From the Operators

Melinda Gates of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recalls how Microsoft Bob taught her that taking brutal feedback can truly help a team and product improve in “This failure taught me a lesson I’ll never forget”

Steli Efti of Close.io provides recommendations to help avoid fraud from sales reps, and covers how to best handle a situation where a rep is being dishonest in “How to stop sales reps from stealing from your startup”

Ron Pragides of AppDirect has identified several criteria that can make a distributed office get off the ground and be as effective as possible in “Six Virtues for Distributed Offices”

David Mack of SketchDeck shares the democratic, internal process used to decide which features a very small product & engineering team should build next in “An experiment in design by democracy: Tech Plz”

Chris Dary of Limbo explains how their team looked at a competitor’s (admittedly effective) business and pricing model to determine how they wanted to differentiate on pricing and value in “Building Startups: Differentiating on Price”

From the Investors

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr advises early-stage founders on how to counter the “build-vs-buy” discussion with prospective customers, saying that maintaining the relationship will probably result in a later sale in “Build vs. Buy is Mostly Really Now vs. Later”

Alex Taussig of Lightspeed Venture Partners proposes that even non-subscription firms “should begin modeling customer engagement as a multi-step, statistical process” to better understand what future cash flow will look like in “Are cohorts the future of public company analysis?”

Li Jiang of GSV Capital read every one of Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters and not only shares a number of lessons learned from each, but identifies a single, simple recurring theme in “What I Learned From Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter”

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From the Investors

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