staysaasy

I've been saving my list (on startups specifically) here: https://staysaasy.com/startups/2020/09/24/startup-book-readi...

In my (admittedly limited) experience, Very Successful People say versions of "that will be really hard" very often, and say "that is impossible / won't work" effectively never.

I'm not sure if this is causation or correlation, or even which direction a possible causative link would flow in (eg being positive + open-minded makes you more successful vs. being successful makes you more positive + open-minded). But it's absolutely a pattern that I've noticed.

IME most people will generally appear to be making things up as they go – even if they have significant relevant experience. Every situation is unique, and experience tends to look more like having a list of techniques with varying degrees of expertise, rather than having a playbook for every situation. You have to look for the expertise rather than raw confidence.

In sports terms it would be something like a baseball pitcher being able to throw a great curveball, a great fastball, and an all right slider, and knowing roughly what situations to use them in. There will still be a high degree of randomness and mistakes will be made.

I really agree with this advice, with the added thought that very very specific struggles are usually easier to write about and more compelling to read. For example, this post that my co-author wrote was well-received, I think in part because the advice is so specific ("Don't joke about firing people" as opposed to something like "be a more empathetic manager"). https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/06/09/Don't-Joke.html

I also find these types of posts more compelling when the struggle or the solution is non-obvious.

IME if it's inconvenient to write, you'll never do it. My blog co-author and I do our drafting and editing in Google Docs for that reason. Once you're done writing, you're sufficiently emotionally invested that you can handle the hassle of porting the content to a public site.

We also only add images to posts if it's absolutely necessary. We probably get less engagement than we would if we had high-quality imagery, but we have wayy more engagement than if we didn't write at all.

It also has some mild advantages in terms of auto-generating links to their homepage when referring to the company by name in places like Teams or Slack.

Yup and as recently as 24 months ago, $3B would still have been somewhat pricey at their revenue and growth rate. It'd be very hard for me personally to justify investing in a product that is in such a competitive market without product moats. It seems like with an absence of product differentiation Monday.com is aiming to differentiate via marketing, which is a very expensive way to grow.

I consistently have trouble figuring out how to login to Workday, much less "use" it.

I imagine that that would be really hard to achieve (or manage for the company) in practice, although I'd love to see a world in which employees could essentially get pro rata rights to purchase more shares built into their employment. That'd allow them to participate more fully in the upside of companies taking off like rocket ships.

Thanks for reading, and glad that you've enjoyed the blog! We've preferred to stay anonymous as it allows us to write more authentically.

They occupy a really strange place in the industry – relied upon by many, but heavily conflicted in terms of their incentives. The ritual and strategy of participating in something like a Gartner magic quadrant is worth a whole post in and of itself.

Thanks for reading!

Author's co-writer here – there are a few common ways to get this information from public sources. Public documentation, press releases, analyst reports from places like Gartner or G2crowd, field reports from a sales team in an enterprise business are some examples.

Thanks for reading!

I think that this is a very reasonable observation. It's definitely weird in theory, but the reasons that I've seen are:

* Very large tech companies build software (relatively) slowly due to their size

* Sort of like a toddler, you don't know what you want until you see that someone else has it. Another company hitting product/market fit + traction proves the value of a product that you might have just hypothetically wanted

* You're often buying a go-to-market motion (marketing, sales, services, etc) that complements a product

* In some cases, you're buying talent that would be difficult to hire + train on your own _fast_. Ie even if you could theoretically hire 50 traffic mapping engineers, you can get them onboarded onto your team faster by acquiring Waze

Short version: have an agenda, manage the clock, don't fuck around, have well defined and understood interaction models

We wrote about this here https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/05/05/Running-Meetings...

We coincidentally wrote a post on this at the start of the pandemic: https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/05/05/Running-Meetings...

TLDR

* Have an agenda * Aggressively manage time * Make sure that people engage in the way that you need them to * Stop telling jokes

Same

The main thing that was stopping them from improving in the collaboration / usability department was the fact that Adobe's products are extremely comprehensive – that's how they differentiate. But that comprehensiveness comes at the expense of complexity, makes it harder to have a really tight interface and add things like collaboration features.

