Rob Mallery

The harsh reality of CA politics -- the state government works for Big Tech, not the citizens. Some good quotes here. Newsom's stated goal about workable "guardrails" is nonsensical as it's currently physically impossible. That's a bit like saying they are pursuing a way to apply DDT safely to agriculture.... no such method existed. Newsom and CA have zero cred on anything relating to responsible or safe AI. The question is whether that extends to Harris. I honestly don't know, but her history in defending SV and conflicting relationships that include her brother-in-law suggests that it would be difficult for her to regulate Big Tech objectively. Trump is also a wild card. He's so unpredictable that one day he might attempt to order Zuch arrested and the next brag about the power of American Big Tech. The next four years will be interesting. I have much more confidence in SCOTUS.

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One of my favorite people is Bob Van Nortwick. He started & built AWS for Startups in 2010. Let me share a story about Bob. It’s 2012. By this time I’ve known Bob for a few years - he was the AWS liaison to our portfolio at a16z. Credits, technical support, meeting Werner Vogels, you name it, Bob got it done. He built this team to over a thousand people by the time he left ten years later. This is a HUGE role. Startups are a large part of AWS, which is the growth engine of Amazon. You’d expected Bob to have self-portraits adorn his home, start off meetings with grandiose introduction, & relentlessly name drop founders & investors. Not Bob. He’s hilarious & humble, a combo of dad jokes with f-words sprinkled in. He listens to you with complete attention. Even when I call Bob, I can HEAR his focus. He sees me even when he cannot see me. Most of all, Bob was (& is) RESPONSIVE. Anytime I’d email him, he’d reply in five minutes or less. If I explicitly wrote “this can wait” he’d STILL reply in five minutes or less. Back to my story. It’s about 11pm ET on a Tuesday in NYC. I’m in my hotel room winding down. I should sleep but jet lag. Then I see the email no one wants.   A founder emails me about how his entire infrastructure melted down an hour earlier. I’m not technical but I understand adjectives. This is disaster. And, he’s launching his new ipad app this Thursday.   Less than 48 hours.   Which will be featured on the App Store. To millions of people. I immediately email Bob but I’m sure we’ll have to delay the launch and therefore lose the feature. As usual, he replies in five minutes, asks to be connected directly with the founder. I email the founder the next day. No reply. Not a good sign, but understandable. I email Bob. No reply. Shit. What I didn’t know was that Bob & his team were meeting every hour, pulling all nighters, do everything possible. They probably needed a week; they did it less than 48 hours. On Thursday, the founder emails “WE’RE ON THE STORE!!” The launch is a success! Whenever I share this story about Bob, he smiles & says “We’re just doing our job.” Amazingly, everything I just wrote is not the best part about Bob. He’s a fantastic dad with three grown & accomplished children. But of course he’d be a great father! He’s humble, hard working. Even though we’ve never worked formally together, when you work with Bob, you feel like you share an email address with him.   Why did I write this?   Do I owe Bob a poker debt? Is this a sponsored post by AWS? No, I just caught up with him, reminiscing about old times, & he has the same warmth, same deep attention, same dad humor. Our industry has wild & extreme personalities.   I’ve worked with some of them. It’s fun but exhausting. BUT there are very decent people here too.   They don’t get headlines. They don’t want them. But their stories,  their achievements, their character,  deserve sharing. If you know Bob, please tease & embarrass the shit out of him. 😁

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How to fix California? Subject of today's Daily Dipup. Cali's had it's ups (goldrush, SV, YC) and downs (quake, fires), but now we are way down. The only way to lift Cali back up is shrinking govt like @elonmusk is doing at #DOGE and supercharging innovation by founders & startups. If you live in Cali and want to lift it up again, comment below on what you think we need to do.

