Naveen Gavini

In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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I really like this PMF Framework from Sequoia. https://lnkd.in/gT2nWttx

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Common founder hiring mistake #5: (most founders don’t think this applies to them) Failing to run structured interviews. Most founders think they’re great at interviewing. Chat with candidates, ask about their background, maybe throw in some tough technical questions. But without clear structure, interviews easily veer off course. You fail to systematically assess candidates on consistent criteria And your team asks disjointed questions based on what intrigues them, not what predicts performance. Suddenly you’re debating candidates without alignment on what good looks like. And critical factors get overlooked. Your new goal: Well-crafted interview plans. • Start by defining explicit evaluation criteria upfront for each interview stage. What specific skills or traits make a candidate successful in this role? • Then design focused questions that ladder up to those criteria. Dig into relevant experiences to determine if candidates meet your standards. • Share question bank, desired responses, rating guidelines and interview best practices with all interviewers. Make sure everyone assesses candidates the same way. • Take time to calibrate on what strong, medium and weak responses look like for key questions. Prevent bias by keeping evaluations evidence-based. With rigorous process, your team reaches alignment faster on quality of hire. And you avoid hot-take debates after missing key signals in interviews. P.S. Dover’s expert recruiters help our customers create interview plans based on best practices AND train the team on how to be amazing interviewers.

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If you had a great startup idea, should you keep it a secret? Are musicians natural entrepreneurs? In this episode, Seed Zeng and I chat with Yotam Rosenbaum, musician, YC founder, and investor. 👉 Listen on your podcast app: https://tr.ee/ZmRr5NjEtk

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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Parker just posted Rippling's new fundraising memo. It's the manifesto for compound startups and one of our initial inspirations for building Atlas. Here's a nugget that I really liked that summarizes how we feel about the competitive advantage of all-in-one startups over vertical startups (in customer support especially): "When we build corporate cards, we're not innovating on the way we issue corporate cards (through Stripe issuing or Marqeta) or the way we scan and extract metadata from receipts (which is mostly a vendor relationship for us today). We're going to win on the capabilities we have that are common to all Rippling products—the integration with the rest of Rippling and with employee data, the platform capabilities, and the common UX described above." Here's the full doc: https://lnkd.in/gYH59HVZ

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YC is right about so many things, but I think it gives one piece of unhelpful startup advice: "Don’t worry about competitors; listen to your customers." This advice worked when there were few excellent tech companies. Just listening to your customers and building fast in tech was a way to differentiate. But that’s no longer the case. Listening to your customers is still essential but must be paired with a strong strategy. I have wasted a lot of time treating this advice as gospel. I built a product that a small group of people loved but could not break into the market because listening to our users was not guided by a sound strategy. In an increasingly competitive market, you must understand how you will differentiate from your competitors in a way that cannot be quickly copied or competed away. Ultimately, there are three broad approaches to do this: Do something your current or future competitors (A) can’t do or (B) don’t want to do. Approach (A)—traditional “moats” or “powers”—sounds great, but it requires particular circumstances when in a crowded market with similarly funded and sized competitors. (B) is often the right strategic move for most startups competing in a crowded market—doing something your competitors don’t want to do. Three ways to do (B): 1. Adopt a counter-positioned business model If most competitors pursue a particular business model (e.g., freemium, PLG SaaS), switch to closed free trials through salespeople. Or vice-versa. The model still must work with your segment and give you some asymmetric advantage. But if so, it will be hard to copy you. 2. Focus on an undesirable segment Find a sub-segment of your market that is unattractive for some reason (e.g., longer buying cycles, harder needs to satisfy, harder to reach) and focus on them. They still must have a burning problem that your product meets in a differentiated way. And there should be a path to grow deeper with or extend beyond them. 3. Narrow to an uncomfortable level so that it feels like your “TAM” is too small This is a subset of 2: Find a way to further segment your existing ICP into a more targeted/narrow definition. This deeper segmentation needs to be along a meaningful dimension that creates differences in needs, preferences, and behaviors. It's a bonus if this smaller segment is fast-growing (H/T to YC for the excellent advice). Often, people are scared to do this because of a smaller “TAM,” but focus is a source of power. TAKEAWAY Struggling to get traction in a crowded market? Start doing one of three things today: change your business model to something hard for your competitors to copy, focus on an undesirable segment, or narrow your ICP to an uncomfortable place. Doing so will help you run in a less crowded lane where you’ll control your destiny. — I wrote this with Alper Yurder 🤝 at Flowla 🌊 from a discussion about how we're competing in crowded markets. Check out what he’s building; he’s thinking about this right.

