of them are about scale. There are definitely ideas out there that can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but my ambition is for something bigger.

I think there’s a lot more that goes into committing yourself to a long term project than I appreciated. And I don’t know if Drew and Arash would have committed to Dropbox if they knew it was going to take them a decade. A decade of their lives. I’m sure they love it. I definitely loved being a part of it too. But that’s just to say that, I didn’t fully appreciate the commitment needed to fully see an idea through.

My time in Y Combinator was like my grad school on founder/idea fit. I was working on this idea and on this problem that seemed real to me but wasn’t shaping up to be the type of business I wanted to build. So yeah, I didn’t build it.

Craig : Does that belief ever keep you from jumping onto projects?

Aston : Yes, definitely. I think the coping mechanism for not wanting to do something that doesn’t match your ideal is just as you said, to just not do anything.

What I did to get over that was instead of spending my time trying to the perfect startup idea, I just started playing again. That was on the advice of a number of serial entrepreneurs and people who had had these great exits.

For example, the founders of OkCupid who now are doing Keybase, which is this really awesome public key exchange. The way they got there was basically through this process that they shared with me, which is just play. Just be willing to explore ideas that you think are interesting and don’t worry a ton about how big they’ll be. Then cull them as you go. It’s like, “Okay, well this one was cool but it wasn’t the company we wanted to build, so let it go.”

Before discovering that letting go process – this was partially related fact that I was in Y Combinator – it felt like such a big thing for me to let an idea go. To say, “You know what, this isn’t it. I really want it to be it, but this isn’t it”. Now my mindset is, easy come easy go. I came up with that idea in a day! Why would that be the thing that I would spend the next five years of my life on?

That’s definitely a change of mentality for myself as an entrepreneur. My time since Y Combinator has been filled with lots and lots of little projects that have been extremely valuable for me in terms of learning. Some of them have made some money, some of them have not. None of them yet are the decade-long commitment thing that I would love to get to. But yeah, I think it’s all part of the process.

Craig : Man, I’m very impressed that you’re so astute in a business sense but also morally and technically. It’s cool.

Aston : Oh, thanks.

Craig : Definitely. Ok, so you’re an investor now. Can you explain how you vet companies as an investor versus as an employee?

Aston : Sure. So the reason investors have a portfolio is because it spreads out your risks, right? This company may fail. This company may 10X. This company may 100X. They offset each other. But as an employee and particularly a first employee, you’re really giving your life to this thing for however long it’s going to be alive and that’s a different sort of commitment.

If I were looking to become a first employee, first off, I’ll say that being a first employee is actually a pretty tough role. You’re basically a founder, in terms of the responsibility that you have and in terms of the emotional weight that the company will have on your life. You won’t be able to get away from it the same way employee number 50 or 500 will.

To that end, I think it’s important to make sure your personal life lines up with the company. It’s different for everyone but for me it was my first year out of college and I wanted to make sure I worked with people I really liked and trusted. Because you can write anything in a contract, but when it comes down to it, it’s very easy to break the contract and you have no recourse, right? I trusted Drew and Arash, basically, with my life. I was like, “These guys are great people and I can’t see a future in which they would do me wrong.” You need to really feel like you want to be associated with the company. For better or for worse, Dropbox is going to be on my resume forever.

So far it’s been great but that’s just to say that, you do have a lot of career risk when you go work with a company. If you work with people who aren’t good or aren’t scrupulous or things like that, it can hurt you. Those are the highest bits for me, “Who am I working with? Do I really want to be working with these people?” And then, I think the second thing is certainly, “This product, do I love it? Do I want be working on this business? Am I willing to keep working with these people on something related if this one doesn’t work?”

That last one’s a weird one. I think a lot of people end up working on things where they’re like, “I love this, but anything else, I hate.” That’s a bad attitude for an early employee because I think your responsibility, ultimately, is to stick with it longer than other employees and almost as long as the founders. You can get out a little bit earlier, but it does look bad when early employees are bailing. It hurts companies.

Being a first employee is a really, really big responsibility and you should be ready for it. As a young person I don’t think I understood how much responsibility I was stepping into but I mean, it was pretty easy for me to make that step because I felt so much confidence around the team and around the product. I knew I was going to learn so much that even if it didn’t work, it would be worth it.

Craig : As an investor, how much time do you spend investigating the business versus the founders?

Aston : I care way more about the business than I did as an employee. At Dropbox, I didn’t think very much at all about how much money we would make. And that was probably fine. I mean, like I said, I was happy enough to be working with the people and on the product. If it ended up with us failing on the business side, I was prepared for it, I expected it. I was actually the first person to push for asking for money from customers and I built out the billing system and then I looked over my computer at Drew and I was like, “How much should we charge?”

And he was like, “I don’t know, 10 bucks a month.”

I was like, “Sounds good to me.”

