Francesco Agosti

In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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💯 If your team is drowning in support tickets and customer "rough edges" you should probably sit back and evaluate if you have a viable product. At the very least, you should evaluate if your product team is correctly focused on the needs of your customers when this pattern emerges. "Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place." "In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team." Customer feedback is a gift. Don't squander it or pawn the problem off on a man-power to solve it. A pile-up here is *always* a sign that your product direction needs improvement.

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As a technical founder, one of the biggest challenges in scaling from $1M to $10M ARR is balancing two mindsets: the creativity and passion that helped you build an incredible product, and the operational discipline needed to lead a growing organization. To evolve from an IC to a founder-CEO, focus on these 3 areas: 1️⃣ Establish a hiring playbook Develop a structured process to assess candidates using scorecards for their resume, interview, and reference checks. Grade each on a 1-10 scale and dig deeper if a reference doesn't give a 9 or 10. 2️⃣ Delegate, but stay hands-on Empower your team, but also seek out the "ground truth" - join customer calls, have skip-level conversations with ICs, and interview key candidates yourself. Lean in to understand the details of each executive's role. Only then can you set expectations and evaluate the performance of your team. 3️⃣ Define a culture that can scale Be proactive about articulating your culture's core tenets. Approach it with the same rigor and customer-centricity you bring to building products. A strong culture is the "shared operating system" that allows a large organization to function as a cohesive whole. Learn more from my conversations with Doug Winter of Seismic, Mohit Aron of Cohesity, and Sanjit Biswas of Samsara in the latest edition of B2BaCEO: https://lnkd.in/emsvFN9q

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Is this the end of embeddings? Hear from Josh and Tashrish on the pros and cons of using embeddings-based RAG for document data extraction and our experiments with switching to completions-only RAG.

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Check out how easy it is to gather all the data (backfill) you could ever need from Coinbase's BASE chain, using QuickNode ⚡Streams product 👉👇

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TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firms Alpha Partners, SignalRank and now SaaS Ventures help seed VCs pay for shares when big VCs try to price — or push — them out Lee Edwards, partner at Root VC, has a saying at his firm that “pro rata rights are earned, not given.” That may be a bit of a stretch since pro rata refers to a term that VCs put in their term sheets that gives them the right to buy more shares in a portfolio company during consequent funding rounds to maintain an ownership percentage and avoid dilution. Still, while these rights are not exactly “earned,” they can be expensive. One of the latest trends in VC investing these days are funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise their pro rata rights. https://lnkd.in/dRM3RvdA By Christine Hall

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I recently talked with Paz Yanover, VP of Product at Amplication, about creating and managing effective docs. Here is his developer docs success formula (check 1st comment): In this interview, Paz shares his formula to creating developer docs that drive product adoption. You'll learn: - The important role docs plays in support and attracting devs - Tips for balancing technical accuracy with user-friendliness in your docs - Strategies for effective collaboration between technical writers and product teams Check the first comment for the full interview. --- Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Derick Ruiz for more.

