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Newsletter With No Name #4
We are so excited to have the fourth issue of our new independent newsletter live, and you can subscribe here. If you’d like to recommend a piece of content, suggest a job post, or sponsor the newsletter please get in touch with us at editor@daniellemorril.com
This is Kevin here writing this week. Danielle and I are back from Hawaii and adjusting to the Fall temperatures in Colorado. While we’re both taking time off between startups, it’s been noticeable how work pulls you back in even though you know you need a break. It’s been mostly me writing the past 2 weeks, so let me know if we’re doing a good job of keeping the quality bar high and the writing on point.
Engineering Newsletter Update: last week we previewed an upcoming newsletter focused on engineering content. Several of you are interested, and I’m working on v1, but want to make sure we can keep the quality high. Right now I’m culling together a list of 100+ feeds to pull the best content from, but we may need even more since great engineers tend to write infrequently. If you have anyone you know who’s written great posts in either startups or engineering, just reply to this email and let us know.
From the Operators
Justin Jackson of Transistor.fm takes a sobering look at how long it will take to grow from $781 MRR to a living salary, and questions whether venture scale critics like Jason Fried of 37signals have misled bootstrapped founders in “Bootstrapper’s paradox”
Ammon Bartram and Harj Taggar of Triplebyte recently guided CTOs through the recruiting journey that is ahead of them. They took a comprehensive look at the recruiting ecosystem without overly selling their own service. You can learn from their hard earned lessons in “Building an Engineering Team”
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro points out that highly trafficked sites like Google, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram have become insular and shouldn’t be blindly relied upon to send you traffic in “The Powerhouses of the Internet Are Turning Hostile to Websites”
Amjad Masad of Repl.it gets a last minute YC interview, even after Rick Rolling the entire partnership in “Rejected Then Recruited: Our Journey into Y Combinator”
From the Investors
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures celebrates 15 years of publishing his blog this week. He also sat down with Chris Dixon from a16z for a far reaching conversation on AI, crypto, and where we are in the history of the software industry. Easily one of the more thought provoking podcasts I listened to this week.
Hunter Walk of Homebrew cautions founders seeking bridge financing to expect the possibility of a flat round in “Second Seeds: The New Normal But Know This…”
Joanne Wilson of Gotham Gal Ventures recounts the an early career story of standing up to a bad manager in “Be Tough but Be Yourself”
Barry Eggers of Lightspeed Venture Partners shares his recipe for fund construction, sparing many first time VCs from mistakes that will come to haunt them when they raise fund II, in “VC Firms — How to Build an LP Base for the Long-term.”
Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz urges founders who are raising to preemptively calibrate their phase of growth for investors in “Aligning Startup Metrics with Stage of Maturity (Beyond Labels for Fundraising Rounds)”
Sammy Abdullah of Blossom Street Ventures outlines how to hire an investment banker for M&A, something too few founders proactively learn about, in “Negotiating with your investment banker”
This Week’s Picks
Last week I recommended the Internet History Podcast, but I could tell from the click through count and my own hasty writing I didn’t do a good job describing it. When I first discovered this great work by Brian McCullough, I was glued to my earphones for days catching up on old episodes. It is an incredible trip down memory lane if you grew up in the 90s, and often gives you an “aha” moment as you see what was really going on behind the curtains. I hope you give it a listen if you haven’t already.
Connections by James Burke – anyone that works in tech and hasn’t read this book is in for a surprise. Each chapter of the book starts out at the dawn of civilization and follows a chain of an invention taking you all the way up to modern day by the end of the chapter. For example, the Jacquard loom of 1804 was an inspiration to Charles Babbage who built one of the first mechanical computers in 1822. American inventor Herman Hollerith came across Babbage’s difference engine later that century, and build a machine for tabulating the 1890 census. His company would be acquired by a conglomerate that would become IBM. The in depth story in series of inventions is more interesting than anything I can summarize here.
