Jeff Lawson

On this Tech Tuesday we're talking testing SDKs. Whether you're building SDKs or consuming SDKs someone else built, here are the topics to consider and ask your SDK vendor about.

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🚀 It’s a big day at Hoop! We’re excited to share we’ve raised $5m led by Index Ventures with participation from Origin Ventures, Chingona Ventures, Divergent Capital, and an inspiring group of angel investors. Two years ago, Justin, Brian, and I got together and started brainstorming. We had worked together as early executives at Trello for 7.5 years! We wanted to recreate the magic of the early days of Trello and respond to the epidemic of distraction we were seeing in the workplace. When I left Atlassian, I was in back-to-back meetings most days. Slack was constantly buzzing. My whole day was spent going between apps and praying I wouldn’t miss something important. I would wake up in the middle of the night remembering that DM I forgot to respond to. In an age of AI, this kind of mental fatigue across tools drains humans of our energy to do the work that really matters: the focused and creative work that comes when we can feel secure that we’re on top of all important work. Hoop is the product I wish I had. It connects to Zoom, Google Meet, Slack and email and automatically captures tasks for me using AI. It then centralizes everything in one spot so I never miss a task. Our vision is to rethink task management with an AI first principles mindset. There’s so much we can do now that we couldn’t have imagined back when we were building Trello. It’s an exciting time to be building in the space, and we’ve got a world class team taking on this challenge. Now’s the time to try Hoop out and let us know what you think! We couldn’t be more grateful for all the amazing support from our community, investors, and friends. Let’s go team! 👏🏼 Special thanks to our investors for all their belief and support - Damir Becirovic Neil Rimer Katie Shea Samara Mejia Hernandez Jason Heltzer Andy Dunn Wade Foster Linda Lian Michael Pryor Kristen Habacht Elizabeth Hall Barry Clark Nikita Miller Mihika Kapoor Jiaona Zhang (JZ) Maggie Adhami-Boynton Sonia Sahney Nagar Sean Harper Darren Murph Mike Arauz Job van der Voort Annie Duke Jay Simons Maria Christopoulos Katris Ezra Galston Sheel Mohnot Ilya Fushman #futureofwork #ai #startups #fundraising

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🎙️ Exciting insights from SaaS Academy's CEO Johnny Page on the Expertise Economy podcast! Johnny breaks down their two-step approach to helping SaaS founders: 1️⃣ The Discovery Call: Uncovering the founder's "why" and long-term vision 2️⃣ The Strategic Game Plan Session: Creating a 90-day action plan to achieve 12-month goals 🔑 Key focus: Identifying and solving business constraints Want to dive deeper on the secrets of building a successful SaaS business? Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dju-Be2u #SaaS #BusinessStrategy #SaasAcademy #ExpertiseEconomy #Podcast

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Let the wave begin! Pioneer Fund company Recall.ai *grew their revenue 10x* in the past year, has 300 enterprise customers, and just raised a $10M Series A led by Ridge Ventures. David Gu and Amanda Zhu dropped out of college at age 19 to start the company. They've grown it exponentially with a tiny team. They make it easy to build meeting bots that are cross-platform. They're aggregating all these different APIs into one unified API, the way Twilio did with cell phones. At first it "sounds" easy to build a meeting bot -- just integrate with the Zoom API. But in fact there's a huge long tail of things you need to build, security and privacy pitfalls, automations, transcription complexities, integrations, the calendar invites where someone is using Google Meet or Teams, staying up-to-date with the libraries, etc etc. Recall takes care of all of that. It's WAY easier to build on top of Recall.ai and focus on the features that make you unique. Congratulations to the Recall team!

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Fundraising founders, don’t be too hard on yourself—it’s a tough fundraising environment, and that’s no secret. But remember to keep raising your standards because the bar for VC funding is getting higher, and you’ve got to meet it. As the venture capital landscape tightens, competition for dollars is fiercer than ever. At Startup Ignition Ventures, we’re seeing this shift firsthand, every day more and more apparent. In 2021 and 2022, many startups could secure VC checks despite being loosely thrown together and rough around the edges. Fast forward to 2024, and those same startups wouldn’t make the cut. That's not a knock on yesterday's startups as much as it is a contrast to today’s fundraising environment being completely different. Today, the founders getting funded are buttoned-up, detail-oriented, and operating at a much higher level. Everything has to be top-notch to catch a VC’s attention. Why the change? The number of active investors has dropped by 38% from 2022 to 2024 (PitchBook), meaning fewer deals are being made. VC funding is also down over 30% year-over-year (GlobalData). This means the standard has tightened, and startups must rise well above the average “2022 or 2023 fundability status” to secure 2024 investment. Startups now need to show exceptional business models, traction, products, and teams to stand out in a shrinking pool of opportunities. The landscape may be tough, but it’s also ripe for startups that prove they’re exceptional. Now is the time to build, to gear up, and then be ready for further opportunity as the market begins to turn. Which I personally think is around the corner in 2025.