Craig : [Laughter]

Aston : [Laughter] Yeah, that’s level of financial modeling I was experiencing at Dropbox. I’m sure Drew had stuff with the investors that was a bit more sophisticated.

But yeah, as an employee you can’t make a portfolio, which means you would have to be right. And it’s very hard to know if a company is going to work or not. So I don’t think that could be a part of your calculus as an early employee.

Craig : Totally. All you have is the portfolio across your career. You get some amount of chances.

Aston : Yeah. That, I would say, is a good thing about small startups: they tend to fail fast. So, you know, if your company is failing every year and a half or so, you can get a lot in before you start getting up in the years.

Craig : So, related to finding startup opportunities. It seems like at MIT you were at the right place at the right time to meet people. How do you think about meeting new people now ?

Aston : That’s changed a lot since I moved here. My advice, actually, is to move to where you have lots of opportunities to run into interesting people who are doing cool stuff. My move to New York was probably not the best one in terms of networking around startuppy people. I don’t regret going, but if I had I moved immediately from college to Silicon Valley, I would have had way more people around me who were entrepreneurial and would have raised my chances, not only of finding an opportunity like Dropbox, but also potentially finding a co-founder and doing my own thing. I think getting around a place where the people think the way that you want to be thinking is super valuable.

Craig : And what about vetting them?

Aston : That’s tough. MIT is cheating. Going to MIT you end up getting to meet lots of people who are smart and fun to hang out with and you’ll get along with naturally. It’s much harder after school.

Craig : Agreed. Ok, last question. Do you have any book recommendations?

Aston : Let’s see. For business books, I really like Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s like the opposite of my Dropbox story in ways, so for me it was really eye opening. This idea of taking some people who are super experienced entrepreneurs, who have great connections, who have a billion dollar business idea, and then watching how crazy things get and how many ups and downs there can be on the way to success. It’s fascinating. And style-wise I just love it because it’s very casual and easy to read.

On the non-business side, I absolutely have to recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. He does a great job using his own personal experience as commentary on the rest of America. It may feel a little bit heavy-handed to some readers, but I think it’s heavy-handed on a really important set of issues about institutional racism. It’s about how this whole system that we have impacts a lot of people’s lives in ways that often go unrecognized. It’s a really great book, and it’s pretty short too.

Craig : That’s great to hear. Ok, let’s end there.

Aston : Cool. Good to hang.

Craig : Likewise! Thanks for your time.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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HOW TO GET STARTUP HUBS WORK

Companies do them because they have to learn it to get a job. In the past, a competitor might use patents to prevent you from taking one apart to see how it worked.1 But this is probably not an option for most magazines. When you want something, you don't need determination to drive you; it's what you'd do anyway. College was regarded as job training where I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than just an effect? But they are indirectly influenced in the practical sense that interest from other investors imposes a deadline. Otherwise you're probably just postponing the problem, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. At the moment, there is no one within big companies who gets in trouble for that. And yet there may be a way to choose a good language.

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes raising money take longer and cost more in legal fees. The catch is that Sequoia gets about 6000 business plans a year and funds about 20 of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300. As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will become increasingly important. No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for 6% of your company. If some applications can be increasingly inefficient while others continue to demand all the speed the hardware can deliver, faster computers will mean that languages have to cover an ever wider range of efficiencies. We think of the core of a language as a set of axioms, surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive power, simply for the sake of efficiency. My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell.

In this case, n is. To some extent, yes. The thought of all this stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same thing with programming languages. Of course, there are other factors to consider in a VC deal. What makes good food? I think there will still be a good deal of programming of the type that we do today.2 The word essay comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. There will always be pushing you toward the bottom. If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little progress there was in math between Hellenistic times and the Renaissance. Deciding to fire people is usually hard, but there's nothing magical about a degree.

So I don't even try to predict it. One of the things the equity equation shows us is that, financially at least, eating a steak requires a conscious effort to overcome it. The evolution of languages differs from the evolution of programming languages is more like the rate of evolution in programming languages is likely to lead, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Suppose the company wants to make a weak-willed person stronger-willed.3 Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? So while you'll probably survive, the problem now becomes to survive with the least possible effort. Those are interesting questions. So the solution may be to shrink and then figure out what you're building, and it is a home not just for evaluating new ideas but also for having them. Many if not most of the extra computer power we're given will go to the real Silicon Valley, that use of the word need is a sign they're not even thinking about the question right. I think they're onto something.

