Many venture-backed startups are capital inefficient, and while some of this is required for the model, the more homogeneous it is at the top (👨👋🏻), the higher the risk...
Here are three ways I saw this play out working across operations & marketing in startups from 2013-21:
1) Over-focus on revenue at the expense of real, sustainable, and specific customer/user acquisition
If you're paying any attention at all, one of the first lessons working in a startup is that revenue is a byproduct of growth, and growth means nothing if it's not segmented.
In many cases, the pressure of creating constant, impressive growth leads to up-and-to-the-right syndrome, where investors and founders essentially spend all their time figuring out how to corner the market & outmaneuver competitors rather than learning from and creating repeatable growth within specific segments.
Read MoreOne of the misconceptions about AI is that it will completely replace any kind of creative process — a more likely outcome is that it will aid/accelerate them, and here's an example:
Over the last 10 years, I've worked in/around content & design marketplace startups. I also hired hundreds of creatives via freelance, agency, and platform models as a marketer.
While Canva and similar tools have and probably will continue to dominate the market's low and low to mid-end, there will always be a need for differentiation.
If you don't believe me, pause for a second, and imagine your 10 favorite brands and influencers all sharing nearly identical TikTok videos based on the same script and visuals.
Read MoreSomething I don't talk a lot about is that until early high school my family survived on section 8 housing and commodity food. Some people may recognize this can, but if you don't the tl;dr is it's the least appealing part of any commodity food box, whether you eat pork or not.
There was also a "Beef With Natural Juices" with a similar level of visual appeal. But, when you live below the poverty level...what you get is what you work with.
Since my parents were first and second generation immigrants that started over, we didn't have any wealth to speak of.
That meant that when things went badly (and when you're poor nearly anything unexpected goes badly) we were at a high risk for being on the street. My parents hid this from us, but it was present in all sorts of ways.
For example, when I was 11 or 12 a neighbor's dog chased me and I broke my arm hopping a fence.
We had no health insurance and my accident nearly destroyed our family, although I didn't know it at the time. I just thought getting a Raiders cast was cool, which, fortunately the doctor said no to because he knew that wouldn't be safe in the neighborhood we lived in.
Read MoreWithout question, the most popular slide in a startup pitch deck is the one showing hockey stick growth.
When you find product/market fit and start seeing rapid customer acquisition, the theory goes, your basic X/Y axis of time and revenue will show exponential jumps. Your monthly revenue goes from $7,000 > $70,000 > $700,000, hence the hockey stick graphic.
Obviously, this is an extremely attractive slide to put in your pitch deck or financials. And while it’s clearly oriented toward venture capital investors, over the last decade hockey stick growth thinking has made its way into private equity and the broader marketplace as others learned from and emulated the growth of Facebook, Google, etc.
The slide does have value, but investors, companies, and founders still frequently mistake the hockey stick as a model for growth, rather than the consequence of it.
Read MoreOne of the hardest parts of making the jump to being a manager, leader, or starting a company/org is learning to frame your work.
This is a brutal truth: most people don’t know how to frame the work they are doing.
It shows up all the time…
Two people schedule a meeting and spend the first 20 minutes telling a third person about a conversation they already had.
Someone with writing as a core part of their job delivers two projects. One is amazing and on-point, the other is ok but written for the wrong audience.
A partnership opportunity appears out of thin air but the company/org can’t move fast enough to leverage it.
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