Thank you so much for reading our newsletter. We still have a lot to figure out, including the name, sections, business model(s), and more. Your feedback is welcome, and will reach both of us when by emailing editor@daniellemorrill.com
Much Love, Danielle & Kevin
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Keeping the Streak Alive!
What a week! Kevin and I are starting to get the hand of co-editing, though I think we might have pushed the editorial tasks to the end of the week a bit too aggressively. We have more technology helping us with the reading process now, thanks to Kevin’s coding and an awesome startup called Retool (also one of our angel investments) that made it super easy to build the UI. We are able to go through ~50 posts per day in the course of just 1-2 hours and quickly score them as on topic and graded the quality of the content. We’re following ~430 feeds right now, and looking to identify more.
At week’s end we take the top scoring content and whittle it down further based on our editorial perspective on what’s most relevant to readers. Someone has suggested we could turn this into a newsletter-as-a-service business but we are a little early for that… this is still a mostly manual process. However, we are toying around with the idea of starting a second newsletter focused on software development tools, hiring, and practices. Is there another topic you’d love to see us focus on? Hit up the comments!
If you’d like to recommend a piece of content, suggest a job post, or sponsor the newsletter please get in touch with us at editor@daniellemorril.com
Danielle & Kevin’s Newsletter With No Name #2
This newsletter is curated by hand with love from Denver, Colorado by Kevin Morrill and Danielle Morrill. You can reply to editor@daniellemorrill.com with any feedback. If you love what you read today, please consider forwarding it so others can subscribe. Thank you
Woo hoo! It’s week #2 of our newsletter that still needs a name (read the 1st issue here). Thank you to everyone who has forwarded this newsletter on to friends and colleagues. If you have open jobs at your startup, just wrote a blog post you’d like us to consider, or have a cool “Request for Startup†idea for the new section we are going to start running please drop us a note with a short blurb no more than 30 words and a link. We can’t promise to include everything, but we’d love to hear from you!Â
The Best Thing We Found This Week
Peter Thiel is one of the most interesting vocal personalities in the technology ecosystem, and this interview brings together thoughts on his investing strategy, experiences serving on the board at Facebook for the entirity of its existence (14 years), and our personal favorite: a lot more detail around the founding story of Paypal. “Peter Thiel on Trump, Gawker, and Leaving Silicon Valley”
The headline of the interview is salacious with mentions of our current Cheeto in Chief, a blockbuster celebrity lawsuit, and his move to Los Angeles — but we think the other tidbits we mentioned are the real meat of the conversation. Â Â
From the Operators
Carl Tashian of Nerd Coach digs into startup postmortems, finding founder communication and underlying passion deserve more attention in “What Really Kills Most Startups”
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro reminds us that great marketing doesn’t start with optimizing ad campaigns, but rather understanding what the people you want to reach pay attention to in “You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?”
Mathilde Collin of Front emphasizes the value of building relationships before you raise in in “Fireside Chat with Founder and CEO of Front, Mathilde Collin”
Patricia Aas of TurtleSec lists “Survival Tips For Women In Tech” (isn’t it sobering that such a list is even necessary?) and Knut Melvaer of Sanity follows on with 23 tips we can all do to help make tech better for women in “Making tech survivable: What Can Men Do”
Russell Smith of Rainforest doesn’t think your startups tech stack needs to be a special snowlake in “5 Foolish Reasons You’re Not Using Heroku”
From the Investors
Congratulations to Austin Clements on his promotion to Principal at TenOneTen Ventures
Kyle Poyar of OpenView lays bare the metrics you need to hit to raise a Series A all the way up to Series D in “What Does It Take To Raise Your Next Round In 2018?” The full report is also available.
