From the Operators
Patrick McKenzie of Stripe has a guide to equity for founders, covering everything from grants to tax implications, all designed to help make good decisions now and avoid stress later in "Stripe Atlas: Founders' Guide to Equity"
Nick Bonfiglio of Aptrinsic thinks the traditional enterprise SaaS customer acquisition process is broken, saying the faster you can get a prospect into a product, the more likely they are to engage, in "How the Customer Acquisition Process Is Changing in SaaS: Don’t Tell Prospects About Your Product, Let Them Try It!"
Steli Efti of Close.io believes that upselling to existing customers and new technologies are key to successful sales, and this fits particularly well with Tomasz' post below about how customer acquisition is going through a revolution, in "What the best SaaS sales reps know that others don't"
From the Investors
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures addresses the ever-increasing cost to acquire a customer, and notes that when combined with upcoming regulations around how prospects can be emailed, firms will have to find new ways to court potential customers in "The Implication of Secular Increases in SaaS CAC"
Bill Malloy of Sway Ventures acknowledges that a disconnected board member provides no value, and provides a baseline as to level of involvement and engagement a founder should expect in "Being a better board member"
Jackie Vouthouris of Corigin Ventures is building their VC platform on the premise that truly listening to founders can help the founder succeed where resources are constrained, and the VC succeed by attracting the best innovators in "Building a Venture Capital Platform (Part I): It All Starts with Listening"
Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures believes that Fortune 500 and other older firms are finally starting to care more about design due to the nimble startups proving that consumers truly value a beautiful, easy to use product in "How Digital Product Design is Changing Industries from Financial Services to Technology to Pizza Delivery"
Parul Singh of Founder Collective assembles an FAQ covering everything from what happens in a pitch meeting to the follow-up process and round sizes in "How to Pitch Me at Founder Collective"
Tom Ebling of General Catalyst has a series of questions and answers worth considering when deciding between providing implementation services in-house or building a partner network in "When to Outsource Implementation"
Joanne Wilson of Gotham Gal Ventures reminds all startup investors (not just the fund cited in the article) that offering any amount of investment and then reneging is not just inexcusable, but can seriously jeopardize the survivability of a startup in "First you give but suddenly you take away"
Events!
500 Startups' annual PreMoney Investor Conference is December 5th in San Francisco. PreMoney is a one-day, investor-only conference about the most disruptive strategies, models & technologies for the future of venture capital.
Visit: http://sanfrancisco.premoney.co/ for speaker line-up, agenda and more info.