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10 years ago, a conversation changed my perspective forever. I was chatting with an early-stage startup CEO. Confidence radiated from her. I admired that. Then, the conversation took an unexpected turn. She began mapping out my career, insisting sales wasn't for engineers. Fast forward a year, and her company had shut down. Here's the kicker: Your career path is YOUR masterpiece. Not everyone's advice is gold. 👉 Don't let misplaced confidence dictate your journey. 👉 Stay true to your skills and passions. 👉 Embrace opportunities, even if they don't fit traditional molds. Your career is a canvas only you should paint. If you've ever been told you can't, I want to hear it. Let's inspire each other by sharing those moments we proved them wrong. Drop your stories below. 👇

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I recently talked with Paz Yanover, VP of Product at Amplication, about creating and managing effective docs. Here is his developer docs success formula (check 1st comment): In this interview, Paz shares his formula to creating developer docs that drive product adoption. You'll learn: - The important role docs plays in support and attracting devs - Tips for balancing technical accuracy with user-friendliness in your docs - Strategies for effective collaboration between technical writers and product teams Check the first comment for the full interview. --- Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Derick Ruiz for more.

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InVision has experienced the biggest fall from glory in Silicon Valley's recent history. $350M raised with a peak valuation of $2B. And now they are shutting down. Not acquihired or "acquired by private equity" or strategic tuck-in. Just a hard stop. It's so easy to s**t on them. They got out-innovated, they were not product driven etc. etc. But, the truth is most startups that raised monster rounds in ZIRP days could face this deadend. You raised too much money: 1/ So you are too expensive to acquire 2/ So you raised your burn too high to finance a big GTM team 2/ So you got complacent on product 3/ So you got lazy on shipping There will be a lot more inVisions in the next 24 months as startups run out of capital. It's sad. The employees & founders at these companies gave it their all, but raising too much money sealed their fate. For the next gen of startup founders, heed this advice: raise little, keep your burn low, ship fast!

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Ever wondered where the perfect balance between tranquility and innovation lies? For me, it’s Seattle. Unlike the Bay, Seattle has a more serene environment that’s perfect for focusing on building products and businesses. The city’s vibe encourages deep work and creative thinking, free from the overwhelming hustle. But let’s be honest, Seattle’s founder and investor communities aren’t as vibrant as those in SF. Yet, this city holds a special place in my heart – a blend of my love for startups and the charm of Seattle. I believe in Seattle’s potential and I’m on a mission to help ignite its startup community. From connecting with fellow founders to engaging investors, let’s come together to build something extraordinary here. Seattle has all the ingredients to be a startup hub – talent, innovation, and a supportive ecosystem. What it needs is a spark. Let’s be that spark.

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Yesterday, my team at Vareto announced the first-ever multiplayer modeling platform for Finance. 😍 Now that I can finally speak publicly about what we've been working on, the first thing I want to share is a screenshot from a live multiplayer session we did internally at the company. One of the interesting things about building enterprise software as a startup is that we're still too small to *need* our own product. So instead of doing what our customers do--expense budgeting, headcount planning, etc.--we use Vareto's multiplayer modeling to forecast fun things like total pet spend. Yep, that's right. We had 40 people go into a Vareto model and enter in bottom-up inputs for how much they expect to spend on their cats and dogs this year. 😂 While this isn't very useful--especially since many people entered in clearly exaggerated numbers--sessions like this helped prove that our new 2.0 platform can handle even "extreme" usage situations. (In reality, even if some enterprise customers have thousands of users in Vareto, only a handful are ever likely to be in the same model page at the same exact time given granular data permissions.) You can see more useful, realistic ways that finance and business teams can use Vareto multiplayer here: https://lnkd.in/gV9gqKwz