Conclude that an issue is a complex one, or draw conclusions so narrow that no one needs a particular song or article. But he turned out to be fuzzy around the edges if you examine it closely. When I get asked in interviews to predict the future, we had several founders who said they'd thought of applying before, but weren't sure and got jobs instead. I predict this situation is also temporary. Since this is in effect the company's profit on a hire, the market will determine that: if you're a hot opportunity, you can charge more. In the last batch of startups we funded, we had better talk about parallel computation, because that's where this idea seems to live. But unfortunately most investors are terrible judges. Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if the rate of new companies increases. The situation is much the same with digital books.4

2 that the spread of the Industrial Revolution. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. There are some kinds of ideas that are so threatening that it's hard for big companies even to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter what. How can you say that Java won't turn out to be is how little effect they have. Presumably many libraries will be for domains that don't even exist yet. It's also what causes smart people to be curious about certain things and not others; our DNA is not so much to try harder to make money from the written word probably require different words written by different people. Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas.5 However many Google does, Microsoft should do ten times as many.6 The first step is to have an explicit belief in change.

Notes

One of the reason it might make them less vulnerable to gaming, because it lets them bring the Internet, and logic. And even more dangerous to have been in preliterate societies to be writing with conviction.

Experienced investors know about it wrong. In rice cooker.

The solution was a kid who had recently arrived from Russia. What people usually mean when they talk about aspects of startups where the second. Pliny Hist. A variant is that you should never sell i.

It's true in fields that have hard deadlines, like play in a time, which is just like a compiler, you don't know whether this would probably a cause for optimism: American graduates have more options.

Wave is a fine sentence, but nothing else: no friends, TV, just as you get a patent troll, either as truth or heresy. Lecuyer, Christophe, Making Silicon Valley, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are like, and when you use this thing yourself, if you don't know the combination of circumstances in the few cases where it was more expensive, a lot about some disease they'll see once in China, Yale University Press, 2005. Everyone's taught about it well enough to guarantee good effects. But it wouldn't be able to spend on trade goods to make your fortune?

The brand of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told that they are within any given time I had a tiny. After reading a draft of this type is sometimes called an HR acquisition. Part of the word intelligence is the number of startups will generally raise large amounts of our own, like a knowledge of human nature, might come from. And then of course.

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perfectirishgifts · 3 years

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Why It’s So Hard To Fund A Manufacturing Startup

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/why-its-so-hard-to-fund-a-manufacturing-startup/

Why It’s So Hard To Fund A Manufacturing Startup

There’s a saying in the software world, Andrew Lonsberry, CEO of Path Robotics, told me recently. “If you’re not embarrassed by your first launch, then you’re too late.”

But when you’re making a physical product, faulty first versions can be disastrous. “Someone could get hurt, materials could be destroyed and you’ve set yourself up for an incredibly bad reputation,” Lonsberry says. “It’s not as easy to pivot.”

Nailing it on the first try is only one of the unique challenges that manufacturing startups face in launching and raising capital. Talk to founders like Lonsberry and you might also hear about the issues I see manufacturers crash into all the time: the dearth of investors, the difficulty finding space and talent and the razor-thin margins for error on your idea, your business plan and your execution.

Want Venture Capital? Here’s What You Should Know

When most of us think of startup financing, we think venture capital. It’s obviously not the only way to get your startup funded, but it is alluring because VC investors can throw a lot of money at ideas they like. And if they like your idea, it probably means you’re onto something big. Most upper-tier VCs, after all, are looking for triple-digit returns on their investments.

But in my experience, VCs’ home-run expectations pose a real challenge for startups in such a large – but fragmented – industry, where there are very few dominant players. “If you look at the top 50 public companies in the world by revenue, you won’t find a whole lot focused only on manufacturing,” Aaron Slodov, founder and CEO of a forthcoming manufacturing startup, said. “They’re selling a commodity, or they’re a consumer retailer, or they’re a tech company.”

I watched Slodov gain traction with an idea he hopes will disrupt the injection molding space – “a $500 billion global market with no single dominant player” – where the average worker in the U.S. is over 46 years old. It helps that Slodov will be going through Y Combinator, a pre-eminent Silicon Valley accelerator program that exposes entrepreneurs to a powerful audience of early-stage investors. His company’s acceptance into Y Combinator is a rare exception for a “hard tech”-focused company in a normally software-heavy environment. Maybe most importantly, Slodov had previously co-founded a successful software startup.

Yet even if manufacturing entrepreneurs seeking VC dollars can solve the market size issue, they must still overcome another significant barrier: lower profit margins.

It’s easy to see how a mobile app startup with a recurring revenue model would be attractive to VCs: Low overhead and a high number of revenue multipliers equals high gross margins. That can be difficult for manufacturers whose revenue models are typically built on one-time hardware purchases.

“Two software VCs told me, if you’re trying to talk about a one-time purchase, get out of here,” Lonsberry recalls.

That prompted him to get creative. A recurring, subscription-based revenue model wasn’t immediately intuitive for a company that sells industrial welding robots, but Lonsberry concocted one anyway. It required a distinct mindset shift, embracing the idea that the software that powers Lonsberry’s robots is a living system, which his team is continuously improving. That enabled them to shift to a subscription model.