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As we dive into 2024, the Series A fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly daunting. Investment standards are soaring, and fewer startups are making the cut. Series A investors are finding many seed stage companies too premature. The median valuation jump from seed to Series A skyrocketed from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Investors now demand stronger revenue performance, targeting $2 million to $3 million in ARR, up from $1 million to $2 million. Alarmingly, only 12% of Q1 2022 seed startups secured Series A funding within two years, down from 31.8% in Q1 2020. #venture #earlystage #seedtoseriesa #seed #seriesa #inspireglobalventures https://lnkd.in/gW4bkcNy

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On this episode of Building Jam w/ Retool + ex-Stripe eng leader Tamar Ben-Shachar: 1. How to get out of fire-fighting mode and back to proactive engineering 2. Slowing down short term to add observability to move faster long term 3. The importance of aligning on what does "Done" mean on your team 4. Why the best dev teams are good at saying no 5. What are the best engineering interview questions to ask Hope you enjoy the episode! YT link below

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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We work hard to make giving as easy as possible, while showcasing the power of DAFs as the smartest way to give. And what can be easier than tracking your client's DAF into the flows and processes you already know and love? Endaoment + Plaid enables just that. Interested in giving a twirl or getting a custom integration for your workflow? Just shoot a message ✉️

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VC platform teams rarely add meaningful value to portfolio companies. They’re mostly a tool for GPs to justify raising larger funds and collecting higher management fees.

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Here's my 2024 LinkedIn Rewind, by Coauthor.studio: GATHER THE F***ING DATA. That's the real lesson from 2024, and it's why we launched Founders First Fund, kept Demolicious roaring, and continued pushing Portland's startup ecosystem forward. This year wasn't about me. It was about proving that overlooked founders in the PNW have the chops to build incredible companies - they just need the right support, data, and a community that refuses to let them fail. At NSIN, we connected defense and commercial startups. Through Founders First Fund, we made our first investment in Airbuild Inc. And with Demolicious, we gave 90+ founders a stage to share their vision. Three posts that captured our journey: 1. Early-Stage Startup Reality Check "Don't write any code! Don't build a website! Don't create a social channel! GATHER THE F***ING DATA!" https://lnkd.in/gQfMPaRi 2. Demolicious Champion of Champions "We had over 90 founders pitch throughout the year with the top founders pitching last night at the Mission Theater in front of a packed house." https://lnkd.in/gySaA--3 3. OEN Awards Reflection "We are really lucky to have an insane number of people who care deeply for the founder community here in the state." https://lnkd.in/g3ejZrPt Key moments: • Launched Founders First Fund - $5M focused on PNW startups • Ran 12 Demolicious events with 90+ founder pitches • Continued NSIN work connecting startups to defense opportunities • Celebrated UpStart Collective's 2-year anniversary 2025 is simple: Keep fueling the engines of founders who most people overlook. Because talent isn't distributed evenly, but opportunity shouldn't be a privilege. To every founder grinding away in their garage, basement, or coffee shop - we see you. Keep building. #LinkedInRewind #Coauthor #2024wrapped -- Get your 2024 LinkedIn Rewind! Go to coauthor.studio

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I really like this PMF Framework from Sequoia. https://lnkd.in/gT2nWttx

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Hot take: I think startups die because the founders stop having fun doing them I recently listened to this podcast on Lennys Podcast called "Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more" with Dalton Caldwell, a managing director at Y Combinator. He's probably seen more startups go through the journey than any other person in the world. He talks about how the main thing that separates the startups that die and the startups that become successful is not necessarily skill, experience, runway, or any of the other typical factors we may think about. It's the irrational perseverance of the founders who, despite confronting near-death experiences with their startup, still continue. And that irrational perseverance comes from their true love of their customers, their product, their team or a combination of all. They are STILL having fun despite the challenges. AirBnB is a great example of this where they nearly died 3 times and all signs should've pointed to shutting down. But they just loved working with each other and did anything they could do stay alive - even famously selling Obama O's cereal. And we've had a few pivots as as company as well and had moments where I had to question...is this all worth it? Yet, time and time again, I keep coming back to how much I love working with our team, and love solving problems for our customers. I am deeply committed to creating the tools of tomorrow that empower investors to take control of their financial lives. I am personally on a mission to help investors in Singapore aggregate and automate their personal finances across any account they hold - banks, CPF, brokerages, crypto, real estate and more. I would love to hear what other's think of this as well - if the main question we should be asking ourselves as founder is..."are we still having fun building this company?"

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You don’t need to raise VC to build a business with big impact, *even in a market that has heavily VC-funded players*. Case in point: Excalidraw is an open source alternative to Miro. Excalidraw is bootstrapped and revenue-funded, Miro is VC-funded ($476M raised). Miro just added a comparison page to Excalidraw - meaning that they saw enough demand for people searching for Miro vs Excalidraw that they added this page.

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Going from Zero to Product Market Fit is like getting out of a Bermuda Triangle For every direction that works out, an equal and opposite direction works too It is shocking how few get to product market fit Only 15 out of 100 SaaS companies get to a million dollars in revenue When you have PMF, it is an awesome feeling Everything is going smoothly for you It also feels scary and out of control You push one unit, and ten units of progress happen But when you don’t have it…. You push ten units of effort, and not even a unit of progress happens It feels like a Sisyphean punishment Moving a boulder up the mountain In the GenAI age, I hear arguments that go “The focus should be on the core functionality. Like how musicians concentrate on the music itself” This is clearly a faulty analogy Businesses providing playback formats (cassette tapes, CDs) are obsolete today Gen AI brings AI below the API No more does one need to stand up a team in ML Spend a few million dollars to “translate languages” or “transcribe accurately” GenAI now assures that Getting to PMF boils down to the basics - Do you understand the problem deeply - Can you build a 10x better solution - Can you execute & iterate faster - Don’t die in the process (cash) What has worked for you to get out of the Bermuda triangle?

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Learning the "Adjacency Matrix" is key to deciding when (or if) to launch new products as a SaaS business. I chatted with Jason Cohen from WPEngine about this on Rogue Startups recently. Full episode at https://buff.ly/4aAz2GH

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