Todd Jackson’s Post

Congrats to Itai Turbahn, Yoni Goldberg, and the whole Dynamic team on the partnership with Magic Eden! ME is the biggest multi-chain NFT marketplace, huge milestone and partnership for the company.

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself. “Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.” Clay's Kareem Amin is one of the most thoughtful founders I know on this topic. Before Clay was the GTM power tool that it is today, it was struggling to choose between broadly building a horizontal product and narrowly focusing on outbound sales. “We had a bunch of initial customers, but they were all doing very wildly different things,” says Kareem. “One company actually sent me their code base because they wanted to send all of their data to NetSuite, but they didn’t have time to do it, so they asked us to reverse engineer it. It was in the same general sphere of doing some data transformation in a no-code way, but it had nothing to do with sales or recruiting. We just had this running in the background for a long time. They were paying us. But suddenly our servers would go down and we were like, ‘What's going on?’ And it was just this one company sending a bunch of data to us that needed to get transformed and sent to NetSuite. We had a customer, but it was the wrong customer.” In the latest installment of our Paths to PMF series on The Review, I got to sit down with Kareem to unpack the seven-year “overnight success” story of Clay, drilling deep into the debate between building a horizontal vs. vertical product, and how to find focus as a founder. Article in the comments.

Loved hosting our "Know your buyer" panel as part of PMF Method. These panelists have purchased 💰 millions in SaaS and gave insights on what they look for in new SaaS products, when they say yes to design partnerships, how to navigate procurement, etc. Super useful for founders!

"If the goal is to get Roman Empire facts exactly right, Lamini Memory Tuning would create experts on Caesar, aqueducts, legions, and any other facts you provide. Inspired by information retrieval, the model retrieves only the most relevant experts from an index at inference time — not all the model weights — so latency and cost are dramatically lower. High accuracy, high speed, low cost: with Lamini Memory Tuning, you don’t have to choose."

Excited to see Lamini's memory tuning announcement today! For many problems, prompt engineering and RAG (even when iterated on by expert teams for months) don’t perform well enough to use in production. These approaches break down when trying to deal with large, messy data when the use case requires reliably retrieving and combining specific facts. Lamini Memory Tuning is a new fine-tuning approach that turns any open source LLM into a Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME). Memory tuning allows your LLMs to keep their general reasoning capabilities, with 95%+ accuracy, cutting hallucinations by 10x. Read Sharon Zhou, PhD and Gregory Diamos's blog post: https://lnkd.in/gyVDygcr Check out the case study: https://lnkd.in/gdS9x7Ux

If you’re an early-stage founder, finding out what your customers *really* want so you can build the right product is critical. I’m excited to share some of First Round Capital's PMF Method program with Gagan Biyani on Friday! Gagan has founded 3 companies including Udemy, Sprig, and Maven. We’re hosting this live conversation for product leaders & founders on how to reach PMF. You’ll learn: - How to identify your customers' real problems - How to test demand by selling before building - When to write code vs. build a no-code MVP RSVP to join on June 14th (it’s free): https://bit.ly/3VBAK69

I've been consistently blown away by Ben Freeman and the Omnea team — their business is ripping. Some amazing opportunities to join the team below! 👇

Super excited to lead daydream's seed round! Thenuka Karunaratne, Shravan Rajinikanth and the team blew me away with their vision for the future of SEO and Search, how they're solving very real pain points for their early customers (like Clay, Tome, Notion and Product Hunt) and their fast growth out of the gate. I also loved that Thenuka experienced this problem firsthand at Flixed, and built the platform he wished he had. And as a side note, we heard some of the strongest personal references we've ever seen about the team ("Thenuka is one of the founders I’m constantly blown away by. I would bet on his life output very early on.") 🎉 Looking forward to partnering with the team on this next chapter!

Wrapping up the first weekend of PMF Method and feeling so excited for these founder journeys! In Session 2 we talked about “dollar-driven discovery” — how to validate that customers will truly need and pay for your product. This means before jumping on customer calls to validate your startup idea, you need a hypothesis. Who’s your buyer? What critical problem will it solve for them? Most founders stay at the surface level, using one liners like “we’re the first [X] to enable [Y]” during customer calls. At First Round Capital we developed a framework called the 4 P’s to help founders dig deeper: persona, problem, promise and product. Taking time to validate your 4 P’s with customers is how you’ll stress test whether you’re building something that customers truly need. In Session 3 we covered markets, which is a critical (but often underdeveloped) choice in company building. We don’t look at markets using high level TAM slides or McKinsey-ish top down numbers. Instead, we define a market as a collection of buyers who have a specific problem that your product solves, who buy software in a similar fashion, and who expect the product to provide value in a similar way. Given our definition, most generational businesses end up serving many adjacent markets over time. Some characteristics of a great market, starting with an initial white-hot center: • Enough buyers with an urgent problem to drive significant initial revenue, but ideally not enough that it’s saturated or obviously huge (and thus hyper-competitive) • Buyers are unhappy with the status quo…or the problem is very new • The category is entering a period of high velocity software adoption • Buyers have high (or at least medium) sensitivity to product quality • Budget already exists or will be easy to obtain • There’s willingness to pay a price point that can support the right GTM modality We loved digging into the first 6 months of company building with this group over the past few days, covering "How do I tell if this path is going to lead to PMF?" "How do I know if I'm targeting the right buyer?" and "Is this actually a good market to be building in?" Excited to continue the sessions with the founders over the summer! More to come on positioning, customer discovery feedback and founder-led sales.