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An excerpt from our weekly newsletter: (a link to subscribe is in the comments) Enterprise software malaise. The biggest news in tech this week seems to be a widening sense of capitulation around enterprise software valuations. Jamin Ball of Altimer Capital wrote that software sentiment had crumbled. There are concerns around AI, but the main issue seems to be a slowdown in growth in general. As Jamin writes, “growth hasn’t rebounded - there was no v shaped recovery. In fact, forward estimates are starting to go down, not up. Sure, the strong headwinds have abated, but the headwinds haven’t been replaced with tailwinds. Everyone is still waiting for growth to “re-accelerate,” and a number of companies are implying this will come in the back half of the year, but will it? Feels like investors are broadly more comfortable waiting for the data to show up. What’s more likely is the current state we find ourselves in is likely to be the equilibrium.” Anita Ramaswamy, writing in The Information, argues that the selloff and the collapse of sentiment is overdone: “The market’s panicked reaction may be overdone. It’s far too early to judge how much companies will shift their spending from existing enterprise software firms to new AI services, and when. Given questions about large language models’ accuracy and cost, which have caused many businesses to hold off spending on AI-powered services so far, the near-term impact on software spending may be minimal. And, of course, software companies such as Salesforce are adding AI tech to their existing products in an effort to cash in on the AI boom. That complicates the issue, as some software believers think AI can help drive growth for older companies, while others think it will kill them. Whatever happens, the shift is likely to take years.” Jared Sleeper pointed out that software is just naturally growing slower as it goes logarithmic. “As bad as all of that sounds, there is nothing to fret about here per se over the long run. It isn’t surprising that an adjustment away from behaviors learned over two decades. It is actually an altogether more benign explanation for the current malaise than some of the others circulating. In this scenario, SaaS still has a healthy decade of well-above-GDP growth ahead of it (without considering AI’s impact). There are still plenty of exciting startups which for one reason or another are less mature than the sector overall and merit investment levels that harken back to headier days. We're experiencing a normal adjustment period of a disruptive, exponentially growing technology- not an existential crisis.” Tomasz Tunguz also addressed these concerns, pointing out that “In the last 12 months, public software companies will grow on average 17%, which will add $100b in revenue across these businesses.”

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Hiring and working with excellent people is what makes starting a company so fun

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Great take from Orel Zilberman - Slack is killing your productivity. Derrick Schommer and I heard this message while doing ICP interviews. DevHuddle has features available (and some on the roadmap) to fix the interruption-tax of async communication tools that are treated as sync communication tools. It helps to have a culture of truly async collaboration to increase everyone's velocity. https://lnkd.in/eypeaVXV

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⚡ 🎇 Basis Theory x Stripe ⚡ 🎇 https://lnkd.in/gfYrwF_G With this integration, leveraging Stripe's new Forward API, it is now possible for ANY merchant or platform - regardless of size, sophistication or resource allocation/availability - to get all of the benefits (control, freedom, flexibility, leverage, redundancy, etc.) that companies like Netflix, Microsoft and Uber spent millions of dollars of engineering resources to build with a single API call! The vitamin 💊 now beats the painkiller 💉 Get started today for less than $500/mo! 👇 https://lnkd.in/gzM6QMKQ *no frontend changes required

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GPTZero has skyrocketed to profitability within 18 months, raking in millions. With 500% ARR growth in six months and user growth from 1 million to 4 million in a year. While many AI-detection companies struggle with accuracy, GPTZero excels, leveraging vast data and advanced LLM models using the latest open-source tools. Initially celebrated for helping teachers spot AI-generated student work, GPTZero's clientele now includes government agencies, grant writers, hiring managers, and AI training data labelers. One founder noted, "We have a big data advantage with millions of examples of human versus AI-generated text," proving the quality of data fed into AI models is crucial. https://lnkd.in/gREnQ2ps #ai #sustainabledevelopmenttechnology #emergingtechnology

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Nice overview of how we're using data to inform how we invest in early-stage founders. We'll be announcing more this summer but we're seeing some really interesting early data. https://lnkd.in/exU_Juf5

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I've had the privilege to know Max Kanat-Alexander for the last year through our Hangar DX community, and since then I've learned so much about DevEx him. Max is the author of Code Simplicity, was a TL at Google who defined the code review guidelines and was also the Chief architect of the Bugzilla project. I recently chatted with him about the Developer Productivity and Happiness framework that LinkedIn published last year. There are so many nuggets in that podcast that we may have to do a volume 2. Listen to the full episode on YT, Spotify or Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dtAwVgBy Some takeaways: - There cannot be developer productivity without developer happiness - Iteration time and context switching are key concepts that impact developer productivity. - Understanding and catering to different personas of developers is crucial for effective developer productivity efforts. - It's significantly more important to understand what to measure than how to measure it. Most teams fall into the trap of measuring the wrong metrics. #developerproductivity #developerhappiness Checkout the Hangar DX community at https://dx.community We are hosting a Zoom session with William Howell from Okta this Thursday at 11am PDT!

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I really like this PMF Framework from Sequoia. https://lnkd.in/gT2nWttx

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