Inside Round Week 18 - We're back
This week's articles, tweets, and podcasts every founder should check out.
✌🏽Welcome back
After a brief holiday hiatus, we are back! Welcome to the 18th edition of Inside Round by AngelList. Every week, we curate the tweets, podcasts, and articles every founder should check out. Let’s get into it…
Reading list
1/ Tracy Young, Co-founder of TigerEye and Plangrid, lifts the veil on the failure points she experienced scaling her business from $5M - $100M in ARR. Key takeaways? Don’t be creative with org structures, trust your gut, fight for your values and more. Read here.
2/ Jason Cohen, co-founder of WPEngine and Smartbear, proposes several “Extreme questions” designed to “jostle you out of tiny thinking” and help you develop better ideas. Read here.
3/ First Round profiles Kate Ryder, CEO of Maven — charting their path to product-market fit and highlighting key lessons learned along the way. Read here.
4/ The four critical components of ‘Artisan SaaS’ are speed, workflow, brand, and reinvention. Jacob Jolibois, the writer of Making Product Sense, breaks down the rise and anatomy of ‘Artisan SaaS’ like Linear. Read here.
5/ A16Z published a helpful resource on startup growth metrics. Plug in some basics about your company and immediately get key benchmarks for companies like yours. See it here.
Thread(s) of insight
1/ Sara Mauskopf, CEO of Winnie, lists out the ways investors can be more helpful to portfolio companies now that they are doing fewer deals:
2/ Dan Siroker, CEO of Rewind.ai, turns the tables and writes advice from a founder to investors.
Listen and learn
Tome CPO Henri Liriani discusses the importance of founding designers and how to build a strong design team early.