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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A startup idea worth pursuing is: 1. pitch-worthy: you enjoy distilling it down and telling people. 2. join-worthy: you can form a community around it. 3. earn-worthy: folks will invest time/effort for collab opportunities or early access. 4. prepay-worthy: cashflow. https://lnkd.in/gA2icK8h

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Listening to Julia Schottenstein who was at dbt Labs before joining LangChain as an early employee to “solve all of the problems that aren’t specifically in product and engineering” talk about AI application design is 45 minutes well spent. Given - “I think we have a million developers now who use LangChain, and our partner ecosystem is really important for making LangChain as special as it is.” - it’s especially interesting to consider these design insights. Top 3 takeaways from Julia’s interview on “The current state of the AI ecosystem” episode of The Analytics Engineering Podcast by Dan Poppy (dbtLabs). 1: Foundation is set, now it's about unleashing next level creativity. Question: “How much do you think the creativity being unlocked in the LangChain ecosystem is still modest relative to what will happen with the next major innovations in the underlying model architecture? Are we seeing the thing or are we just seeing a tiny little precursor to the thing?” Answer: “It has to be the latter. I've been in this space now for a year, and the types of applications people are building today versus last year are very different.” Question: “Because the models have gotten better or because people have gotten better at using it?” Answer: “Skillset mostly. People have figured it out. They've gotten more of the basics down. They've figured out how to push the technology further. Yes, the models are getting better as well and that helps. But as people learn best practices for prompting, for fine tuning, for testing, we can just go a lot further. 2: Accelerating the feedback loop to iterate, faster / better “And the other cool thing that we're, we're starting to experiment with is feedback from production. People liked your responses; can we use that to influence and improve your prompting strategy or improve the way that you actually can design your application.” 3: Jobs to be done, application logic + design “As you start to dissect and think about the different types of user experiences that are now possible, how do we design for them? It's totally new worlds that I took for granted. It is these small new ways to interact with your application and software.” “Your application logic has to reflect how people are going to use your app. And so if they're coming in with certain types of problems that they need to get solved, you're going to design your app in a different way.”

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Ironically it’s the companies which are struggling or really need to streamline that will lean even more aggressively into things like having more geographically diverse (remote) employees. What inevitably follows that is a smaller physical office footprint. There’s just no denying that these things reduce operating costs https://lnkd.in/gbJ6yT3T

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Moderated a session this morning on applied GenAI/LLMs for a broad group of folks, thanks to Hydrolix.io for sponsoring the event outside RSA. As many folks think about building out "chain of thought" RAG pipelines, I wanted to mention there was a cool effort by a group to expand the context window of LLAMA 3 from 8k to 1M tokens. https://lnkd.in/eK8U3Pms I started to test with a typical needle in a haystack test, but discovered we need a better way to test efficacy- that more accurately aligns with the way we retrieve data from files and content blocks provided to the model. I will share more as a solution is fully identified. BUT, this Gradient model is a great potential addition to those using GenAI Assistant and Agents with local enterprise data, such as large log datasets housed in systems such as Hydrolix.io.

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YC founders: here's a harsh truth that might help you when hiring. Great people want to work with great people. But...A-players hire A-players. B-players hire C-players. Keeping the hiring bar relentlessly high is critical, especially early on. A single person that isn’t great can drag the quality down of the entire team. Folks will look around and realize the standards are lower than they thought. They’ll realize that they don’t need to be as good. They’ll realize they can learn less from their colleagues. People make the organization, not the other way around. And that if you don’t have great people, you won’t have a great organization.

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A cautionary tale for any entrepreneur including warrants in their fundraising efforts. Techcrunch ran a story yesterday on the collapse of Newchip and how warrants flowed through the bankruptcy proceedings. I am guessing in this situation, there were NO clauses protecting the startups from the insolvency of Newchip. If true, my heart aches for these startups now fighting to protect their equity pool/CAP tables from unknown outside investors coming into their company at likely ridiculous valuations via bankruptcy actions. It's a cautionary reminder to get solid advice from legal counsel—or, failing the ability to afford outside counsel, seek advice from experienced entrepreneurs who know their way around term sheets and investment terms. Best of luck to those companies mentioned in this article. And for anyone reading this who is a startup founder or entrepreneur, worth a read! #startup #entrepreneur #fundraising https://lnkd.in/gsvzQ_wT

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Some tools I'm using in many of my consulting engagements right now (steal my tech stack—"Good artists copy, great artists steal": (For context, the type of engagements I'm doing include: automated PLG workflows, inbound automation, scoring, micro-campaigns, and automated warm outbound/signal-based selling). ~~In alphabetical order~~ [CRM] Attio (a new one in the mix) HubSpot Salesforce [Data] Apollo.io Clay (a spreadsheet with APIs into 80+ data providers and LLMs) Sumble ZoomInfo [Miscellaneous] Chili Piper (Lead routing) Default (next-gen lead routing) HeyReach (LinkedIn automation) Ocean.io (Lookalikes) [Signals] Apollo.io Champify Common Room Koala Orchestra Pocus RB2B UserGems 💎 ZoomInfo ••• The alpha is not in the technology. It's in the strategy. Remember, avoid catching "GAS" (gear acquisition syndrome). The tools used to execute the strategy is merely a means to an end.