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The early days of founding Outreach was a bumpy ride. At one point we were 7 pivots deep with 3 weeks of runway in the bank. Here's how we survived: 1. We convinced our investors our 8th pivot was "the one." Before this pivot, we were a tech-focused recruiting marketplace called GroupTalent. We had spent 3 years throwing everything at the wall trying to get growth, but nothing worked. We had one more idea. To help us source developers and designers to join our talent pool, we built an internal tool which allowed us to send personalized emails at scale. The reply rates to these emails were off the charts, and we found that other recruiters wanted to buy the tool. This tool eventually became the first version of Outreach sequences. Our investors had no reason to believe this pivot would be any different but they gave us one final shot - which gave us enough time to prove out an MVP. 🙏🏼 2. We had each other’s back. Most startups die of suicide, not murder. Being founders is more than just a working relationship. It’s like a marriage. You’re with each other sometimes 16 hours a day and you need tools to get through the lows. The four of us made time to get together every friday over drinks, and talk about the highs and lows of the week. And not just team-level highs and lows, we did individual-level highs and lows about each other which prevented little issues from festering and made us stronger as a team. 3. We found our “Founder Market Fit.” Before Outreach, we were basically recruiters that could have run GroupTalent off of a spreadsheet. We built a ton of tech for a problem that didn’t need it. For example, we built a really cool workflow and matching automation engine that tried to intelligently match talent up with projects. But we didn’t have the scale to warrant this investment. GroupTalent was a bad product fit for our team. The value we were selling at the end of the day was the talent itself, not the tech. But with Outreach, the value was the tech and building the tech was our superpower. Once we figured this out, we were seeing a much higher ROI. 4.  We obsessed over our customers. With Outreach, we had customers since day 1 and boy did we listen to them. We were all doing customer support in the early days and built very close relationships with them. It was nice having customers finally care about the tech we were building and we were thankful for it. (Queue up our 2014 Thanksgiving video) Being so close with our customers helped us build the right product out of the gate and build up a loyal following for years to come. LOTS more to go into later, but these were the major themes that got us to the next milestone as a company.

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We believe in extreme vetting of our founders. You can't build a unicorn if you spend time on silly stuff, like seeing family and friends. Grow up, and focus on investor returns. #vc #startups #investment

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3 years of pricing lessons at Equals condensed into one blog post. Since starting the company, we've tinkered a lot with pricing and packaging. It's one of the single most impactful levers early stage companies can pull. I think folks *don't* experiment with pricing enough, or take big enough bets when they do. We've tried free. We've tried completely sales led. We've tried not listing pricing on the site. Matt Hodges details all the plans we've had, why, and what we've learned in our latest installment on Wrap Text. https://lnkd.in/ecckEDba

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🚨 Bookkeeping is HARD - a Lesson from Synapse's Collapse 🚨 I was recently quoted in Mary Ann Azevedo's TechCrunch article on the bankruptcy of Synapse, a banking-as-a-service startup. As someone who works at a CPA firm that does bookkeeping for clients, the Synapse situation really resonated with me. Synapse had essentially one job - to sit between fintech startups and banks, and keep track of where each end-customer's funds went. Sounds simple, right? WRONG. Bookkeeping, especially in the highly-regulated world of finance, is incredibly complex. When Silicon Valley tries to "move fast and break things" in fintech without truly understanding the accounting complexities, people can actually get hurt. Supposedly, Synapse's collapse has impacted up to 10 MILLION consumers who now can't access their money. 😱 That's a lot of ordinary people who are going to have problems paying their rent or getting groceries. I'm seeing a similar wave of unkept promises hitting the small business accounting space. Startups saying that they can "automate" complex accounting tasks, but not really understanding what they actually need to do. And not taking into account how their mistakes will impact their small business customers. The last time this happened there were a lot of business owners who ended up losing a lot of their hard-earned cash when their supposed expert accountants messed up or dropped the ball. 😞 I'm sure that will happen again, and it bums me out. I'm all for moving fast and breaking things, but not if it hurts other people. https://lnkd.in/g6p_5viM?

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Some of the most inspiring founders I've backed take expertise from one field and apply it to another. They're able to create solutions that might not emerge within disciplinary silos. I call these people "missionary misfits.” I'm drawn to these misfits because they tackle big problems without being constrained by the “rules” of individual domains. They combine their deep subject expertise with unbounded curiosity for adjacent disciplines to solve real-world problems. I believe that the most disruptive innovations come from the unconventional remixing of insight and experimentation. That’s why missionary misfits are the apex predators of innovation. These are the ones who initially raise eyebrows yet become study material for future generations. They will transform industries and solve societal problems. And I want to partner with as many as possible.

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