Average cost of an MBA in Australia is $50,000. What if you took that $50k and invested $10k in 5 companies while keeping your day job? You'll probably need to screen 200+ companies to invest in 5 and you'll learn a lot more from talking to founders and sales and product people

late to the game - everyone talking about blackbird's fund returns based on their new fund data but can we talk about how they've made 85 core investments in their 2022 fund? That's ~25 a year (2022 to 2025 ytd is 3.5 years) and basically an investment every 2 weeks 🤯

Anyone still playing Age of Empires 2? Maybe we can do some old school LAN

Thankful for heaters because it’s freezing in New York now

Once you work in a startup, you realise that the worst kind of company to build is a startup that sells to other startups

When you’re building a B2B company, you should release slower and more deliberately. How much can your customer absorb? How much can your company and team absorb and then gear your product release cycle to that cadence. Ship quickly, release slowly.

Strategically - how do you use the changes to position in market against competitors? Have you defined success? How do you track the success? How are metrics reported, by who and how often? Too often are features launched with no strategy or tracking of success

Is finance across pricing? What about additional cost of hosting? In the world of AI, what about the cost of compute, hosting, databases etc?

What’s the capacity of your GTM team to absorb new product changes? Does sales have the capacity to learn about the changes? How do you build demos and showcase new features? Does marketing have the materials to launch it? Is sales enablement brief ahead of time?

Who communicates it to the customers? CS? Product? How much do you communicate? What don’t you communicate? How do you communicate it to the market more broadly? To prospects and opportunities in pipeline?

Have you tested the product for edge cases and completed UAT? What processes are in place to ensure reliability? Have you thought about deployment timing across tenants and infrastructure? How will this impact load on your existing product? How much will this impact your margins?

What’s your customer’s ability to absorb product changes? How much communication do you provide and lead time? How will your changes impact their processes, workflows, documentation? Even changing the colour of a button can have repercussions!

One of the proverbial falsehoods of startup culture is “shipping quickly”. In many cases and especially as you scale, shipping quickly is actually detrimental to your company and to your relationship with your customers

I’m in NYC! I’d love to meet some great operators and investors, anyone I should meet?

Incentives / compensation for engineers “on call”. We would like to incentivise engineers to be on call from around 11pm - 7am in case we have urgent issues in other timezones. Would love to hear how everyone else does this!

Uncapped SAFEs for AI startups we are SO back

Who advised on the deal? Imagine being an investment banking taking a few pp on the raise ahead of the pref stack and the employees. Armchair MD is punching in the air right now knowing they’ve got their next Vale ski trip all sorted

On the flip side - looks like they had over 200k customers and $1.5bn in FUM so on a CAC basis for eToro that’s $400 per customer and $1.9 per $1 FUM. Would love to compare to that to eToro’s current performance. Someone close to the deal should do a dissection for us in the back

I’d love to see the Spaceship preference waterfall. Over $50m raised in equity and $13.5m on convertibles. Just a reminder for founders to raise the requisite amount of capital required for scale - that preference stack gets fat quick.

"say it with me" "i'm a SaaS investor and I'm relentless"

"They're only growing at 17% YoY with R40 of 32% so 8x is a premium but NRR is 113%. Let's drive multiple expansion by cutting staff and rebranding to AI. With further rate cuts, we'll exit at 12-15x back to the public markets" Blackstone on the Smartsheet Acquisition, probably