How An Ancient Chinese War General Would Run Your Startup Better (read)
“The success of your startup is determined before you ship a single line of code.” Okay, you’re right, Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese war general and author of The Art of War, didn’t quite write that. But given his emphasis on preparation and heuristics, I imagine it’s something he might’ve included in a modern-day version of the book targeted at Mattermark Daily subscribers. Here's the story.
Editor's Note: scroll down to discover 6 open startup/VC jobs
Weekly Digest: Top 10 Featured Posts
Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners details his thoughts on the acquisition of AppDynamics, company building, and the opportunity for enterprise technology in “Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company the AppDynamics’ Way”
Pejman Nozad of Pear Ventures reflects on how he left Iran to start a new life in the US and went from living in an attic of a yogurt shop to building a portfolio of investments valued over $20 billion in “Tech’s Most Unlikely Venture Capitalist”
Sam Altman of Y Combinator describes what happens to people who decide to start a startup and have everything go their way except happening upon a perfect market in “Navigating Mid-Success”
Bryce Roberts of OATV and Indie.vc sees the biggest disruptive threat to venture capital is when the very best founders realize they need very little of it to scale in “Helluva Lifestyle Business You Got There”
Stephen Hays of Deep Space Ventures hopes to point investors in the right direction by sharing his resources and processes for learning, networking, and getting into deals in “I Raised A Venture Capital/Angel Fund, So Now What?”
Josh Pigford of Baremetrics declares the he’s finished subscribing to and following the traditional startup mentality as he builds a company in “Getting Out of the Startup Rat Race”
Rik Lomas of SuperHi recognizes startups are emotional roller coasters that one minute make you feel like you’re changing the world and the next minute, that everything is falling apart in “How to Start a Startup Without Ruining Your Life”
Dan Reich of Troops walks through how they got to Series A as a Slack-first company in “The Work Before the Work”
Chris Brophy of Tradecraft goes deep on how ‘jobs to be done’ can make you a better growth marketer in “Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product: They Care About Progress”
Jordan Gonen expands on how he managed to go from knowing nothing about startups building a deep network of awesome people, work on things he cares about, and developed real, hard skills in “How to Hack Networking”
Business Ops is the New Sales/ Marketing Ops.
“What were our sales last month?” Simple question, right? But do usually get a simple answer? Not likely. Liz Cain of OpenView Venture Partners calls out the current lack of alignment with various internal Ops teams, and details why consolidation of sales and marketing ops is crucial to your bottom line.
The Need for Speed and Other Tips on Building Teams for Transformation (read)
There’s no doubt about it — business transformations are tough. Sean Moriarty learned about transformations first-hand by leading Ticketmaster’s transition from an offline to online company in the mid-2000s, and over the past 18 months, leading Leaf Group from a long tail publishing business into a diversified internet company.
Here’s how to build a team that can help you transform a company
What’s New @ Mattermark
We’re proud to announce many new updates to the Mattermark suite of products. These new updates include an the Mattermark Growth Score, increased copmany and industry data coverage, and 3 Public Event Lists.
Startup DB: Search Over 4,000 Posts Featured in Mattermark Daily by Keyword, Phrase, etc.
Our friend, Isaac Madan of Venrock, deep-indexed every article featured in the Mattermark Daily over the past few years, and built Startup DB: a simple search interface so you can find the best, most relevant startup content written by investors, founders, designers, developers, operators, and more. (FREE)
Startup & VC Job Openings
Mattermark - Customer Success, Content Marketing, Sales, Engineering in San Francisco
Periscope Data - Community and Content Manager in San Francisco.
Agathos - Data Insights Engineer in San Francisco.
Ladder - Growth Strategy Director in NYC.
Pilot - Account Executive in NYC.
Founder Collective - Senior Associate in San Francisco.
White Star Capital - Associate in Montreal, Canada.
MMC Ventures - Pre-MBA Associate in London.
Want to feature a job next Sunday? Reply or email Nick with a link.