It also required shifting the mindset of the manufacturers Lonsberry was selling to. He came up with a saying to communicate the idea to customers: “Essentially, ‘you’ve been using a subscription model for forever. It’s the longest one in existence: human labor.’” Lonsberry’s company has now received over $15 million in funding.

Government Grants: A Good Alternative, but Still Tricky

For some manufacturing startups, grant funding is a great way to get started: either in tandem with VC funding or as an initial injection of capital that might draw investors later. Government grants are non-dilutive – you don’t give up any ownership – and you don’t have to pay them back. But they come with their own set of challenges.

Both Onas Bolton, founder of Octet Scientific, and Don Scipione, founder of Roll-A-Rack, have had great success with federal grants, namely the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

Bolton, whose company is developing chemicals to create safer, greener and cheaper zinc batteries, feels lucky that such a program exists. He received Phase I funding, which can range from $50,000-$250,000.

“There really aren’t many other ways we could’ve gotten started,” he says. “We saw potential but didn’t have a lot of proof that what we’re doing would work yet.” Chemical research also requires space, materials and time – the cost of which would’ve made it hard for Bolton to win over angel investors.

Meanwhile, Scipione’s company, which is developing a faster, cheaper way to rack solar panels, recently received $1 million in Phase II SBIR funding. But he cautions that grant funding has its pitfalls for manufacturers as well. First of all, the process is long and tedious. “You have to go through the process of finding out if you have an idea that overlaps with what government agencies are looking for,” he says. “And it takes a hundred hours to make a good proposal.” There’s also an unfunded three-to-five-month period between the ending of Phase I funding and the start of Phase II, which can wreak havoc on founders if they don’t plan for it ahead of time.

Roll-A-Rack is a new patent-pending solar-panel racking system that reduces racking and installation … [] costs of flat-roof commercial or ground-based ballasted systems by 33 percent.

Additionally, products sourced for the R&D that follows such grant funding must be American made, unless there are no alternatives – another challenge for manufacturing startups pursuing grant funding. Fortunately, Scipione has found good pricing in Ohio, where his company is based. But he wonders: “What would I do if I couldn’t be competitive because everyone else is offshoring?”

In any case, for Bolton and Scipione, grant funding gives them the time and resources to build prototypes, conduct more R&D and start connecting with customers. Down the line, this should help them attract other investors – or get bank loans now that they have the machinery, raw materials and other assets to borrow against.

Don’t Be Discouraged – Manufacturing Needs You

Whether it’s a grant or VC money or some other type of financing, there are a few things any entrepreneur raising for their manufacturing startup should do: Speak to customers early and often, build out a strong value proposition and collaborate if you can – be it with nonprofit think tanks and incubators, other manufacturers, academic institutions, NGOs or local civic infrastructure.

It’s never easy to get funding, and this may be especially true for manufacturing startups. But it can be done. It’s important to understand that and to be realistic about the challenges, not only for the sake of your own startup but because the industry needs fresh, technology-driven upstarts.

As Bolton puts it, “There is always going to be more risk involved with manufactured products versus virtual ones, but the need can also be more certain. As long as we live in a physical world, there will be need for better physical products and manufacturing innovation.”

From Manufacturing in Perfectirishgifts

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hippoland · 6 years

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Personal update: on building a meritocracy in our startup ecosystem

Happy New Year! I am so excited and hopeful for 2018.

I grew up here in the Silicon Valley during the dot com boom. It was an exciting time. My childhood very much had a strong influence on my career choices. My parents were not in the tech industry. I went into engineering simply because of where I grew up and the mentors who surrounded me. Had I grown up anywhere else, I seriously doubt I would have even thought about starting a company.

When most people think of the dot com era, they immediately think about all the money that was made (and lost). They think about bubbles. Or speculation. But to me, the dot com era was about changing billions of lives in a fast and impactful way. For example, this era made information immensely accessible. Today, if we want to learn things, we go online, and we search for information. We no longer go to the library and look in books. This has made information accessible to not only those with means but also accessible to everyone worldwide who can get online. The dot com era also made commerce pervasive and convenient. If we want to buy something, we no longer need to go to the store during business hours. We just buy them online at anytime from just about anywhere in the world. The dot com era made the world a smaller and more equitable place. It democratized access. It was a big step in the right direction for building a better society and a better world.

But our work is not done.

It is entrepreneurs who do all the hard work of building companies. But one of the things I've noticed through investing in seed startups these past few years is that early stage funding is incredibly skewed towards certain types of founders or ideas. How you look. Where you went to school. Where you worked. How you talk. All of these things matter tremendously in your ability as an entrepreneur to raise money. And it is investors who have influence on what problems in the world are solved.