David Beisel of NextView Ventures shows early stage companies how they’re being compared to their peers in “Seed Stage Startups Are Now Graded on a Curve” Founder mental health is on the radar this week
Mahendra Ramsinghani of Secure Octane is now cowriting a book with Brad Feld on Depression, and shares his early observations in “Investors are waking up to the emotional struggle of startup founders”
Felicis has decided to carve out 1% of all checks for exec coaching and therapy
Michael Seibel of Y Combinator details “How to Email Early Stage Investors” and maybe the era of signaling prestige by getting a warm intro is finally over, at least at the angel stage
Diego Rey of Y Combinator claims that “over the last two years, YC has made more seed investments in bio companies than any other investor in the world.” More over, “the percentage of bio companies in each batch has been increasing linearly since 2011.†in “There Are Now 141 Bio Companies Funded by YC”  Are these bio companies getting financing downstream? LifeSci VC breaks down the stats in “Biotech Venture Deal Terms Are More Startup Friendly Than Ever”
Ali Hamed of CoVenture challenges the investing advice of Warrent Buffett and LPs should take notice in “Investing on an 0–2 Count”
Working at a Startup? It’s Time to Learn About Equity Compensation
Our dear friend and Mattermark cofounder Andy Sparks is working on a new startup, Holloway, building tech to help people find, consume, and improve tactical knowledge. Their first guide came out a few weeks ago, offering a comprehensive overview of stock option compensation.  To learn more, check out “The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation”
This Week’s Book Pick
“The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood”by James Gleick
Do you know the surprising story of how the Information Age got underway? The Information tells the story from early African tribes and their own form of Morse code, to how England’s need to dominate the seas led tinkerer Charles Babbage on a journey to build the forerunner to ENIAC as early as the 1800s, to information theory pioneer Claude Shannon. After 20 years in software industry, Kevin was surprised to finish the book wondering, “How did I come this far knowing so little about what got our industry going?!â€
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Book Review — Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies
In last week’s newsletter we featured Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West as our book recommendation of the week.
TL;DRÂ
Ready to geek out on power laws, fractals, and connections between the natural world and the man-made? This book took our curiosity soaring several times and is a relevant read for those navigating the growing pains of a startup going from a two person team to 200, or VC firm going from 2 partners and $25M to a second or third fund 10x that size.
While building Mattermark I spent the past 5 years studying how companies grow, and exploring how we might detect this growth and describe it using data exhaust that is publicly available online. This cross-disciplinary study, embarked on by theoretical physist West, connected some new dots for when it comes to what growing companies have in common with other scaled up entities. From our thousands of sales conversations, we knew ancedotally that of all the signals we were tracking at Mattermark the most significant (and hardest to get) was employee count. Seeing how the size of a company changes over time is a leading indicator of it’s ability to metabolize capital into revenue. But what can the 8 person version of a startup tell us about the 80 person, or 800-person, version of the future?
This is one of many questions explored in “Scaleâ€
I also loved West’s observation that there is far less written on the death process than on the origins of life and growth (read Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death†for one theory on why this is), which reminds me how much less we know about how companies die (or exit). Crunchbase works harder than most data-driven private company platforms to update their “Deadpool†of companies and it’s still incredibly difficult. The knowledge of how to sell companies is also tribal and hard to find, though I am currently reading “The Magic Box Paradigm†by Ezra Roizen and hoping it will become a go-to recommendation for me when founders ask about this in the future. I’ll report back in a future review!
Reading Notes:Â This book was fantastic as an audiobook on Audible, read at 1.5X speed at is about ~13 hours of listening.
Further Reading: “On Growth and Form†by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson — West gushes about this book as beautifully written, and it only comes in paper/hardback. It just arrived, and it is loooong. Perfect for the cold Denver winter just around the corner.
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The First Issue of Our Newsletter is Live!
We are so excited to have the first issue of our new independent newsletter live, and you can subscribe here. If you think this is awesome, I hope you will help us spread the word by forwarding the email, Tweeting, etc. For now, we are going to consume feeds throughout the week and recap the best content coming from startup operators and investors through the week, and send it out to you on Saturday mornings.
