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;DR 

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 “Scale”

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: 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.

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!

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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?”   Harj Taggar of Triplebyte provides a hands on guide with actionable advice for “Convincing Engineers to Join Your Team”   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 fit

From 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 ”The NextView Ventures Manifesto”

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.   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.   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 company

This 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.

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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

A friend recommended I read “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” and while I was initially turned off by the title (see what they did there!) I read it. I don’t know about boycotting anything, but on a personal level it dovetailed nicely with a journal entry I had written last week, reflecting on how much my ego used to feed off of media hits and the dopamine hits I got from “engagement” (manipulation?) of a large Twitter following. Was I a narcissist? I still don’t know, but what I do know is I dislike who I am when I’m on Twitter and to a lesser extent on Facebook.

It also explores a lot of feelings I’ve experienced regarding my use of social media, but had a hard time giving a name before. This goes back to the times of bulletin boards, and many of the much older platforms… but now we are beyond the earlier adopter stage, and the vibe has changed.

I like to test these things out, and I’ve been living a little differently since I went on sabbatical in mid-May. Why not? Would these things be deeply missed, or simply go the way of my accounts on MyDiary.net, Livejournal, MySpace, Flickr, Photobucket, Xanga, Svbtle, and so many more? Barely missed, hard to even remember the names and proper spellings required to construct that sentence.

Earlier this week, I deleted Facebook and Twitter mobile apps from all my mobile and tablet devices. The withdrawal has come in waves, and I have started keeping a journal to jot down random thoughts I would have tweeeted in the past. Often, these are turning into 500-1,000 word journal entries.

Then, yesterday I archived and deleted all my tweets. It’s been 24 hours, and I don’t think anyone has really noticed. I’ve been liking some friend’s posts from the web interface when I log in to see what the reaction is to my empty account (nothing). I’m pretty sure hitting publish on this blog post is going to auto-tweet, and I can’t figure out where the heck I set that up so I’ll just have to go an manually delete it.

Today, I took what for me will be the hardest step yet, and removed the Instagram mobile app. It’s the one I am the most addicted too, and I had rationalizeed it was not a source of low self-esteem or time suck, and that I didn’t actually get many ads there. Then a pair of His and Hers slippers for my husband and I arrived in mail that I knew I had found on Instagram through an ad. Then I saw the same ad again today (and told Instagram I was seeing it too frequently). Then I wasted 45 minutes looking at my feed of Instagram models and vacation lifestyle accounts. Ok… maybe this is actually more of a problem than I thought.

I’m not ready to delete my accounts outright. I have some big questions about identity on the Internet, and I fear someone would take my username and then manipulate people who thought it was me. I also might come to regret this whole experiment, or decide to just go back to using these services like normal. I don’t know what will happen yet. I am also still trying to figure out what I am going to do with the accounts for my dog Emo, who is a source of sweetness and happiness to a couple hundred people and one of the best things in my life. TBD.

I emailed my immediate family and Kevin’s immediate family to let them know I was taking a break from social media, so not to worry if they didn’t see posts from me and to reach out for 1-on-1 communication by phone, text, or email.

Of all the arguments in “10 Arguments”, the most compelling is the last one — about religion, specifically AI heaven or the singularity. In our race to fulfill this fantasy, we’ve built a hierarchy that places machines above humans and formed a religion that evades the responsibility of consciousness. What we build is a choice, and the point of the book is to advocate for different choices. I am certainly pondering this as I contemplate what I build next, given I can’t unsee what the author has made clear.

“AI has become a fiction that has overtaken its authors. AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success.”

As someone evaluating companies for angel investment who claim to be building “AI” and turn out to have very basic technology that trains and classifies on some set of UGC I see this fiction re-written in decks daily. As someone who just spent 5 years leading a company that leveraged machine learning in a meaningful, and sometimes meaningless, way — this rings so true. I am wearing an old Mattermark shirt that says, “building the basilisk since 2013” and the irony is not lost on me.

In dreams begin responsibilities.

I just discovered this week that I didn’t have product/market fit with my own prototype. How do I know? After using it every day from April 22nd – June 29th I just randomly stopped for over 2 weeks. But let’s backtrack a bit, what is this prototype anyway? It’s a series of Google Docs and Google Sheets chronicling my backlog of personal life crap, recurring stuff like the dentist and habits I’m trying to establish, trip planning (often shared with others), a long list of dates to plan with Kevin, family members with big stuff going on and reminders to send notes or flowers, and a jumble of other personal activities, aspirations and ideas that come up throughout any given day of stuff I’d like to do if I were a more organized woman, wife, sister, daughter, businesswoman, human being. It has some goals for each month across the top, mostly to do with budget adherence and planning ahead for big stuff like our 11th wedding anniversary next month. It’s actually too personal for me to share (!!) unlike Facebook. It’s got a running list of birthdays, and I started transcribing fitness goals that I normally track in Apple Health apps.