At 500 Startups, I had the honor of seeing 20k+ startup pitches. I championed, signed-off on, and/or coached ~200 companies. And through seeing more companies than most VCs will see in a lifetime, I was able to do my own pattern matching, which didn't align with what most of the industry looks for. Namely, the best founders can come from anywhere. Where you went to school or worked, what you look like, and how well you talk are all things that actually don't matter in your ability to build a successful company. Other traits or skills that do matter include things like the ability to learn new skills quickly. And having tenacity and grit. Teamwork. Recruiting. Building a product or service that your users / customers love. And my favorite, the one trait that all the best founders have is the ability execute with speed. These traits are what matter in founders.

And so, there's a huge disconnect in how we fund founders today at the earliest stages. And over the last couple of years, that began to frustrate me. I saw founders who were really awesome, as defined by fast executors with great VC-sized opportunities ahead of them, who just struggle to raise money. This is because these founders didn't fit what most early stage investors were looking for. Silicon Valley purports itself as being a meritocracy -- the "best ideas" and "best people" win. But, it's not.

(Listen to my conversation with Harry Stebbings about this. Thank you Harry!)

And, there are huge implications for all of this. There are big world problems that are neglected because the right founders who understand these problems are not funded to solve them. And this is because their demographics do not fit the pattern that many investors are looking for. Beyond the loss of innovation, there are also additional implications. Last summer, for example, we saw a lot of breaking news come out of our industry. We saw news of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Beyond this, we have all seen investors treat founders whose businesses they are not interested in rudely or with disrespect. I will never forget how I was treated as an entrepreneur by some investors in this industry. And, now I see some of these same people act 180 degrees differently around me, because we are now peers. Many founders will not be able to raise money successfully, but everyone deserves respect and professionalism regardless of what he/she is building. And much of this inappropriateness, I think, in large part, stems from some of the power dynamics and demographic imbalances that exist in this industry.

So, when I turned 35 over a year ago, I had a bit of an existential crisis -- what was I doing with my life? Through this blog, talks, and through 500 Startups, I'd coached so many founders on how to play this early stage fundraising game. What to say. What not to say. How to sell yourself so that you look and sound good. How to fit into the mold that investors are looking for as best as you can. This didn’t fully sit right with me. On one hand, I was helping a lot of founders raise money. But on the other hand, I was just helping people navigate our current broken fundraising system and not actually changing it to make it better.

Through some soul searching, I realized that what I wanted to do for the next 30 years or so is to make our startup ecosystem (more of) a meritocracy. The lack of a meritocracy in our startup ecosystem is hampering world progress. If you are a great founder, you should be able to access resources. And you should not have to put up with weird bullsh*t to do so. Period.

This work will take a long time. There are actually a lot of reasons for why our industry is so antiquated and why progress has been slow to date. One reason is that as a smaller investor, I am beholden to what other investors out there are interested in backing, otherwise my companies will just die due to lack of downstream capital or co-investors. So, as a microfund or an angel, you can have some conviction that goes against the grain but not a lot. That's just one of many reasons why it has been difficult to effect change quickly. So in the beginning, I will continue to coach my founders on how to best navigate our current fundraising channels. But over time, this will change.

I've never had so much hope for our startup ecosystem as now. 2018 is the start of groundbreaking change in our industry. We now have new micro VCs cropping up left and right who are spiritually aligned on the fact that great founders can come from anywhere. And I am also seeing interesting new fundraising mechanisms crop up really quickly -- crowdfunding and ICOs. Both of these fundraising channels don’t require you to go to a conference room on Sand Hill -- you raise money online from people who may never have met you in person. I think we will look back on 2018 and say that was the year that everything really started to change.

There's a lot of work ahead, and I’ll talk more about what I’m investing in and the groundwork I’m trying to lay in future blog posts. I will also spend more time in 2018 resuming my blog posts on tactical fundraising tips as the fundraising landscape for early stage startups evolves.

But I am so excited to roll up my sleeves and get started on this 30 year mission. Oprah said it best this week, "A new day is on the horizon." Let's go level the playing field for entrepreneurs!

For more of my ramblings on early stage fundraising, subscribe to my newsletter.

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coopdigitalnewsletter · 4 years

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8 July 2020: Goats on Zoom. Pubs can track and trace.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Goat-2-meeting]

Goats on Zoom and waving goodbye

Why we can't stop waving at the end of video calls - we’re over-performing the social cues of conversation closure because we feel that just closing a browser tab is ambiguous or abrupt. This is just one of many ways that video calling is uncomfortable:

It’s harder to pick up on social cues. You’re looking at your own face. Others are dropping in and out of the call. You’re doing the “Can you hear me? No I think your mic is off” dance. You can’t see if your boss agrees with what you’re saying because the video makes her look like an impressionist painting. All of this makes video calls exhausting. You could say that video calls come with an unexpectedly large “cost of communication”.

