Teams, hiring, leadership, incentives, company-building, and AI adoption.
Quiet quitting is a recent name for something I am sure has been happening for all of time. It probably has something to do with the person's life circumstances, or something about the macro environment being depressing, or whatever. But let me propose a simple economic justification. Consider the total impact of employment on a person. That includes
"What's the Moat of your AI company?" That seems to be top of mind for founders pitching their novel idea to VCs -- and the most common question they get. But I think it might not be the right question. Right now, nobody seems to have a good answer. a16z doesn't. At the same time,
NFTPort sells tools in web3. I've heard people say that this is a smart approach in a volatile market, because selling shovels in a gold rush is safer than looking for gold yourself. That seems wrong. Sure, during the rush your revenue is more stable, but you still depend on that market's macro cycle. Once the
Today, we announce a $26M fundraise with NFTPort. You may be surprised. This wouldn't make much sense if NFTs were only about buying and selling images of apes. Art and profile pictures may fetch high prices when sold as NFTs, but it feels like those things lack some tangible "real world" value that e.g. a
How I spent a year trying to start a startup -- and failed.
How do you end up with an outlier success? I guess the common advice would be to "leave your comfort zone". That's hard to do. In the comfort zone, everything makes sense. Things work. Clients are using the product. You might even be growing slightly. It would be stupid to mess with something that works, right?
“Founders at Work [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work]” is a unique book by Jessica Livingston, one of the founders of YCombinator. It contains un-narrated, almost unedited interviews with founders of successful startups like Paypal, Hotmail, Apple, and 27 others. I’m only through about 10% of the book, and it’s clearly one of
Which business models benefit from AI? This is an audience question I recently got at a webinar aimed at early-stage startup founders. The answer is almost like enumerating all business models because AI is like Javascript. Which businesses could benefit from Javascript? It can create value at almost every company. I’ll make the question more specific: what are
Now the title might be a bit clickbaity but it’s true: when I joined Veriff I had received an offer with a higher salary from a larger company. I decided to write about my choice because, year after year, I’ve kept moving towards riskier ventures in earlier and earlier stages, and in hindsight, I always used to be
It’s common to see job descriptions along the lines of the following. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Looking for a data scientist. Responsibilities: 1. Building big data databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and pipelines. 2. Training and deploying deep learning models and neural networks for prediction. 3. Creating dashboards, analyses, visualisationgs and reports. 4. Supporting marketing and other teams with A/B test analyses,
