- When VCs asked us how long it would take another startup to duplicate our software, we used to reply that they probably wouldn't be able to at all. I think this made us seem naive, or liars.
JTBD
- During the Internet Bubble I talked to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an "outdoor portal." You know what kind of business you should start if you like the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks…What's the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. That is where your idea of what's valuable is least likely to coincide with other people's
April 24 Meeting
- David’s Agenda
- #1
- Build a P&L? Equity map? How do we track that?
- Mercury bank account and provide a report.
- $115k come in past 7 months… loss = $30k; QuickBooks and turbo tax. How to reduce tax burden to 0
- Carta = equity. Cap table. $100k @ $5M, 2% when we have a price round. Safenote, not realized equity until we get a 409A valuation. Effectively if we raise w/ a valuation higher than $5m, so her investment divided by $5M. Could command a $10M valuation in market today… if we were to raise additional money, would need to be on a different safe note
- Decision tree about how I can be on the ground floor. What’s that look like? What hypotheses?
- Here’s our systems map… path to scale to $1M… assumptions
- #2
- 6P Memo + assumption questions
- Two crisp assets: Narrative 6 pager… and second ??? 180-day plan of ownership lanes. More actionable collateral.
- Start a word doc?
- #3
- What does robust positioning look like for David? What assets and answers
Tactical ask: Research field of psychometrics; psychometrics as a service model. Consulting service model. Clarity around skills —> goals (through our enablement through a variety of…) Hardest problems by shrinking service models. Pyscho service model delivery. What are the skills of your org. Listen labs… asynch consumer product research. Do we want to do a listen lab? aggregate data around a specific skill. What a fleet of psychometricians do. Supplemental to service.
“What if you scaled down a service-oriented company?” A shit ton of agentic support.
Offer he can give me… Jan 1st
Seb or Danny facilitate???
mOcked 3ish day agenda
Change flight?
Mariott wokring space
Harvard / Resilience working space?!
Avis?
- I took this example from David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality…Explanations get at why we should take a theory seriously. Without a good reason, it is hard to justify spending resources on experiments, hypotheses, and models.
- For instance, if a business model cannot scale to a desired size because the customer segment is too small, why would you pursue or test that segment?
- why your idea is worth pursuing,
- why customers will want your idea,
- why now for your idea?
- why you for your idea,
- how you will roll out your idea, and
- how you will defend against copycats,
What do our processes look like at each incremental shift? 10 to 100 to 1000
- Customer acquisition strategy
- Support processes
- Onboarding experience (you likely can't offer the same high-touch service)
(Assuming you'd like me to proceed with general assumptions suitable for a managerial/leadership audience interested in both strategy and practical application, here is the synthesis. I will refine this further if you provide answers to the questions above.)