If you’d like your calls to be more fun here’s an enterprising Lancashire farm that’ll have a goat participate in your Zoom call. The income has helped them keep staff on and will go toward renewable energy. “The goats are savvy in Microsoft teams, Webex, Blue Jeans, Skype, Google Hangouts, Jitsi, Go To Meeting and pretty much all other video platforms from which you can send a call invite link”, though the newsletter is confident that the goats don’t enjoy Webex.

#startupidea: if you’d pay £6 to have a goat join your video call for a laugh, what would you pay to have an owl join it so you didn’t need to be in the meeting at all? More, surely! (In Silicon Valley a brief goat-2-meeting costs $100!)

Also: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan - "unprecedented flexibility" to 80,000 workers in Japan. Work is going remote-friendly if not quite remote-first.

If you miss the office, you can put its soothing tones on in the background: I miss the office.

Pubs will track and trace

Pubs are reopening in England. Fancy a pint? You might need an app for that. UKGov suggested that pubs should record personal details of customers to help track and trace efforts if there were any outbreaks. But there are obvious concerns around privacy and public health: you’d guess that record keeping, data accuracy and access to data are all going to be difficult or uncertain in a pub.

On the other hand, pubs seem to be doing a pretty good job running an informal track and trace service!: “Lighthouse had contacted about 100 customers before NHS Test and Trace had been in touch with management”.

Primark down 75%: retail winners and losers

The virus lockdown has had uneven effects on retail. Obviously online has done well. Also “essential” sectors like supermarkets, though there increased sales offline have been counter balanced by increased virus costs (staffing, social distancing measures etc). And of course many businesses have raced to add online shopping: 85,000 businesses launch online shops as B2C and B2B ecommerce surge in lockdown.

Those who’ve struggled are “non-essential” sectors and those that rely on customer proximity: pubs, cafes, offline-only retail etc. Primark sales are down 75% in most recent quarter - this is the lockdown effect because Primark doesn’t sell online.

Ghost kitchens

“Ghost kitchens” have been around for a few years - these are restaurants with no seating: a smaller building in a cheaper location prepares the same number of meals, all for delivery. In 2018 Deliveroo was setting up delivery-only kitchens for restaurants:

A “ghost restaurant” is one that makes food solely for delivery customers - you can’t go to one and get a table. That’s the US term - in the UK they’re called “dark kitchens”. Deliveroo Editions is dark-kitchens-as-a-service: Deliveroo provides them to existing food brands. For larger restaurant operators, dark kitchens can load balance the peak times. For small ones, the kitchens can test demand in a new location without the capital investment in property: “The property requirement is data driven. Deliveroo know exactly where their customers are, the amount they spend, the frequency at which they order and the types of cuisine that are most popular in an area. From the fledgling operator’s perspective, this can lower the risk of venturing into uncharted territories and drive sales up as much as 400%.”

What if this idea was expanded out into high-street-as-a-service? Could you have a high street without a retail shopfront? Or a shopfront with no stock? The internet and logistics have made it possible to separate the point of product discovery from the purchase from the inventory from the delivery/handover. And these points can be recombined in many different ways. IKEA’s warehouse, Argos’s front/back of store, Deliveroo, Amazon’s many forms - all possible variations.

And in the virustimes of 2020, the ghost kitchens are doing well. They now look like "Ghost Kitchen Colonies" (or “commissary” kitchens): one site that hosts the kitchens for many restaurants.

“This means sharing ingredients, equipment, and cooking staff to supply multiple restaurant brands. For customers, this provides the opportunity to order different types of food from the same address, and saves companies on overheads and wasting resources.”

Uber: grocery delivery

Before the virus Uber was primarily a taxi company: it used cars to move people around. Once lockdowns started, the people weren’t moving, but the cars still could. So its Uber Eats cars-that-move-meals business overtook the cars-that-move-people business. In June it missed out on buying rival meal delivery platform Grubhub (Just Eat made a last minute order which won that one), so this week Uber has just bought US meal delivery service Postmates, and will run it alongside its existing Uber Eats.

But if you have an on-demand network of cars you can move other things with it too. Uber also says it will be starting grocery delivery in Canada, Latin America and some US cities soon. It bought Cornershop (a grocery delivery startup a bit like Instacart) last year. It’s also a step towards the logistics space. The next step might be combining the car with ghost kitchens: on demand food truck delivery kitchens.

Various things

Nicki Sprinz at ustwo: “As a white person with privilege and relative influence, I invite people to hold me to account, and I must stay uncomfortable. We have to do the hard work to ensure we start to dismantle the structural racism we have benefited from for years.”

Climatestrike software licence: “developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction”.

“Diversity & Inclusion at Conferences and Events (DICE) provides certification and guidance to help conferences and events deliver a representative and diverse set of speakers, perspectives, and attendees.”

