What I read this week (week of 08/29/2022)
Remove that ‘exit strategy’ slide from your pitch deck
- You don’t know when that happens and the investor wants a 10x return in the best case.
- Removing the exit slide from your deck means that at least you’re not the person who brings it up. But what do you do when an investor asks? There’s only one correct answer: “I am building this company to eventually IPO. If reasonable acquisition offers come in, I’ll take them to my board for discussion.”
Retention measures the ability of your product to keep (1) users (2) active (3) over time.
- Depending on your business model and type, “users” can mean customers, free users, or free users with a purchase, so retention calculation and definition will be different.
- “Active” can be a range of activity events, and often you have to pick the event that is available, consistent across your platforms, and clean.
- “Over time” can be tricky to define—bound to a specific timeline or a rolling average? Pick your X-day or unbounded retention type based on your product usage.
How venture capital works – back to basic
- Most of startup probably don’t need a VC funding, or simply they’re not qualified as a VC funding candidate
- The article has an example spreadsheet to list how a VC firm would deploy 30 million and ideally got 90 million returned.
- Silently, huge AI progress in the last several years, represented by the Dell-E 2
- In the meanwhile, more emerging risks from AI passing human - in my opinion, still quite a distinguish for computer to make decision based on common sense
What’s missing is a shared, value-neutral way of talking about what today’s A.I. systems are actually capable of doing, and what specific risks and opportunities those capabilities present.
Stop ghosting and start saying no
- One of the biggest drivers of ghosting can be when we overcommit ourselves and take on more than we can actually do. It can then be hard to admit that we can’t fulfill our promises and that we may disappoint others. Some leaders may choose silence and no longer being in communication as the easier answer, which is when ghosting ensues.
What does the future looks like for e-commerce aggregator
- Need to pause the financial game and focus on the real operation
- Really interesting to see this kind of competition exists for real
