Liam Bolling

Have you ever thought about how compliance laws are a lot like design systems? I recently spoke with Joe Toscano, founder of DataGrade, and he made a fascinating comparison. Joe explained how Brad Frost's atomic design methodology took an engineering approach to design: → Creating standardized elements → Templatizing them → Scaling them across a system This led to the rise of human interface guidelines (HIGs) from tech giants like Google, Apple, and IBM. But here's where it gets really interesting: Joe argued that privacy laws and regulations are like the ultimate HIG for product design. Just like how HIGs provide rules and constraints for design systems... Compliance laws set guardrails for what we can and can't do with user data. If we design something that isn't compliant, it doesn't matter how sleek the UI is. Legal requirements become the top-level framework we have to design within. That's what got Joe into studying laws - to understand this new "design system" for building products. So next time you're cursing a lengthy legal doc or trying to make sense of GDPR... Remember, it's all just part of the atomic design of compliance. — Do you agree with the analogy of compliance laws as the ultimate design system? Why or why not? Hear more of Joe's unique perspectives on the intersection of product, privacy, and law on the latest episode of The Minimum Viable Podcast.

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powerful tool

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Marques Brownlee -aka MKBHD's 41-second review and the fall of a $230M AI startup. It took less than a minute for MKBHD to share his skepticism about the Humane AI Pin, a new entry in the wearable tech market with a price tag of $700 and a $24 monthly subscription. Towards his review, he couldn't find any added value to the product. The aftermath is rapid: - Social media bad buzz - Absolutely not recommended for purchase Conclusion: 1/ The hype of startups 🦄: Especially in tech, they operate under immense pressure. With investors pouring millions into what they hope will be the next big thing, the stakes are incredibly high. 2/ The creator economy and its influence 🤳🏽: This is a prime example of the creator economy’s impact on traditional business models, especially in technology. Influencers and content creators like MKBHD have an enormous power. Their opinions can validate or condemn products overnight, influencing not only consumer behavior but also investor confidence and market dynamics. 🫸🏽 Don't build before you talk to people. Attached is the video of Humane gravestone 🪦.

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Over the past two months I have gotten to learn more about Hammad Malik, and the amazing ways he is using his knowledge and experience in conversational AI to uplift the lives of others. I was truly inspired, and now want others to hear his story, and learn more about his new startup Uplift AI. At this month's Open Seattle's Monthly Meetup we will hear from Hammad about how his company is planning to overcome literacy barriers in Pakistan. With a background from Lahore University of Management Sciences and Cornell University and experience at Alexa and Siri, Hammad is developing advanced voice technology solutions to provide essential information and services in Pakistan’s native languages, accessible even on basic phones. His mission-driven endeavor aims to enhance healthcare, agriculture, e-commerce, and banking access, improving economic opportunities for Pakistan’s underserved population. His talk will resonate with entrepreneurs and mission-driven individuals eager to drive meaningful change. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gNnMMNH4 Raza Ul Mustafa, Raja Iqbal, Salman Paracha, Omer Gajial, Umair Bashir, Jon Turow, Kartik Talamadupula, Misbah Uraizee, Misbah Syed, Fahim ul Haq, Noor Us Sahar Arif, Fatima Kardar, Yuval Neeman, Sabrina Wu, Greg Coquillo #generativeAI #conversationalAI #openseattle

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Similarweb acquires 42Matters- an app intelligence data company. Smart acquisition and I would expect Similarweb to use their public stock to acquire aggressively. Lots of data and data technology would make sense as part of their company. 42matters' expertise in app store, engagement, and mobile SDK data promises to deliver more in-depth insights into app performance and user engagement. The integration of these advanced solutions is expected to benefit app owners by providing a clearer view of their apps' positioning against competitors and user interaction. The 42matters' dataset includes information from 12 app store platforms, over 2.1 million publishers, more than 2,600 SDKs, and upwards of 20 million apps. The combination of these two companies should benefit from the Similarweb distribution.