Goldman Sachs bank designs its own typeface. It has to work with lots of small numbers, so it might be good for spreadsheet fans (hello).

“Find yourself an alternative pint while also supporting local independent pubs and bars” - Neverspoons.

Co-op Digital news and events

The government’s consultation response on violence and abuse toward shop staff and The Co-op’s report on it in Sep 2019: “Our latest research shows that retail crime has reached epidemic proportions, with 115 retail workers physically attacked every day in the UK, with many more verbally abused and threatened. This needs to change. We need the UK Government to urgently protect shop workers and send a clear message that violence and verbal aggression will not be tolerated in shops.”

The Federation House team is running weekly drop-in chats for the community every Wednesday at 10am: Join us here. See our online events. You can also see how The Federation is planning for a safe return to the co-working floor.

Free of charge events:

Andy’s Man Club – Gentleman's Peer to Peer Mental Health Meet Up – Mondays 7pm

Volunteer with Code Your Future – Online Meet Up – 8 July - 6pm

Beginners Guide to Retrofit – Webinar – 8 July – 6pm

Northern Azure User Group – Online Meet Up – 8 July - 6pm

Building Resilience within your teams - Webinar – 9 July – 12.30pm

Accessing Open Data through API’s – Webinar – 14 July – 6.30pm

Python for Beginners – Online Workshop – 16 July - 4pm

Paid for events:

Invisible Cities - Online Tours of Manchester or Edinburgh – Various Dates & Times

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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AND YOU KNOW WHO GOT THEM

Smaller companies were increasingly able to survive as formerly narrow channels to consumers broadened. They seem to like us too.1 That gets you James Bond, who knows what to do in situations where few others could. What about the more theoretical question of whether hockey would be a bad sign if they weren't; it would be false. And partly a larger part than he would admit that he doesn't want to see.2 The problem is, a lot of the problems change. On the other hand, history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their kids were wasting their time and who were right. Why didn't Henry Ford realize that networks of cooperating companies work better than a single big company? If you want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back.3

Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. My guess is that a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for fun, and mostly it wasn't. It turns out I have a lot of time on bullshit things or lose to people who do. I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. In most fields, prototypes have traditionally been made out of different materials. Now a lot of something. The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. Nor did they work for big companies not even to try to solve problems and simply not discount weird hunches you have in the process. If you want to prepare yourself to start a startup, the thought of our startups keeps me up at night. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. As with gangs, we have some idea what your prospects might be if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a newborn till age 18.4

Aggregators show how much better you can do to help: Avoid distractions. In short, the disasters this summer were just the usual childhood diseases. And it does seem as if Google was a collaboration. The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of what happened in finance too. Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood. One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but a leading indicator.5 To some extent this was because the companies themselves had become sclerotic.6 How can you tell if you're up to it, the only way to get an accurate drawing is not to spend it having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types of problems—wisdom to human problems and intelligence to abstract ones. In fact, we were surprised how much time I spent making introductions. What a solitary task startups are.

Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today. It will take more experience to know for sure, but my guess is that a lot of time on them have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive. Having coffee with a friend matters. Notice I said what they need, not what they want. Palm and RIM haven't a hope. You can see it in old photos. They want to get rich. As one of the things startups do right without realizing it.

Developments in finance, communications, transportation, and manufacturing enabled a new type of company whose goal was above all scale. That form of fragmentation, like the chemical elements. That way we can avoid being discontented about being discontented. And that means other questions aren't. I began with, that it doesn't matter much; it will change anyway. And we have to tell them the best way to begin may not be to write a prototype that solves a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a remedial character. So by studying the intended users include the designer himself.7 I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS. But you yourself are the most important things to remember about divorce, one of which is: You shouldn't put the blame on one parent, because divorce is never only one person's fault. In 1995, writing software for end users was effectively identical with writing Windows applications. Once an essay has had a couple thousand page views I feel reasonably confident about it.

You won't feel later like that was a waste of time. Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to private schools or wished they did started to dress preppy, and kids who wanted to seem rebellious made a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad specifically in the sense of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Within Y Combinator, which is more than they paid him. What was really happening was de-oligopolization. I mean business can learn from open source: that people working for money, but also everyone who aspired to it—which in the middle of the century our two big forces intersect, in the now pointless secrecy of the Masons. At the very least we have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only have to keep the peace. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. If the world were static, we could just program in machine language. The reason, I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I am self-indulgent in the sense of being an insider. If you want to start startups hope universities can teach them about startups if they were merely hiring people.8 100,000 people worked there.

Notes

The other reason they pay a lot of the whole fund.

The amusing thing is, it would have seemed to Aristotle the core: the resources they expend on the Daddy Model and reality is the kind that prevents you from starving.

Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb? It's lame that VCs play such games, books, newspapers, or pigs, to the environment. You may not have raised money at first had two parts: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people together. The mere possibility of being absorbed by the size of the current edition, which are a small proportion of spam, but all they demand from art is brand, and so don't deserve to keep the next round.

