Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 6

Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.

Hi there,

Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.

1. Allison Pickens
   , solo GP at The New Normal Fund, who invests in AI and SaaS companies, spoke to Krish Subramanian of Chargebee on the Second Acts podcast. Here’s her take on why early-stage companies have more generalists than specialists. Second Acts is one of the best SaaS business podcasts out there right now.

So what are the kinds of workflows that we need to have executed, and what are the kinds of people who need to do them? You need to know, again, what they need to do when they get to work. Often in stage two, you have generalists who are kind of figuring out what are these workflows that need to happen? And then I, they're defining what kinds of specialists need to be hired to take on that workflow. It could be that the specialists are reporting the generalists, but it could also be that the generalist moves on to some other area of the business that's not well defined and then kind of hands it off to a specialist to do."

But relying on generalists for too long isn’t a good idea.

I think also there were situations where the amazing generalists that we hired sometimes obscured the reality of the product because they were able to basically create band aids for product gaps. You know, if you put a great human in front of a great generalist in front of a customer, and you say like, make them successful, they might again be able to use their heroics to make that customer successful. But those heroics may not be scalable because the product has a real gap. I think there was a period where the involvement of our generalists actually prevented the product from getting better, which is the opposite of what you would hope.

2. Priyanka Salot, co-founder of the Sleep Company, made an incredible remark about talking to customers - they do 100+ qual interviews per month. She was on the Founder Thesis podcast by Akshay Dutt. BTW, Founder Thesis is a 350+ episode old podcast. Simply amazing!

We talk to at least 100 consumers every month through qualitative focus groups. We also conduct many quantification surveys, not just to see how consumers are liking our product, but also to understand what more they want to see from the Sleep Company.

I always tell people, before you go for quantification, do qualitative. What qualitative helps us understand: Let's say I have a business problem, OK? I want to understand, you know, what are... let's say, what are the spaces to play in office chairs? You know, is it long-lasting comfort? Is it... you know, I don't know what are the spaces that I could play in.

What I do first: qualitative deep dive where you're talking to consumers. Don't try to understand only the categories you want to focus on. First, understand your consumer. What does his everyday life look like, you know? What does their day look like? You know, there's another category behaviors, right? And then obviously get into your category.

3. logan bartlett
   , GP at Redpoint Ventures, weighed in with his thoughts on the value VCs bring to founders. He spoke to
   Turner Novak
   on the Peel Pod. He suggests that while VCs may offer various forms of support, their most significant value often comes from a few crucial interventions or pieces of advice throughout a company's lifecycle.

…there are a handful of things in a given year or in a company's life of working with a person that are really, really going to matter. And it's probably, it could be the firm that helps you get that customer or helps you hire that incremental person. That could totally be it. Or it could be helping you weigh an acquisition offer. It could be helping you think through an element of product strategy. It could be evaluating the person that you just got introduced to be your CRO candidate and helping you think through the considerations of that person coming into the organization. It could be a founder disagreement that might blow up the business.

I think a great VC is active enough in the business to have enough information and credibility with the founder to get them to the right answer. And, and that's a really hard thing to quantify. I don't think. It could be the customer intro or it could be the talent intro. It could be the events that introduce you to the customer. That could be what makes or breaks it, or it could be that relationship that helps you get to a right answer. And I find more often than not, it's, it's, that is the value add and not the other stuff

Hope you find this useful. See you next week.

Rohit