If you’d like to recommend a piece of content, suggest a job post, or sponsor the newsletter please get in touch with us at editor@daniellemorril.com
Also, a big thank you to long time startup friend Tony Blank from SendGrid for generously offering to sponsor our email sending so we could get this entirely bootstrapped effort out the door without breaking the bank!
Danielle & Kevin’s Startup Newsletter with No Name – #1
For those who subscribed awhile back, this is the DanielleMorrill.com newsletter, where my husband Kevin and I are exploring a new weekly (and maybe someday daily) newsletter about startups, investing, our new life in Denver after selling Mattermark, and exploring how to bootstrap a new business around this content. — Danielle
I’m excited to write this newsletter alongside Danielle. In order to find, organize, understand the best writing on startups across the web I am using machine learning to find hidden gems that could have been easily missed. Beyond startups, I have many intellectual interests including the history of invention and philosophy. I’m exploring how this technology could generate other topical newsletters. — Kevin
From the Operators
Adora Cheung of Y Combinatorinterviews Ooshma Garg of Gobble about the evolution of her prepared meal kit delivery company and endurance through The Struggle
Mike Maser of Big Sky Health shares his journey from user to CEO of Zero Fasting App, which was originally created by serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose in “Saved by Zero — Surviving Cancer, Discovering Fasting, and Turning It Into My Next Career Journey  Retired serial startup founder, author, professor and investors
Steve Blank comments on the return of a late 90s startup trend: high profile founders raising huge amounts (like, 3 commas huge) of capital with nary a product in sight in “Is the Lean Startup Dead?†Â
Harj Taggar of Triplebyte provides a hands on guide with actionable advice for “Convincing Engineers to Join Your Team†Â
Kevin is a moderator for 30 companies in Y Combinator’s Startup School, and this week’s theme is Product Market Fit with two helpful founder accounts:
* Peter Reinhardt tells the story of Finding Product Market Fit at Segment
* David Rusenko tells the story of Weebly’s long fight to capture product market fitFrom the Investors
Congratulations to Angela Tran Kingyens on her promotion to General Partner at Version One Ventures. Angela joined the firm 5 years ago, and we are proud to have worked with her through that entire time as portfolio founders at Mattermark. She is one of the few investors we now who can make an API request, and we can’t wait to see what she invests in next!
Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital launched the firm’s startup accelerator program this week, and offered commentary on claims that comments to the press were “calling out other accelerators†for their lack of diversity, in a tweetstorm on Thursday evening.
Peter Brack introduces his new venture firm Hypothesis on the belief that great companies can and should be built everywhere in “Hypothesis: The Next Wave of Transformative Companies Will Come From Outside of Silicon Valley”
Lisa Suennen formerly of GE Ventures reflects on the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh as she says goodbye to her role at the corporate venture firm in “What’s Next?! A Plan in Progress”  Venture Capitalist
Brian Laung Aoaeh shares his story of deciding to disband KEC Ventures in “#ProofPoints: An Ending + A Beginning”
Semil Shah of Haystack opens up a conversation about whether VC need to “go all in” to demonstrate their commitment in “Conviction, Diversification, and Portfolio Construction”
Rob Go of NextView Ventures ends a busy summer with a thoughtful post outlining the core beliefs of his firm in â€The NextView Ventures Manifestoâ€Startup Jobs to Check Out
FlexPort is revolutionizing global trade and disrupting an industry that touches every person on earth. The company is based in San Francisco, and they’re hiring several Software Engineers to solve complex challenges. Â
Treasury Prime is transforming banking. The company is based in San Francisco, and they are hiring engineers to build modern banking infrastructure for 21st Century. Â
Enzyme is building FDA compliance and quality systems as a service. The company is based in San Francisco, and they are hiring a Director of Engineering.  * we are angel investors in this companyThis Week’s Book Pick
“Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies†by Geoffrey West
Ready to geek out on power laws, fractals, and connections between the natural world and the man-made? This book took our curiosity soaring several times and is a relevant read for those navigating the growing pains of a startup going from a two person team to 200, or VC firm going from 2 partners and $25M to a second or third fund 10x that size.
