📣 After spending 12 years at startups like
@stripe
&
@notionhq
, I’ve joined
@firstround
as a partner! I knew I wanted to make supporting founders my life's work and am thrilled I get to do that as part of an incredible team. Sharing more on that... 1/7
Today is my first day at
@NotionHQ
, where I’ll be leading Platform & Partnerships! 🎉 If you have any feedback on our API (in the works) or partner integrations, I’ll all ears. 👂
Today is my last day at
@stripe
. I've had such a remarkable experience in my 7.5 years at the company and I'm so proud of all that we've accomplished. I'll miss the people the most. Their integrity and tenacity is unparalleled. ❤️
Just in case this wasn’t clear, it’s entirely inappropriate for a VC to reach out to a company that’s competitive to an unannounced investment in their portfolio and extract information under the guise of investing. 😏
This week, I’m joining the incredible team at
@linear
as Chief Operating Officer. In looking back on the startups I’ve joined in my career, they’ve all had a combination of extraordinary founders and customers who deeply love the product...
As a startup employee, you’re investing the vast majority of your time in a single startup with the hope of a significant financial outcome.
VCs can place multiple bets in a short period of time and hope one pays off. Employees get one bet—just one. Choose wisely.
The
@NotionHQ
API is on the way! But seriously, we mean it this time. 🤪 If you ❤️ Notion, like building docs and guides and want to help developers build the very first integrations on our platform, apply here 📝
A lot of early-career startup employees are afraid of getting layered with a more senior leader hired above them. So was I when it happened to me. It took me awhile to look back and understand it from the founder/CEO perspective.
A quick thread on getting layered. 🧵
I just wired my 50th angel investment today! 🎉
A friend asking for advice on getting started with angel investing was told, "I never had to think about building my network, deals just came to me."
Well, that's not exactly how it went for me. 🤷🏻♀️
So, I'll share my advice...🧵
I’m hearing a lot of small startups say, “Well, Stripe didn’t have PMs until they had hundreds of employees, so we’re thinking we’ll do the same.” A couple thoughts... 🧵
I've been having lots of conversations with folks looking to join an early-stage startup (Seed to Series B) and negotiating their offers. A few thoughts based on my experiences... 🧵
Employees joining startups 10-12 years ago had the default assumption that the startup would fail.
Employees joining startups more recently have the default assumption that they've joined a rocketship.
As a founder, this makes it much more difficult to deal with hard times 🧵
I met with some students from Stanford's undergrad venture capital club today (this did not exist back in my day).
One student had started their own fund before the age when I knew what the terms "startup", "software engineering" or "venture capital" even meant.
Less than 5 years ago, Salesforce (SF’s biggest employer) led the charge to pass Prop C which disproportionately affected financial services businesses. Today, Stripe, Block and Schwab have all left SF and Salesforce continues to dump office space.
SCOOP:
@salesforce
is pulling out of its remaining space at a San Francisco office tower that carries its name, per a new listing for the property.
SF’s largest employer has given up over 1M SF of office space in the city.
#sanfrancisco
#Salesforce
Finally, some good news in 2020!
@daniel_levine
and I welcomed Simone to the family! We’re looking forward to many socially distanced meet and greets ahead! 😷
In joining a startup, you are choosing how to invest your most valuable asset—your time. ⏰
I had a few career chats this afternoon and was asked how I’ve chosen startups to work for. Here’s my answer in hopes it might be helpful to more of you out there🧵
.
@Shopify
’s Shop app, which launched earlier this year, is now the 35th most downloaded free app in the App Store. That’s above Google Photos, Uber Eats, Tinder and Reddit. 🤯
📬 Some personal news...
This month is my last at
@NotionHQ
. I loved building
@NotionAPI
, getting our growth team off the ground and working with wonderful people. Thanks to
@ivanhzhao
&
@akothari
for bringing me on. I'll be cheering the team on from the sidelines!
"What did Stripe do in the early days to build a strong brand?"
Building a strong brand as an early-stage technology company is incredibly difficult and it goes far beyond simply building a great product. Getting it right makes everything—sales, recruiting, press—easier.
Signals a startup truly cares about the financial outcomes of their employees:
✅ Offer ability to early exercise stock
✅ Extend the option window to exercise to 10 yrs
✅ If founders want to sell equity in secondary rounds, offer the same opportunity to tenured employees
.
@Calendly
has a fantastic story and they also happen to be incredibly capital efficient.
• 9M monthly active users
• $60M in revenue, profitable since 2016
• $500k in funding
• Founded by
@TopeAwotona
, who emigrated from Nigeria to the US for college
45% of YC startups are on Linear
66% of the companies in the Forbes AI 50 are on Linear
@linear
is the default tool of choice for ambitious startups to build their products. Now, early-stage startups can upgrade to get 6 months of Linear free!
🔗:
Thrilled to announce that
@NotionHQ
has raised our next round of funding to continue to grow our business and expand the product for years to come in these unprecedented times.
