I'd take a candidate who fights for a view I disagree with over one who hedges to please everyone (Strong opinions weakly held, but willing to change their mind if/when the data tells a different story)
555 karma · joined February 24, 2013
Top VCs—who see the best deals and run deep diligence—still only have a 1–5% hit rate. As an angel, you don’t have that level of access or time. Even if you get strong referrals, you’d need to be 10–15x better than elite VCs to pick winners in a small portfolio. Unless you’re investing in at least 10 companies, it’s statistically a losing game.
My experience: I invested in ~200 companies early stage (with some winners like HuggingFace, Checkr & more).
It's unfortunate to see a founder believe that one accelerator would make or break their company. Typically an accelerator amplifies your existing trajectory - if you're a fast-growing company, you'll get more term sheets from investors than you know what to do with. If you're flat, they won't be attracting investors in any way. It's a founder's job to navigate this instead of relying on the accelerator to find $500k.
As one example, Sequoia invested in Airbnb at $0.01 per share, and Airbnb's current stock price is $102, almost exactly 10000x return. This happens more often that you think if you're not in the early stage & top VC world.
The other option (more often used) is that you can raise more money at a higher valuation. You dilute yourself by the same amount as the initially planned raise, but you get more money and don't end up selling more/all of the company.
The solution to this problem is incrementality measurement at the channel level. Every time you scale with a recently onboarded vendor, measure baseline of ALL conversions happening on your app. If this baseline doesn't move, cut the vendor. I say scale and not launch because upon launh, there won't be a visible impact on the global conversions. To be able to spot this spike from baseline, pick a small market than "worldwide". For ex, pick "California", let the new vendor scale in California, and measure spike in California.
There are no singled-out pockets that you can tap into and make up SF annual budget. It's all about cumulating a lot fo long-tail small pockets + 1-2 large pockets.
So I’m assuming if some do it for phones, must be some doing it in laptops.
Again. It’s all about probabilities. 1/ What’s the likelihood of the company doing that? Close to none. 2/ what would be the severity of the issue if they were doing that for me? Very high. 3/ what’s the effort level to prevent that? Very little.
This ratio ultimately tells us what to do.
There is a risk/reward/effort to look at, putting a small piece of tape is low risk / low effort / high reward (if your company actually angers laptops).
>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates
Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.
The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.
It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.
That's a huge if - one that Youtube probably is not going to enforce on new customers. The same principle applies to most businesses I know - a new account/client has X months to be profitable until they get dropped.
On the flip side, i've often stumbled (in the days where I was parsing youtube for side projects) on projects with hours long videos with 3 views - for years. My best guess would be that those accounts / uploads are what youtube is targeting, not preventing their new account sign up / new DAU drop.
Specifically in performance marketing spend, 15% of the budget is very often allocated to "new initiatives & new partners", with the thought process that it'll either allow to find a previously un-identified improvement, or it'll allow to learn what to avoid in the future on the 85% of spend.
As to conflict of interest, I did mention we work with a lot of advertisers but certainly not a conflict of interest, simply sharing the thought process of advertisers today. When we run incrementality tests, sometimes it shows that the campaign is not performing and then we stop the campaign.
So my comment above is not intended to mean “spend on marketing”, but rather “if you do spend on marketing today, you should make sure it actually delivers incremental value and therefore you should measure that incrementality.
A digital channel can deliver a solid ROI (>200%) at $10K-$50K / month. Advertiser is excited, wants to scale to $500K / month. ROI drops to 110%. Woops, not as good. So what does advertiser do? Advertiser finds the max scale they can run at to maintain an acceptable level of ROI (for ex, 140%) and that is $100K / month of spend on that channel.
The interesting shift we're seeing is that historically, advertisers just went on and multiplied the number of channels, spending $10K / mo on channel 1, $50K / mo on channel 2, $500K / mo on channel 3. However, the cost of maintaining each channel and optimizing is greater than the added value. So current trend we're seeing is consolidation of this spend, and understanding that they won't be able to spend as much on ads since they still to need that 140% ROI, but only on a few channels.
As to measurement, incrementality measurement (usually two methods, ITT (intention to treat, divide your entire audience in 2 parts and show ads to only 1 of the group) or ghost ads (described below) delivers a very clean metric as to whether ad spend if bringing any sort of value and how much value it actually brings. Assuming a healthy p-value is present (aka, assuming advertiser is running enough marketing spend $ that results are significant), that's your answer to how much more you should invest on the current marketing campaigns (or it will show that you need to change your campaigns because current ones are not performing)