May 5, 2022 • #
The construction market for startups (one that I’m fairly involved in, but only as a segment of our market) has been a historically tough nut to crack for technology companies.
This is a great breakdown from Brian Potter on the past couple decades of construction startups and funding amounts, with a useful segmentation by category into slices like builders, materials, energy use, construction software, digital twins, and more.
It wasn’t surprising to see builders taking such a huge proportion of the funding — after all, trying to scale a soup-to-nuts homebuilding company is enormously capital-intensive. Management software scoops in an ~8%...
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June 25, 2021 • #
Arnold Kling has an interesting point this week in reference to decentralized finance. He argues that for DeFi to work, we need folks that understand the moving parts on two complex fronts: crypto and the financial system. Many folks on each side don’t deeply understand the other:
Marvin Ammori understands more than I ever will about decentralized finance (DeFi). Indeed, there are thousands of young techies who understand DeFi better than I do.
But I bet that in order for DeFi to work, you need...
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June 18, 2021 • #
Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z’s new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects:
Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at least lead to positive spillover effects: The telecom bubble in the ’90s created cheap fiber, and when the world was ready for YouTube, that fiber made it more viable. Even the housing bubble had some upside: It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made...
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December 4, 2020 • #
This week Stripe launched two new major products in their ever-expanding mission to build the economic and financial backbone for the internet.
Ben Thompson was one of two (along with the Wall Street Journal) to have embargoed early access to their launch of Stripe Treasury, their latest major product category. This interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison dives into the background on the product launches, Stripe’s strategy, and where these fit into the wider Stripe mission.
They’re extending their Capital product, which originally launched in 2019 to give Stripe customers access to capital for...
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January 25, 2020 • #
A great piece from the Atlantic’s George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize.
At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from our literary life sound pretty trivial. But if writers are afraid of the sound of their own voice, then honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. It doesn’t matter if you hold impeccable views, or which side of...
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July 12, 2019 • #
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world.
If I had to take away a single overarching theme this year (not by any means “new” this time around, but louder and present in more of the sessions), it’s the value of customer success and retention of core, high-value customers. It’s always been one of SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin’s core focus areas in his literature about how to “get to $10M,...
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