What Makes A Culture “Bad” Isn’t Just That You Don’t Like It — I won’t invest in a startup that doesn’t care about its culture. Because a culture is going to form regardless so you might as well be deliberate about it. And it’s with your first hires that your intended culture will be solidified, evolved, mutated, or challenged. So be thoughtful about…

Tough Love, Running Effective Meetings, Making Products That Produce Emotion, and More — Cross-country flights are great times to catch up on newsletters and unread feeds. This week there’s a bunch I want to share with you. How Levels Does Meetings Levels is a consumer health company focused on glucose monitoring and they run themselves in a very deliberate manner, mostly asynchronous and…

The Things to Know When You Lose Your Job In A Downturn — RIF aka reduction in force. Sounds like a Magic: The Gathering card but it’s actually a polite way of saying you’re being laid off. And with the tech valuation reckoning underway, if you’ve been RIF’ed you’re not alone. I can’t tell you whether this is just a few months of…

Andy Johns Was In-Demand As a Startup Growth Guru But Couldn’t Continue The Work Until He Helped Himself First — Andy Johns was one of the original notable ‘growth’ experts, working at a variety of startups and larger tech companies to help drive product strategies that resulted in organic and sustainable user acquisition. We were fortunate to include him as an advisor to our portfolio during early Homebrew investments, and…

Reflections Prompted By A Conversation Between a16z Crypto Leader Chris Dixon & The Verge’s Nilay Patel — “Good-Faith Skeptic.” It’s a characterization that has been tossing around in my head since reading Chris Dixon’s tweet about his interview with the Verge’s Nilay Patel. It was crypto true believer in a conversation with a crypto skeptic, but containing a foundation of mutual respect, curiosity and, I think, a…

Think Of Your First Non-Investor Board Member As a Senior Hire, And Not Your IPO Board — Being a CEO and running a startup is hard! So you’d think that founders would take advantage of every resource available to help them out. And for the most part they do. But one gap I see too often is leaving the Independent Board member seat unfilled for long periods…

Selective Leaks of Previous Discussions & Policy Debates In The Name of ‘Transparency’ Would Put Twitter Employees At Risk — Typing “I know this makes me sound like a crazy person but..” as a blog post opener is usually a good reason to close my browser window and take a walk. But hey, it’s 2022, let’s soldier onward… Since it was announced that Twitter’s Board of Directors and Elon Musk…

Madonna, Like a Virgin Tour, June 1985 — We recently took our daughter to her first concert, delayed somewhat by, you know, that COVID thing. It was Billie Eilish at the Chase Center a few weeks back. Good show. I’m glad my kid had enough taste to pick an artist that she likely will look back on with…

Why ‘Living Below Your Means’ Is One Key To Success & Happiness — $0 per year. That’s what my business partner and I decided that we wanted in salary from our newest venture fund. Or at least it was the resulting impact of declining to take additional capital from our investors and commit our own dollars instead. …