Basically, the data entry of my own prototype started to kick my ass. It is looking more like a personal assistant to guide me through my days, like Google Assistant perhaps (I haven’t used it) without any UI. The best part about using it is looking out into the future and thinking ahead to things I want to plan, organize, prioritize etc. and feeling a sense of greater foresight and control in my life. I did this frequently for my business, but applying it to my personal life is new. Since I’m on sabbatical and have a dearth of hours for personal life stuff, this might be a bit of an artificial environment.

And yet with all this, I stopped using it for 2.5 weeks. If I wasn’t working on it as a gentle prototyping activity for one of my more compelling startup ideas I might not have even come back to it.

In part, I was pushed away from using it as my life became less structured with my break and I started to settle into a less planned existence. Yay! But the other side of it is that it became too much work, and we’ve all heard this complaint about CRMs before. The sales manager asked the reps why they’re not updating the records, taking notes, logging calls, and really only putting in closed won deals and the answer is usually “I don’t have time” or “there are too many fields to fill in that don’t mean anything to me” or some other flavor.

My mind jumps from here to integrations. If this wasn’t a Google Doc could it be software with all the integrations needed to automatically generate the same thing I have wanted (basically a bulleted day planner connected to goals and deeper context than one usually puts into calendar events)? So I’m back on the wagon, and using some crazy color coding to highlight the integration types that would be required. This is leading me down the path toward what RelateIQ was great at: extracting valuable information needed to update the CRM from email. What I really need is integration with email, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, etc… and this starts me thinking about how to leverage a unified inbox like Front to do the heavy lifting. A quick search reveals they do have an API https://frontapp.com/api

Building that inbox from scratch is really not the point of this personal CRM, so I wonder if I could bootstrap something simple… but I see my thoughts are running toward software implementation. It’s not time for that yet… I need to prove out the value of the integrations with my duct tap and bubble gum version first.

I won’t lie, it’s fun building something just for myself. Many, many, MANY people have followed up from my tweets asking if I have something they can use yet. I’m really sorry, I don’t and even sharing with you what I have is just too personal. Which is the true victory so far… I am really using this for my real life, but only when I remember to log in.

Here in Denver I subscribe to a monthly car wash membership for my black SUV which allows me to bring the car in as many days as I want for the same price. Since I have a black car I use this a lot, especially in the winter months when the car is constantly getting splashed with dirty slush. I rent my car out on Turo, so year round I use this service quite a bit (after each transaction) and also let my passengers know they are welcome to take the car in anytime they like. You’d be surprised by how many do! Denver people are the nicest.

I’m fascinated with subscription business models (I just got an unlimited monthly subscription for my eyelash extension fills!) and this one seems ripe for a WeWork-style startup to score real-estate and create a consistent U.S.-wide (or even global) car wash experience BRAND. They could buy up existing car washes. They could partner with them and provide McDonald’s-style “university” to help franchise owners maximize the value of their property with best practices. They could use collective bargaining to get better deals on equipment, supplies, etc.

Does this startup exist? Are you building it? How would you start?

Update: Thanks to Sachin Agarwal for pointing me to Spiffy, who recently raised $8 million in Series A financing

In this podcast interview on “Founders Talk” with Adam Stacoviak we talk about the decision to sell my startup Mattermark, the process of getting the deal done, managing psychology and explore the many choices along the way.

Listen to the full interview here or download and listen on iTunes

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If you’ve been following along on social media, you might have heard me say “I’m on sabbatical” lately. It’s true, I’m no longer an employee anywhere and this break is self-funded (some folks pointed out saying sabbatical sounds like something that I’d negotiated as part of the acquisition), so I’m not sure what to call it. Yesterday was the start of my 9th week of this new phase, and I’m not planning to work for the rest of 2018 (more on what I am up to coming in a future post).

This interview with Adam is my first deep dive into the process of selling Mattermark, and I hope it will be helpful to other founders who might find themselves in similar circumstances. I’ve tried to present the story with as little spin as possible, both on the positive side and also on the negative side. The truth is that I’m not devastated by this outcome and it is certainly still much better than that typical startup result (a total shutdown without any sale at all). I am proud to have “landed the plane” and I’m sure I was not the perfect CEO, but believe I have acted with high integrity at all times and generosity wherever it was possible. There is certainly a grieving process as I shed the roles, rituals and perks of being a startup founder and CEO but I am starting to see things in a more balanced light.

The coverage of Mattermark’s acquisition in December certainly wasn’t the kind of ending I’d hoped for after an exhausting process, but by that point so many other things had happened that it was really just another thing to survive. I was living life day-to-day, just waking up and putting one foot in front of the other, and I needed a break from the hyper-transparent life I’ve been leading on the Internet. Instead of the typical crappy acquisition fluff post TechCrunch tends to do, our deal details were leaked and the media angle was primarily a criticism of my tone in an email to common shareholders (I said “I have great news!” before telling common holders they’d been wiped out — not my best choice ever, but also not deserving of so much of the Internet’s asymmetrical ire in the Twitter outrage machine). It sucked.