I want to return to the camaraderie and optimism of tech startups in the early 2010s in Palo Alto.
This old post about startups doing user testing at Coupa Cafe really brings back the memories.
1/ Don’t mistake not having a function (product management) for not having a role (PM) played by a team member. Many folks wore the PM hat in the early days of Stripe without the company having a PM function.
We’re excited to share that we raised a $35M Series B led by
@Accel
, with participation from
@sequoia
and
@01Advisors
, to help Linear build the best-in-class project and issue tracking system
Hello, Notinos. We're excited to share that a public beta of the API is launching early next year 🎊
You've been waiting a long time, so we wanna get this right, and nail the functionality you want most! Sign up below and follow
@NotionAPI
for updates.
18 years ago, I lost a bet with my high school debate coach. The price of losing? I had to apply to
@Stanford
. This past weekend, I gave his daughter (now a senior in high school) a tour of the college that I was incredibly lucky to go to. Thanks
@MillerErikr
for believing in me!
I highly encourage you to turn this into an opportunity to help the company find a new leader/future manager who you believe you can learn from.
The only thing worse than getting layered is getting layered with a terrible manager.
I've angel invested in nearly 60 companies before joining
@firstround
and I'd consider myself a pretty helpful angel investor. But there are certainly companies who have gotten more out of me than others.
💡Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your angel investors.
Today,
@NotionHQ
made its Personal Plan free! 🙌💸 Now you can add as much content as you want without hitting a storage limit or needing to pay. If you've ever wanted to try it, now is the time →
As for what's next, I'm excited to get back to something smaller... starting on Monday. I've never taken more than a weekend off between jobs. So, why would a pandemic change that? 😂
3/ It’s easy for developers to understand what they’d want in the product and build it for customers like themselves. When Stripe’s customer base grew and we needed to build for accountants, customer support and other teams using the product, we hired PMs.
I spoke to a woman about to go on parental leave worried about the effects on her career. I shared advice someone gave me before I had my first child:
Don’t feel guilty about not being 100% when you come back to work. You at 80% is often the equivalent of a mediocre man at 100%
Newsflash: Most FinTech companies are at the whim of legacy service providers, who have the power to quickly limit the capabilities of products like Robinhood and Public. Or else, they’re out of business entirely.
Never underestimate the ability to write a good cold email. Sharing this anonymized one sent to me by someone in business school. She definitely got the meeting. ✓
I love speaking with folks early on in their careers, but I know that not everyone feels comfortable reaching out for advice.
☕ I've set aside time every Friday afternoon to connect with folks who may be at an inflection point. Book here
"At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but…
18 years ago, I lost a bet with my high school debate coach. The price of losing? I had to apply to
@Stanford
. This past weekend, I gave his daughter (now a senior in high school) a tour of the college that I was incredibly lucky to go to. Thanks
@MillerErikr
for believing in me!
@jrichlive
I think there are a good number of women CEOs (especially outside of consumer) who never aim to get press.
If you can run a perfectly strong business with no media attention, no need for personal security, no people coming after you for your wealth… wouldn’t you?
Hiring in early stage startups is hard.
We've found at
@Linear
, that the best way of determining whether someone is a builder, has good taste and judgment, can take initiative and approach problems productively—is to just simply work with them.
We shared a bit more on why we…
How do you identify the right people to hire?
At Linear, every hire goes through a work trial. In this new post, we share the thinking and the mechanics behind them.
→
This weekend, I built a lightweight tracker for my angel investments in
@NotionHQ
. If it would be useful, feel free to copy my tracker template (including my "note to self" deal memo template) here:
While there are some good arguments here, this Coinbase post is the tech equivalent of Colin Kaepernick's coach telling him he can't kneel during the national anthem.
The Stripe Capital team has been quietly chipping away at this for last year and a half. ⚒️ We're now providing our users access to fast, flexible financing that helps them invest in their own growth. 💸
It boggles the mind that so many people didn’t know that employees are paid (at least in part) based on what the market will pay for a skill set in a given location. Often, there’s a disconnect between this and cost of living.
We're building our marketing team at
@linear
and I want to share why I believe it's an amazing opportunity to join right now.
1/ We're a company of <50 people with a marketing team of 2! We're profitable with negative lifetime burn (the most efficient business I've ever been…
Working in AI right now is a true test of one’s ability to remain focused on their own game in an incredibly fast-moving environment.
At any given moment, in addition to thinking about what you’re shipping, every day you’re bombarded by news about what competitors (both large…
Patrick shared this note internally about the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle. Glad to put it behind us, and I'm look forward to continued vibrant competition in fintech (which customers benefit from!) in the future.
Trying to understand how you're performing as an individual in early stage startups is oscillating between thinking you're crushing it one moment and thinking you're going to get fired the next.
My oldest kid (3) screams “Team Family!!!” as her call for the whole family to stop everything they’re doing because it’s time for a group hug 🤗
How’d I get so lucky?
