Engineer
Read our previous update here . What we’ve learned Inventory planning is a real problem, just not a venture backable one. Problem resonates most w/businesses w/spiky sales, unclear beyond that. Land and expand strategy is also unclear. Excellent place to build a bootstrapped business. FP&A tools command huge markets. Obvious juicy negative NPS targets (Anaplan, Adaptive). Key is figuring out the…
This is the story behind Swoops , a fantasy sports company that I co-founded in the fall of 2021, and then wound down two years later. Early inspirations In early 2021, my friend Zach reached out to me about building a sports betting startup. Zach and I had met through Conner on what would be the beginnings of Disco , and kept in touch ever since. When my robotics startup didn’t work out, he…
This is our first official update to early supporters / mentors / fans of what we’re building. Thanks for your help so far. TLDR We are building a financial planning tool for businesses, starting with ecommerce. Awesome initial momentum, more customer validation needed as we prep for fundraising. Highlights We had 8 customer discovery calls with FP&A staff, ecommerce store owners, and founders of…
My friend Chap recommended me Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Here are my notes from it: Resulting is the tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome. It’s so easy to do this: you fail, and you conclude that the things you did led to that failure. A better framing is: you used your best judgment to place a bet, and that bet didn’t pan out in your favor this time.…
I learned how to ride a bike when I was five, maybe six. It was a cheap bike, probably from Walmart. It had BMX logos on it and this soft padding on the middle bar held together by velcro. I don’t remember how I got it but it probably involved a lot of begging of my parents. You see, up until then all I could do was walk. So imagine how I felt when I could conquer the streets on my bike. The speed…
COVID-19 has changed several of my habits. Below, I write about which ones that have changed and a prediction on their permanency. Shopping : I buy > 90% of my non-perishables online. I never liked in-person shopping and I haven’t had a car for twelve years so this trend was already in motion. When COVID hit, I subscribed to Amazon Prime which is big driver behind this percentage. The bulk of my…
I just finished Shoe Dog and I loved it. Some reflections: There’s something so elemental about selling a shoe. It’s basic, it’s a necessity to survive, and it’s something everyone understands. I started my career in technology and have spent a lot of it trying to sell what I build to others. And in some ways, I feel like I’m at a loss. I wish I had started my career selling something like shoes.…
Recently, I sat down with my friend Tim Wu. He’s a fellow founder who wanted to pick my brain on a couple things when out of the blue, he asked me why I’m working on a startup. This hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve been in the game for almost seven years now. I’ve spent more of my career working on startups than not. I forgot about the other, “job job” path. By talking it out, I reminded myself…
This article is inspired by a podcast with Professor Luis Perez-Breva where he talks about ‘play’. Shout out to my friend Will Sommers for sending it to me. When we were young, we used to play. Remember? We used to play with legos and build cars. We used to play with mud and build bridges. We even used to play with food and fly it into our mouths. We didn’t care if we built a crappy lego car or…
In the past, I wrote a letter to my 18 year old self . Here’s a letter to a slightly older self. Up until now, you’ve been following your parents’ plan. Do well in school, go to college, get a job. Now, as you quit your job and go to build a startup, you won’t be able to rely on a plan. The progression will no longer be linear. This will be harder than you imagined. The easy success you had in…