CoFounder Weekly is a Twitter-powered slightly silly newsletter about startup culture.
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👨🏫 Learning the A,B,Cs
By: Greg Kubin
🤔 Thought Starters
(Five Tweets this week that made us think )
🔥 HOT: Writing together
Writing solo can be lonely endeavor, so there a few initiatives that are attempting to make writing more social.
One example is 200WordsaDay, a publishing platform that only lets you publish your words to the community of 1,600 writers once you hit 200 word-count. The “Publish” button literally won’t appear until you’ve drafted 200 words. Founder Basile Samel is using the platform to write an entire book.
Along the same lines, VC Hunter Walk recently added writing times to a shared calendar and invited people to do the same. It’s an experiment to see if it helps people write more.
❄️ Not: Amazon HQ2
Amazon will no longer call New York City its second headquarters. The pushback stemmed from the $3B in tax breaks Amazon was promised via behind-door conversations with NYC politicians. While some reacted to the news with a victory lap, others were saddened.
🔗Read more from our friend Raj Advani on how this impacts the NYC tech scene.
⏳ “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”
By: Brendan Leonard
👩💻 FOUNDER & 🤑 INVESTOR STUFF
(Interesting bites for startup nerds)
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💸 Capital is becoming a commodity. “When Money Isn’t Enough: How to Distinguish Yourself as a VC in a Crowded Market” describes six tactics VC funds employ to stand out from the pack.
Stick to a Thesis. For example, “Forerunner Ventures zeroes in on entrepreneurs defining a new generation of commerce by tracking major cultural shifts from a consumer perspective.” Or NFX Ventures focus on network
Platform as a VC. For example, First Round Capital built “the First Round Network, a platform where entrepreneurs can ask for help and share successes on every aspect of startup life — from fine-tuning pitch decks to accessing the latest software to hiring.”
Form your own agency. For example, Andreesen Horowitz “hired partners not to invest but to provide their functional expertise — be it marketing, business development, or recruiting to help their entrepreneurs.”
Send out the scouts. For example, Sequoia’s scout program “involves distributing money to a network of well-connected entrepreneurs, academics, and industry leaders who invest in promising startups and keep their ears open for new opportunities for Sequoia.”
Community as deal flow. For example, Jason Lemkin “is the founder of the SaaStr community, the SaaStr podcast, the enormous SaaStr Annual conference (along with its European counterpart, SaaStr Europa), and his eponymously named SaaStr Fund.”
Harness data to your advantage. For example, “Signalfire says it tracks more than half a trillion data points that it collects from millions of data sources, from patents, academic publications, open source contributions and financial filings.”
😸 FUNNIES
(LOLs from this week)
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Hugs,
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