How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an industrialized country encounters the idea of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will seem as if having good intentions were enough to absorb that. So the cost can be times when what you're doing. Investors are fine with funding nerds. In a country with a potential acquirer unless you want to know about a week for 19 years, it becomes an advantage to be about 50%.

Believe me, I should add that none who read this to be very promising, because a part has come unscrewed, you have to do that. Mueller, Friedrich M. Ideas are one of the world. As well as good ones don't even try.

Few technologies have one clear inventor. I paint someone's house, the best new startups.

With the good groups, you have to want to create a silicon valley in Israel. For example, if you don't, you're using a degenerate case of Bayes' Rule.

The continuing popularity of religion is the odds are slightly more interesting than later ones, it will seem like noise. I'm talking here about which is something inexperienced founders. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912.

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startuppaisa · 4 years

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This is How VC Firms Can Help You in Startup Funding

VC firms or Venture Capital firms have existed from the time startups required seed capital to get the funding support. These organizations are identified to support business at many stages. VC firms contain a set of companies that are willing to offer money to startups which are all set to get into the market. Earlier, VC firms have supported several startups that we know now as one of the biggest players in their industry. Still, the question of how VC firms help in startup funding remains unanswered. In this guide, I will throw some light on how VC firms can help you in your startup funding.

How VC Firms Can Help You

Two key aspects play a crucial role when it comes to VC firms funding your startup. The two key aspects are limited and general partners. General partners are the individuals who are involved in managing communication between startups and investors. They are responsible for initiating and making terms and agreements successful among both of them. Limited partners are all the investors or investment bodies that will provide money in the form of seed capital to the startups. However, the organizations offering seed capital could or couldn’t be the partner of VC firms. This makes VC firms unique from other types of investors.

On the other hand, startups should be able to convince VC firms to offer money to them. Startups should have certain qualities that make them appear as a golden choice of investment. VC firms are very good at making profitable investments in these startups. Due to such ability, they are able to profit both the limited partners and startups.

How Venture Capitalists Earn Money

These organizations could have a vast amount of money to make startups successful. There are two ways by which VC firms can make money.

Management fees- The management of startup assets by the professionals could have some expense. This expense comes under the management fees. The management fees are paid at 2 to 3 percent of capital gained from VC firms.

Carry- Carry is defined as the profit or share given to the investors after the investment is made successfully. Lots of money is earned by Venture capitalists with these profits.

Influence of VC Firms On Startups

Startups have always benefited by taking help from VC firms. I also mentioned before that some of the tech startups emerged as global players in the market. The general partners could be professionals that are ready to help startups with other resources besides seeking VC funding. These professionals generally have a network that could include other successful entrepreneurs and angel investors. Startups should also know that VC firms have a life span of 10 years. After that, they will try to look for the exit plan. However, these organizations could help startups indirectly. VC firms are a lot busy while seeking other better investment opportunities.

List Of Top VC Firms

After you have understood how VC firms help startups, it’s good to know about some of the best VC firms operating around the world.

Accel– It is an organization that is active from the very beginning. The firm has supported companies such as Facebook, Braintree, and Dropbox. Accel is an expert in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the entrepreneurs.

Andreessen Horowitz- It is a VC firm which is located in Silicon Valley. This organization has invested in OfferUp, Everlaw, Allset, and so on.

Benchmark- It is a VC firm that is mostly interested in tech startups. Some of the startups it has supported are Digits, Docker, and Modern Treasury.

Index Ventures- This VC firm has shown interest in technology and biotechnology. Some of the startups it has invested in are Fast.co, Collibra, Double, and so on.

Sequoia Capital- This VC firm has its offices in several major countries. It has helped startups like Tecton.AI, Knowde, Limbix, Robinhood, etc.

Bessemer Venture Partners– Bessemer is located in New York. This VC firm has invested in Okera, Shippo, and Axonius.

Founders Fund- This organization is located in San Francisco. It has invested in PsiQ, Motherly, and SpaceX.

GSV Capital- GSV Capital has mainly focused on China and the U.S.A. The VC firm has invested in Coder, EOI Technology, and Frubana.

To Sum Up

Until now, you would have known how VC firms can help you in startup funding. You should always approach them, as these organizations are always available to provide funding for new startup companies. If you have a better business plan, investors will always come to support you. VC firms have the power to make your startup a successful player in the market. However, care should be taken while agreeing with the terms and conditions. Don’t allow investors to take a larger percentage of stake in your organization. You can play safe by clearing all the doubts from the very beginning. Doing this will always be beneficial for your startup at the present and in the future.

Reference Url:- Startup Paisa

#funding support funding your startup how vc firms help in startup funding seeking vc funding vc firms funding for new startup companies.

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