Thank you so much for reading our very first independent issue of this newsletter. We still have a lot to figure out, including the name, sections, business model(s), and more. Your feedback is welcome, and will reach both of us when you reply to this email or send a message to editor@daniellemorrill.com  Much Love, Danielle & Kevin -
Commenting Like It’s 2009
I’ve been going back and forth on how, when, why, and how much to use social media. Part of my struggle is that I moved away from San Francisco in December after 10 years (most of my adult life), so I don’t want to lose touch with my friends and sometimes I get really lonely. Part of my struggle is that I do get a lot out of engaging with intelligent, interesting, thought provoking people and I don’t want to miss that.
To satisfy this need, and to explore something I remember loving, I started commenting on the blogs I’m reading and enjoying. I am such a blog lurker, powering through 50-100 posts per day without saying a word. I remember how much I used to love commenting on blogs and meeting new readers and friends that way. I’ve been blogging since the days of mydiary.net, Livejournal, Xanga etc. and in those ~20 years since the late 90s it feels like commenting has died out a bit. Notoriously, people will give the advice “don’t read the comment section†to new bloggers. I was never able to follow that advice. Who am I writing for, if not the readers? How wonderful to get to engage, and tools like Disqus provide excellent moderating powers.
On the other hand, there is a lot of content (especially on Twitter) that I just find myself totally distracted by where reading the threads of mentions and replies can send my mood into a tailspin. I emerge hours later wondering where my morning went! I am a big believer that one needs to be very thoughtful about what they let into their mind, because it keeps working on you in a subconscious way. I started by deleting most of my old tweets so there wasn’t such constant stream of spamming of likes and comments picking up old threads out of context. That has been great. I feel like a traitor to the original ethos of Twitter, which was to not delete any tweets (not even for typos!) and I am sad to have lost some of the collaborative “performance art†that was so fun to create. I also have begun to actually block people, which also feels against the original community ethos of engagement but truly makes a huge difference in the experience. Twitter is the closest to a true addiction for me, I open it when I have a moment of standing in front of the mental refrigerator between tasks. I am playing with different approaches to training this out of myself and I’ve tried several strategies including deleting the app from my phone or limiting myself to only reading while I am exercising, and only posting on Sundays.
Facebook is easier to quit. I don’t care so much about the data tracking, perhaps because the ad form factor on FB is so crappy there is really never a risk of me buying anything. I rarely see weird political shit and when I went to download my profile of how Facebooks “sees†me I discovered it was somehow grouping me in the 65+ year old man category. LOL! Fine by me, my feed is mellow. As to people, curating my friends into real friends and acquaintances has been helpful. My default post mode excludes my acquaintances, which removes a lot of the awkward commentary. At this point, I prefer Facebook for the features that help with handling life coordination like EVENTS. I think a lot of the stuff I’d like to get done inside a personal CRM is semi-possible with Facebook. I don’t have FB on my phone, just my iPad, which means it is not a time killer for me.Â
Instagram is my favorite place to be when I have a few minutes free because it is beautiful, and I actually see ads for products I want and buy. I recently made my account private, but I have maybe ~150 people who are regularly looking at my story and ~20 people who are giving me likes regularly. These numbers feel much more reasonable and closer to real life and real friends than my 72,000 followers on Twitter. I don’t have notifications on for Instagram, which is good because it keeps me from getting addicted to the little dopamine droplets. Instagram feels like a place where Facebook can actually get me to do things: I have bought shoes, bikinis, and household decor because of ads on Facebook and have a collection called “Buy†that I actively curate so I will have ideas for gifts all the time. I feel like the ads there are really tailored for me, not crap.
In the spirit of commenting I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments here. How are you engaging with the writers, thinkers, bloggers and other sources of good and useful stimulation online these days?