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to return to stuffy conference rooms, mediocre coffee served all day long, a sea of women's restrooms, having a need for a bag that holds a laptop, and noodling over twenty varieties of sparkling water.
The great thing about not handing out bonuses for recruiting referrals is that an employee's sole motivation in referring someone is that the referral would be a stellar colleague.
When a founder sends an investor update email with several concrete asks (referrals for specific roles, sales leads, advice on topics) and an investor replies all with, "Amazing work! Let me know if there's anything I can help with!"
🔔We're hiring our first Product Managers at
@NotionHQ
!
If you're interested in exploring our Platform or Growth PM roles and helping build the product function from the ground up, keep reading! 👇
⚒️ Platform PM:
📈 Growth PM:
I joined a conference call today with 20 people in the same room in South Korea.
51 million people
511 Covid cases yesterday
Oh what we could have been...
1) Write the email
2) Discover that every sentence ends with an exclamation mark❗️
3) Remove 50% of the exclamation marks to sound optimistic, but not so ridiculously excitable
4) Send
Fun to go back to what was written about Stripe in 2014 when some claim we were invincible:
“Braintree appears bigger than Stripe by every visible metric”
“We’d even go so far as to say an exit in the $500 million to $1 billion range is likely.”
"Leadership loves your annual plan! Only some minor feedback… you’ll need to double the revenue target with half your requested headcount."
Happy planning season, everyone!
I've been thinking a lot about how organizations tune people to their way of working, speaking and writing. When I joined Stripe at ~30 people, you would BCC nearly all external emails to an internal email list that anyone in the company could subscribe to.
You would then…
@DanielleMorrill
- Start now. The sooner you have them, the sooner you’re done
- Have a partner who is willing to do 50%+ of the childcare work
- Get a night nurse 5+ days/wk for the first 3 months post-birth
- Ideally live near family willing to help
Here's the note
@rishi_tripathy_
sent his team at
@beondeck
to convince them to adopt
@NotionHQ
after he joined. It's amazing to see our power users share their love for Notion.
I grew up with a single mom who supported our family working multiple jobs to put me in private high school.
I’m happy to support several organizations today that can help support women and young girls.
#InternationalWomensDay
Excited to finally get the
@NotionAPI
out the door! 🚀
@NotionHQ
users can now build the kinds of automations, integrations and enhancements they want to see in the world. Can’t wait to see what you all build!👷♀️
🚧 Notion's API is now in public beta 🚧
It's the first step towards a brand new set of building blocks, so that you can tailor software to your own workflows.
We can't wait to see what you build!
At
@linear
, our early product planning process starts with generating ideas:
∙ What are we uniquely good at right now?
∙ What are we bad at?
∙ What are we not doing today that would be game-changing?
∙ What should we be paranoid about?
More in our new FigJam template 👇
In
@lennysan
's recent newsletter on how we build product at Linear, we shared how we generate ideas as part of the early product planning process. Here’s our FigJam template, which you can use to organize your team's thoughts on what to build and improve.
2/ This worked for Stripe (in the early days, a developer product built by developers) at that point in time and may not necessarily work for you, in your market, at this point in time.
My ballot for the SF Special Election arrived! 🇺🇸 Here’s how I’ll be voting 🗳
⭐️ Vote to elect
@bilalmahmood
for CA Assembly
✅ Vote YES on Prop A to recall Alison Collins
✅ Vote YES on Prop B to recall Gabriela López
✅ Vote YES on Prop C to recall Faauuga Moliga
We just opened a Product Manager role at
@linear
! You'll work closely with
@thenanyu
, our head of product, with a very low PM::Engineering ratio. We're hiring anywhere in North America + Europe.
@spakhm
Slava, this is an absurd exaggeration. I was a frequent “hey guys” user myself. And honestly, so what if someone privately gave you feedback to say another way to address a group would be more inclusive? How did that feedback harm you or others?
When people say that PLG doesn’t work for landing enterprise companies, I just mention the latest public company that is now a paying Linear customer (and never responded to our sales team).
Meanwhile, SF hasn’t had a single outbreak in any of its private schools, but the public schools remain closed and the unions refuse to start teaching in classrooms even if teachers are moved to the front of the vaccination line. That’s the true injustice going ignored.
S.F. school board will vote on the renaming of 44 school sites tonight. Stay tuned. I'll be watching and posting updates as they come. It could be a long evening.
I began working at startups in 2009, always joining early (<50 employees). Some couldn't hit it big (acquisition post-Series A) and some killed it (go
@stripe
!). As I've been doing career chats with folks, the top question is "Where should I go next?"
I love speaking with folks early on in their careers, but I know that not everyone feels comfortable reaching out for advice.
☕ I've set aside time every Friday afternoon to connect with folks who may be at an inflection point. Book here
I'm surprised at how quickly founders decide on a lead investor to work with.
Picking a lead investor is like hiring an employee you can't fire.
Your diligence process should be far more intensive than it is for hiring employees.