Hello all. After going through several of my own startups and writing several startup books I have a (small) amount of wisdom to share and the belief that founders often need an unbiased listener. So that is the service I'm offering. Simple pricing and nowhere near what an corporate executive coach costs.
Seems like VCs get all the diversification benefits while startup employees usually end up with nothing. How about creating pools of startup equity? This would lower upside but increase chances of an actual payout - great for people later in their careers or with families.
What I have in mind is a service that lets people pool some portion of their equity grants. The service would show what startups are "available" and you would only pool with startups you are interested in, say a minimum of 10 per pool. Valuation would be handled either via stated price (e.g. I'll trade 10 shares of MyCo for 15 shares of YourCo) or some other mechanism. Each pool would be managed via a third party escrow holder/fiduciary of some sort.
Hi everyone - I'm the author of "Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization." Happy to take any questions on this lovely Sunday afternoon. The point of the book is that selling SaaS is different from selling anything else, and how you set up your teams needs to fit the model. The link above will take you to a free excerpt!!
This is extremely timely for me. I met my co-founder 10 years ago, and we got on super well and made a great match. She had to bail for personal reasons, and now I face the decision of whether to continue solo, find another cofounder, or fold up shop.
Could some of this risk be improved by actually going to Russia and working side by side? I am a non-technical founder but I've been impressed with quality I've gotten from Russia-based developers. It seems to me if I spent time there with them we could move much faster. Thoughts?
Here is what all startups are interested in: passion. All startups will hire a passionate new grad. So don't send 50 resumes! Don't ask if they are willing! Pick the one you want and focus. Make a video. Write a case study on their industry. Invite every single person in the startup out to coffee. Physically show up at their office. If you do even a fraction of these things they will hire you, really.
I'd like to put together a breakfast for startup operations folks in the next month to discuss customer support related issues that are important to startups. What topics are people interested in? The idea is I'll get the best speaker available given the topic.
Hi - I've written a couple business books, one somewhat technical, the second not very technical. I am amazed at the value of the reputational benefits I've gotten compared to the amount of work it took. In general don't bother with a publisher. And also don't expect to make much money. Happy to chat offline if you'd like, just ping me.
One thing we try to do is get non-customer service folks to sit on customer calls. It's amazing what can happen. Like one time, we had a CTO of an online dating service sit in on calls from customers for awhile. After one particularly grueling one, he goes "you guys need to give this woman's money back." We go "we can't, there's a policy against refunds." To which he responds "but she will never get a date (for a bunch of reasons not worth going into)." And we go "exactly...so maybe we should change the policy!" New policy the following week. Boom.
I'll add one here from my own business, which is customer care outsourcing. The outbound call. Basically it comes with the territory when things go wrong. But when you call the customer before they realize things have gone wrong they are always, always grateful and impressed. Same thing goes for a "just checking in to see you are enjoying the service" call. Since we have agents sitting around all the time anyway this is time that can be used to call up customers and impress them.
I like this one. I'm a bit biased because I run a customer service business so that's a big deal for us, but even I am impressed when someone just picks up.
I get that it will have a big effect, but I think that human interaction is so nuanced that that effect will play out slowly. Again, I think single digit years is possible, but not less than five.
I would also draw a distinction between B2B businesses with Customer Success needs and B2C businesses. Perhaps I should modify the blog post to reflect the assumption that this is basic question-answering support, rather than technical support.
I definitely don't think it makes sense for early stage startups to work with a vendor - there is too much iteration happening during the search for PMF. Where we see it start to make sense is when the company is hitting acceleration. At that point it doesn't scale to do side-by-sides for training. It becomes necessary to manage large number of high-turnover employees and become really good at hiring and training them. It's really specialized. Most tech companies that have scaled - Uber, Amazon, Google etc etc use outside providers. Which isn't to say that even when we get brought in (usually at around the 6 person mark in the blog post) that we don't spend a TON of time making sure that the communication between the front line agents and product/engineering isn't really good.
This is a tough question but I don't want to duck it. There is no question that any company creates value by taking advantage of a pricing difference - whether it's the price of labor as measured in wages and benefits, or the cost of making a widget using a new technology, or something else. The reason I feel good about what we do is that I feel like we are helping spread some of the [highly concentrated!] economic wellbeing from the Bay Area to other places that can benefit more from it on the margin. That's totally separate from how rough it is for lower skilled folks in high cost markets to make ends meet...which is a real problem, I agree.