When the story broke, I was so sleep deprived standing in my furniture-less rental house in Denver with the deal less than 24 hours from closing I could barely stand. Friends had a variety of pieces of advice, “You have to respond and defend your reputation! Your fans deserve to know the truth! Perhaps a mea culpa?”

After my head stopped spinning I puked in the sink, rinsed it down, and texted my board for advice. “Time to get off the Internet” they said. I focused my last dregs of energy on completing the deal (it closed the next day) and did just that. I’m proud of that, I knew I was strong but this was definitely the most I had been tested since some of the most stressful moments at Twilio… and the stakes were much higher.

I resumed work 3 weeks later and in total spent 6 months not only transitioning Mattermark but also running the Product organization at FullContact as a member of the exec team, professionalizing the Product org, establishing process and training, eliciting input from across the organization and establishing a roadmap aligned with the company’s strategy. I’m proud of the work I did there and truly believe I left things better than I found them. I loved getting to know my team and we’ve formed friendships that will last a long time, and we never would have been able to accomplish so much in just two quarters without their commitment and tireless engagement. Mattermark has been successfully transitioned, and continues to operate as a revenue-generating part of the FullContact product portfolio.

Now I’m a free agent.

I’d love to engage with readers who  been through acquisitions, life and career resets, and other major transitions as I figure out what I would most like to do next. Start a company? Join a startup? Join a larger company? Switch industries? Become a full-time investor? Become a full time writer? It’s all on the table.

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P.S. I am still actively angel investing in startups and funds, and you can learn more about how we are supporting female founders at XFactor Ventures. As reported by Forbes last month, we have big plans to raise a larger second fund.

After many years, the newsletter that was the genesis of my former startup, Mattermark Daily is sending its final missive today. It was such a pleasure to read the Internet and scour for posts to share 4 days a week with more than 100K readers, 60K of whom opened the Mattermark Daily each day at the peak of her awesomeness.

I started the Daily and wrote it for the first 18 months, and then it was the labor of love and dedicated efforts of many subsequent Editors in Chief who made it fantastic (and also made sure it published on schedule!). My deepest gratitude goes to Kevin Morrill, Andy Sparks, Sam DeBrule, Wade Vaughn, Nick Frost, Alex Wilhelm, Jonathan Kressaty, and Ashley Lozito for scrolling through thousands of articles to bring readers the best hand curated startup reading over the years. I am especially proud of adherence to our editorial standards, never-ending search to find more female authors, occasional wit, inside jokes, and exposure of new and up-and-coming startup blogs.

Below are a selection of links covering the Mattermark Daily, a wonderful product I am proud to have built and that brought happiness to many people. R.I.P.

• Ryan Hoover: Blog First Startups
• ValueWalk: Here’s What the Most Iconic Tech Investors Read Each Morning
• Fast Company: 5 Successful Startups That Started as Blogs
• Next View Ventures: Inside the Mattermark Daily, Principles & Process
• Teamwork.com: How to Turn Your Boring Newsletter into a Customer Acquisition Machine

Thank you to everyone who tweeted, blog commented, Hacker News commented, Quora posted, and otherwise spread the Mattermark Daily organically through word of mouth.

If you are looking for something new to read, I am sorry to tell you I am not starting another newsletter (the editorial schedule is grueling — much respect!) but Product Hunt does have 6 alternatives to the Mattermark Daily listed, and it would be awesome if you submitted more to them!

Did I miss a great press clip about the Mattermark Daily? Let me know in the comments so I can save it in the archive. This will be fun to look back on in 5, 10, 25 years 🙂

At FullContact, our vision is to “make relationships better” and I’ve spent the last few months wrapping my head around what this *really* means in the context of profiles of people and linkages between their different online identities. The fundamental idea behind this vision is that more data is better for decision-making, and that customers can craft advertising. marketing, and product experiences that are deeply human when they make decisions about what to say, do, offer, etc. with the full richness of understanding a person.

This is a significant departure from my day-to-day obsession with companies, financing events, mergers and acquisitions. To help me explore this head space I’ve embarked on a reading syllabus that encompasses neurobiology, psychology, sexual education, parenting, and much more. Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

• The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples by John M. Gottman
• Achtung Baby: An American Mom of the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske
• Your Brain on Love: The Neurobiology of Healthy Relationships by Stan Tatkin
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide by John M. Gottman
• How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
• How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns
• NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
• Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
• Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
• How to Create A Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil
• The Neurobiology of ‘We’: How Relationships, the Mind, and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel MD