Late-stage startups are reflections, writ large, of their founding teams. All the strengths and weaknesses, quirks and peccadilloes of the original team become durable advantages and systemic issues at scale. Founders who are community-builders by nature grow to have scalable, defensible community management functions. Founders who have no idea what| Harry Glaser
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]| AVC
It is probably not a great idea for the boss to publicly have favorites, but I was known at Periscope Data to occasionally blurt out that the support team was my favorite team. Well, they were. I probably got away with it because support is such a typically underloved function| Harry Glaser
In Startup = Growth, Paul Graham plots the life of a startup as an S-curve. In the first phase, you are exploring to find product market fit. Then you find it, and start growing exponentially. Finally, at some point, growth tapers and becomes linear or even flat. As PG explains, the| Harry Glaser
At my first company, I internalized the standard advice to never think about M&A. The consensus was, and is, to just keep growing the business and good things will come. I did that, and I was lucky that good things did come in the form of a $130M acquisition| Harry Glaser
