As a Silicon Valley VC, I love to invest in internet franchises that possess strong “growth loops.” What’s a growth loop? It’s a feature of a business that yields compounding value—value that multiplies over time—rather than one-off gains. Think of a flywheel: You turn the flywheel once and it keeps spinning on its own. Momentum builds…
What do you do when it’s only the second quarter and you’re already out of chips? Or it’s Valentine’s Day and someone was expecting flowers three hours ago? Or you’ve got a Zoom pitch to a new client starting at noon and you haven’t shaved in a week because you haven’t shopped for razors in…
Today’s young people haven’t been ruined by social media. They’ve been equipped to unleash the power of a new technological era. The class of 2022 finds itself graduating into a surprisingly strong work environment, especially compared with its immediate predecessors. For the moment, employers are hiring again, and the labor market is relatively favorable even…
Make Market Realities Work for You No matter how much heart and hard work you throw into something, no matter how good your intentions, no matter how strong your convictions—if real customers don’t want what you’re offering, you’ll go out of business. In the immortal words of Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Third…
Ten years ago, when Ben Casnocha and I published The Startup of You, we wrote that we have entered the Age of the Inconceivable, an era in which things we previously couldn’t even have imagined happen again and again and again. Now that we have updated and are re-releasing the book a decade later, this is…
When you hear a member of Congress talking about the tech industry these days, there’s a good chance it’s in a negative context. Republicans rail against the companies that have enabled everyday citizens to project their voices with a freedom and scope that even presidents could not have matched just a couple decades ago. Democrats rhapsodize about dismantling some…