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A Simple Two-step Process for Career Advancement Want to get ahead in your company? Do these two things: 1. Give away your Legos 2. Generate more impact I didn't say it would be easy! Only simple. Giving away your Legos means sharing responsibility effectively. By finding (and training) others who can take over for you, you free yourself to take on new things. And, of course, you create opportunities and growth for your team. But remember the word, "effectively." You can't set it and forget it. You are still ultimately responsible for the results, and you have to ensure the quality and results are there. Finding new, more impactful projects is even harder. The farther (or higher) you advance, the harder it gets. Playbooks run out. Mentorship is scarce. Stay focused on business impact and prioritize your time ruthlessly. Scores of books have been written on both topics. But ultimately the formula is simple -- free yourself by investing (and believing) in others, and use that freedom to pursue impact and generate results.

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SaaS founders stay on about 10% of the time, just two years after they sell their companies to private equity investors or strategic acquirers. That's what I've seen and experienced in hundreds of transactions over the last twenty years. It's possible for them to stay longer; it's just not common. First, there’s the acquisition celebrations and clapping for the rare occasion of selling your company. And there’s usually a big prize for the founders. Then, there’s the new reality that this isn’t your company anymore. You don’t get to do things the way you did before. Almost all founders have moved on after a year or two. Sometimes, it’s the founder’s choice, and sometimes it’s the acquirer's choice. Stuart Draper ★ founded Stukent, an innovative ed-tech company that provides simulated internships for business students. Stukent started by focusing on high-quality digital marketing education for colleges and universities using up-to-date digital textbooks and content. They added a simulation system for students to practice their digital marketing skills. The team grew to over 100 employees and nearly $10 million in revenue serving marketing professors and their students. In 2021, they engaged with Vista Point Advisors, an M&A advisor firm, to shop the company to prospective buyers and investors, eventually getting a majority investment from Tritium Partners, a private equity firm. As Stu describes his transition from founder to CEO to CEO-with-serious-board-members: “When we officially sold a major part of our company to investors, we had a brief celebration. My CFO and I called each other and screamed as loud as we could on the phone in a fun moment. We got there, we did this. My family also took a big trip, and I got a break. “But then it was back to work. I was still the CEO and I still run this thing and I’ve got new investors that also need returns. I’m going to go deliver for these guys. They gave me a big payday, so I’m going to make sure they have a win too. “After the second board meeting with our investors, I realized this is way harder than I thought. After eight board meetings and doubling the business again, I wasn’t enjoying this as much anymore. The board meetings were hard for me. Prepping for them was super stressful. “So we found a new CEO for Stukent, and he’s doing great. Now I get to sit back in my chair at the board meeting, listen in, share my advice and opinions and come back in three months.” That’s a nice way to say it, but I’m sure it was much harder for Stu to go through it than it sounds. It’s always harder. Stuart also describes the steps in their M&A process: how they did it, what worked well, and how he felt after their deal was done. Check out this revealing interview with Stu Draper on the Practical Founders Podcast https://lnkd.in/d2RYyPXW #practicalfounders

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TWO OR THREE-STEPPING TO SERIES A A lot of software founders are still trying to raise a $4-5M seed round from a pre-revenue standpoint to get to Series A. I get that we all want more buffer nowadays but it's also a harder calculus to go from pre-monetization, to early customers, to giving yourself enough sales cycle time in order to hit $1-2M ARR proxy for a strong A. Which is why inevitably, more founders end up having to raise messy extensions/bridges/Seed II or whatever you want to call them. So my advice is that IF you have the luxury of starting a company today, PLAN AHEAD. Even prior to even raising your first angel round. Break up your path to Series A into 2 or 3 tranches of mission-driven capital. Each tranche has a clear goal that you can rally your team and investors around. For example: First tranche to build the product and get early design partners. Second tranche to get to $300K of ARR. Third tranche to get to Series A. This will help support higher operating discipline and awareness. Incremental purchasing and hiring decisions will instantaneously shorten your runway in a way that a larger $5 million seed round obfuscates. And you'll be motivated to find GTM efficiency faster in the journey. Great habits for long term success. For context, Peter Walker of Carta recently sent an update on the arduous path from Seed to Series A. The survival rate is about 1/2 of what it used to be: "Something like 20-24% of startups that raised a seed round would graduate to their Series A in 24 months or less. For companies that raised their seeds in H1 2022, only 13% have made it to Series A across the 6 industries in the chart."

