Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 25th edition of the good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this weekend’s reading!
A brainstorming framework for aspiring founders
https://www.bvp.com/atlas/a-brainstorming-framework-for-aspiring-founders
Bessemer Venture Partners dropped a simple brainstorming framework for aspiring founders which is as simple as answering (and diving deep into) four questions
Do you seek to solve a problem you know well as an “insider” or solve someone else’s problem as an “outsider”?
Do you innovate in an existing product category or attempt to create a novel product category?
Do you favor a widely applicable product with a large market, or focus your product on a smaller, well-defined customer segment?
Do you jump on the bandwagon of a “hot trend” that has investor attention or pursue something under the radar and longer-term?
These questions are at the crux of building a new business and answering them honestly will provide clarity. Do give it a try.
The Key to Enterprise Sales Is Understanding Enterprises
https://future.com/the-key-to-enterprise-sales/
Gary Hoberman (Founder of Unqork, ex global CIO for MetLife) shares how his experience working inside large enterprises has made it easier to sell to them, and provides advice for other startups looking to close enterprise deals.
Do hard things first
…we have to start with Tier 1 customers and Tier 1 problems. Tier 1 customers are the Fortune 100 and Fortune 250. They are your largest, biggest, most difficult customers to sign. They put you through 1,500 questionnaires on compliance and security, and they’ll come do on-site checks. Tier 1 problems are normally the problems that no one lets you near. They’re the problems that only custom code has been able to solve, because no software package can.
…if you get the platform working and find product-market fit and features for Tier 1 customers and problems, everyone else downstream is easy. Every other industry is easy, and every other problem you could throw at it becomes easy.
Social capital important
Customers will ask “Who are you working with that is bigger than us and more complex than us? And what use cases have you done that are more complex than what we have here?”
Build vs Buy argument
…study showed that 93 percent of large technology initiatives started in enterprises fail to deliver any value…
The Unusual Signs of a Billion Dollar Company
https://www.nfx.com/post/unusual-signs-billion-dollar-companies
A common question that investors ask startup Founders in pitch meetings: Can this company be a Billion-dollar business? The idea is to understand how the Founder sees and how they describe their path forward.
Market is supreme
..the market is even more important because I’ve seen great founders repeatedly get crushed by a terrible market. And I’ve actually seen some pretty mediocre people do incredibly well if there’s very strong product-market fit.
Single miracle for success
Each startup needs to have a single miracle… A startup miracle is the key difficult thing you need to pull off for your startup to work. If your startup needs zero miracles to work, it probably isn’t a defensible startup. If your startup needs multiple miracles, it probably isn’t going to work
Founder dynamics
I think one of the big myths of Silicon Valley is that every founding relationship needs to be equal. If you look at the biggest companies on the planet, many of them had very unequal co-founding relationships. Amazon was really just Jeff Bezos. At Apple, Steve Jobs was dominant. At Facebook, no question about the primary decision-maker there.
Arrest the fall
the people who go from zero to one, and the people who go from one to a hundred — there are very few people who can effectively do both. Until you put in place a strong executive team, things will continue to break.. A lot of it boils down to, can you hire a few really great people to anchor the rest of the team as executives?
Until next time!