The comprehensiveness is what allowed them to win in the enterprise, but it came at a high price. If Figma wants to become an enterprise solution they'll probably end up getting really complex too.

Management advice that I learned the hard way –

Force yourself to talk less. If you're talking too much, just stop wherever you are or even say something like "hey actually let's hear what you have to say first."

Separate solutioning from listening + understanding. Try to listen and understand first, and then consciously separate that from any solutioning topic. It's like writing and reviewing code – you write first, then check things over, and then get a review which is done separately (and in that case, by a completely different person).

(another potential tactic – don't try to solution in friendships and relationships at all unless someone asks you to)

Author here - would definitely appreciate any more feedback on it being a misfire. Was it unfocused? Inaccurate? Boring?

(edit) Alternatively if easier to chat 1:1 would love to talk via email, our address is on this page: https://staysaasy.com/about.html (don't want to post our email onto a large public forum). Would really appreciate the feedback.

I agree that it feels pretty cray but it's inline with the market. Sector is hot, it has a trendy + efficient product-driven growth model, they're profitable, and growth looks good. There's a lot to like which gives them a revenue multiple at the high end of the market – which currently puts them right around $5B.

I usually equate VC to some new experimental rocket fuel. It's by far the best way to get yourself into orbit, but the downside is that if it fails you're going to explode rather than cruise to a nice landing.

HN is the only public place I've found that has well beyond a critical mass of people who have started, owned, operated, or worked at very strong startups and technology companies. When the media is out of touch on a topic, HN will often be right on the money. And HN has a lot of good ideas on management and business strategy if you're down to dig for it.

As a result if you want to read the ideas of or get your ideas in front of people who are actually in the arena of modern tech companies (with a definite SV / American / western european / VC backed startup slant), this is the best place I've seen.

HN also has the most "real talk" about startup equity value that I've ever seen, although I think that the HN POV on equity is broadly more negative than it should be.

They will need to for a transaction of this size, and the approval process is most likely ongoing (and will continue for the next few months).

We wrote a similar article recently about something I’ve found essential in hiring managers - ie understanding how much mileage they actually have on the hardest decisions https://staysaasy.com/recruiting/2021/02/15/Top-Question-Int...

I'm with you that 32x feels insane, but these are crazy times and Okta presumably had to pay a premium to take Auth0 off the market. With those stats and a compelling story (developer tools) they were probably expecting a great IPO in this market. Assuming a 20% premium to take them off the market, 32x doesn't seem that crazy with many public companies trading at 25x or more.

But yeah... it does feel a little bit like that moment where you go over the top of a roller coaster...

Had exactly the same thought – this seems like it's begging for the antitrust hammer.

The hardest part of building a design system is getting the organizational willpower to commit to it. There will always be another high priority feature to build, so to get it done you generally need executive level sponsorship.

Design systems are valuable but ultimately best tackled as an accelerant (/luxury) investment at scale. Your customers are unlikely to buy your product or churn from it due to not having a design system in place, so you really need to look at overall design/dev productivity as the benchmark of whether the investment is worthwhile.

In today's frothy market, do you think that they'd only be at $3B? Not baiting at all, I'm curious on how you'd break this down as it's always an arcane art.

I mainly wonder as companies like C3.ai are above a $10B market cap on 50% or less of DO's revenue. And C3 (just to extend the example) is carrying lower margin services revenue as well. Growth is somewhat different, granted.

In my anecdotal only experience it has gotten easier for founding teams who are from central casting - known schools / former employers, tech-first business ideas that VCs can understand, other stereotypes around what it means to look like and especially talk like the pattern of a successful founder.

There's just more money sloshing around and these funds have to deploy it somewhere.

Imho the outsized benefit to being from central casting is probably a sign of the end times for western civilization etc but that's the pattern I've seen from scattered anecdotes.