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Data Rant #1 – Numbers without context. "It was a 4-point game, when…" Yes, that tells you nothing without context. The context? There were 8 minutes left in the NRL grand final between the Broncos and the Panthers. The Broncos were still up, but an errant kick had just led to a penalty in favour of the Panthers. My family is still too sore to speak of this loss over a year later.   Numbers without context are one of my pet peeves. For example, 4 points is an enormous lead had it been soccer – but this was Rugby League. And had it been 8 minutes into the game, versus 8 minutes remaining, it would barely be called a lead. Context changes everything. Please don’t ire the data gods by presenting numbers without context.   So how do you provide context? The two most relevant complements to a number are the target and a past value. Sometimes you can omit one of these if the other can be implied, but there is no harm in providing both. For example, if machine utilisation is 79% the context might be that this is up from 75% last month but still short of the 85% target. See how much richer the understanding is with the additional two context numbers?   An alternative is to include a chart with a target line. Charts are great because now you can see a 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘥, however, be careful not to introduce too much visual noise. There is an art to good dashboard design. I'll pick this up another time.   'nough said. Please include context! And feel free to contribute your rants. I've plenty to come.   Note: this was the 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘦 Broncos and the 𝘗𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩 Panthers. Sensibly the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers don't play NRL. For the Australians, wondering why I'm still talking about last season, it's because this season has been wiped from my memory.

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📚 Book Title: Scaling with Soul | How I Built and Sold a $25 Million Tech Company Without Being an A**hole ✍️ Author: Sharon Gillenwater ✨ Chapter 5: Is That a Polenta in Your Pocket? ✨ 🌆 San Francisco's Resilience: Sharon takes us through how San Francisco has weathered multiple bubble bursts—from the Gold Rush to the dot-com era and 9/11—all while she was striving to stabilize her career. 💼 Lessons from a Toxic Workplace: 📊 Quality Over Quantity: In a job where managers measured success by the number of cold calls 📞 made each day, Sharon focused on measuring impact—the return on calls and conversion to sales 💰. 🕵️‍♀️ Unveiling the Truth: When her approach was challenged, she pulled out a long list from the copier machine 🖨️, revealing that a "top performer" was making cold calls to a toll-free number more than to actual leads! 💡 The Power of Asking: 📝 Despite economic or personal situations, it's crucial to ask for what you've earned. Sharon didn't hesitate to demand her $10K check 💵 for editorial work, even when the contractor tried to delay payment. A stern conversation with the contractor's lawyer ⚖️ did the trick! 🌟 Blessings in Disguise: All these challenges turned out to be blessings, leading her to make the most beneficial pivot in her life. Sometimes, the toughest paths lead to the most rewarding destinations 🚀. Can't wait to share more insights from her incredible journey! Stay tuned 📖✨ #ScalingWithSoul #CareerLessons #Entrepreneurship #WomenInTech #Integrity #AskForWhatYouDeserve #Leadership

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It’s rare to find someone who has gone through a decade scaling developer workflows in a single company. I sat down with Kent Wills recently discussing the evolution of developer platforms at Yelp and dove into their ownership architecture. Listen to full episode on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube: https://lnkd.in/g722icVw Some key takeaways: 1️⃣ Yelp transitioned from a monolithic codebase to a service-oriented architecture that improved code ownership and productivity. 2️⃣ Yelp has internally built most of the tooling circled around ownership to handle tech debt and track vulnerabilities. 3️⃣ Yokyo Drift is an internal tool to support migrations across the organization Pre-commit is an internal tool (now open source) to help standardize the coding practices 4️⃣ AI-powered coding assistance has the potential to further enhance productivity and reduce repetitive work. #developerproductivity #ownership

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