Today in Halloween Startup Thoughts... David S. Pumpkins... Founder or VC? From the Operators Ronen Shetelboim of Jobvite believes that the COO as #2 in a company is on its way out, and the true contender should be a long term, growth focused CMO in "The Emergence of the “Growth CMO”" Parth Sethi of Managed by Q has an interesting look at growing a marketplace through three tiers of pricing strategy in "Marketplaces and pricing" Andy Dunn of Bonobos uses several analogies demonstrating that treating the small, seemingly unimportant things as crucial to operating might be the key to business success in "The Angel’s in the Details" Varun Srinivasan of Coinbase shares a guide covering everything from sourcing to offers to graceful rejection when it comes to hiring software engineers in "Hiring your first 10 engineers" Luke Chircop of Shedd discusses product development, customer feedback, pivoting based on customer use cases, and their concept of "jogging" rather than sprinting in "Customer-Driven Development — A case study with with Luke Chircop, Product Lead at Shedd." From the Investors David Skok of Matrix Partners shares part two of their SaaS survey, with benchmarks around contracting, pricing, churn, accounting and more in "2017 Private SaaS Company Survey – Part 2" Parul Singh of Founder Collective outlines nine things to consider before, and which may persuade against, seeking seed funding in "This Is How To Ace The New Seed Round" Chris Quintero of Bolt looks at round sizes, geographic distribution of dollars, motivation behind hardware investments, and more in "The State of Hardware Funding in 2017" Jobs! Paul from Switch Ventures wrote in to tell us that they're hiring! What they do: Seed-stage venture fund that invest in founders building the next iconic companies Open Position: Data Scientist In their own words: "Switch Ventures is a seed-stage venture fund, hiring a Data Scientist to bring the Moneyball to seed-stage venture investing." |