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Experimented with giving founders and creatives 15min of feedback with their apps and website for buildspace this week: here are some common questions I've asked from 5/20 calls so far. Websites specifically: (1) Is your headline clear? (i.e. can a 3rd grader understand what the point of this site is?) (2) Does the rest of your site (copy, graphics, CTA/buttons, and other interactions) support this? (3) Is there any friction? Is it on purpose? Well-communicated? _____ Who am I: I'm a first-gen design founder here to help founders and creatives serve the underserved. Why I'm doing this: experimenting with how founders and creatives can create impactful and sustainable products/services. What I've done so far: Started a studio to help tech companies in UXR, launched a Typeform to help people start with usability tests, conducting 15min of feedback for early-stage founders and creatives. Interested in seeing what comes next? Happy to hear any feedback, questions, next steps you'd like to see #nights_weekends #productdesign #uxr #websites #apps #founders #creatives

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Interesting conversation between Jason Calacanis and Tekedra N. Mawakana Mawakana, CEO of Waymo (Google's self-driving project).... (Paraphrased) Jason Calacanis: Why are you not testing your Waymo self-driving on highways? You seem focused primarily on city environments like San Francisco, yet in my experience being a tesla-owner from the very beginning (and using both auto-pilot and then full self driving) it is better on the highways. You seem to be taking the opposite approach. Is it because speed kills? Tekedra: Our mission is safety and to get to Level 4 driving (the highest level of autonomous driving, no driver behind the wheel, no drivers' license) and so we’ve made a deliberate decision to focus on crowded urban environments because that is the hardest problem. Anything that doesn’t contribute to our getting to Level 4 is not interesting to us (not intended, but could be back-handed compliment to Musk 🙂) You don’t learn anything new self-driving on the same boring monotonous highways. --- Great point! #waymo #allin #selfdriving #google

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💰📈 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝗯𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 $𝟭𝟬𝟬𝗠 𝗮𝘁 𝗮 $𝟭𝗕 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 Black Forest Labs, a generative AI startup, is reportedly raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to multiple sources. Co-founded by the engineers behind Stability AI, the company emerged from stealth two months ago with $31 million in funding and has since garnered attention from investors. Its text-to-image (TTI) model, Flux.1, is already being used by Elon Musk’s company "X.ai", in the AI model "Grok", a chatbot known for producing audacious images. Investors are particularly drawn to Black Forest Labs due to its founding team, which includes experts in image diffusion models, positioning the startup as a strong contender in the AI space. The company, based in Freiburg, Germany, is expected to launch more features and new models soon, including a state-of-the-art text-to-video (TTV) tool. Though it has yet to confirm its latest investors, sources indicate "Lightspeed" may be involved in the upcoming round. ➜ Check the news at: https://lnkd.in/d4TmqMfb ➜ Vendorvise's official Instagram: https://lnkd.in/ebK2KQ2C 🤖 If you enjoy reading my posts about AI and tech news, hit the like button and share with your friends to support my content! #ai #artificialintelligence #ainews #aipowered #news #blog #techcrunch #blackforestlabs #aiimages #grok #x #aimodel #nofilter #100million #1billion #valuation #investment #funding #startup #generativeai #aitech #technology #content #socialmedia #future #new #business #techtrends #innovation #launch #success #markets #people #industry

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Bilt Rewards went from $0 to $1.5B valuation in under a year post launch. I had the pleasure of hearing Ankur Jain, Bilt’s founder and CEO, speak at FintechMeetup. It was extremely inspiring and I had to dig deeper. What is Bilt? The core idea of Bilt Rewards is simple and compelling. Why can’t your rent payments contribute towards home ownership in the future? Most of us pay rent through our bank since paying with a credit card adds an additional 2.5-3%. With the Bilt MasterCard, you not only avoid fees but earn points on your rent payments: redeeming 1 point for every dollar spent up to 100K points per year - that you can apply towards your down payment. Fascinating tidbits: 1. Before Bilt, you weren’t legally allowed to use points towards a down payment. So Ankur and team spent 18 months working with regulators to create the regulations required to make a system like this possible. 2. Ankur worked on the idea by himself for a year, pitching to real estate owners and finessing the model before even hiring the first employee. 3. Almost every real estate owner Ankur pitched to initially was opposed to the idea. Over the course of 4 years, Bilt built a distribution network of 4M+ rental homes that allows residents to pay with Bilt. Ankur shares lessons valuable to every entrepreneur: 1. Distribution and customer acquisition strategy needs to be at the forefront of your pitch. 2. Creative relentless vs hard-headed relentlessness: “No just means ask again differently. Slightly different changes. Slightly different approach. Slightly different person you are asking. That’s the key. Doing the same thing over and over again will only get you the same results.” 3. A great product will not sell itself. To break through change aversion and transform consumer behavior, you must out execute with relentlessness: “The irony is when you think about building a company, you’ve gotta have the right product to solve a real problem. You have to have the core business economics and all that stuff. But what people don’t talk about - it doesn’t matter how good your idea is or how perfect the timing is. If you are not relentless at taking no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no over and over again and still being willing to come to the plate, it doesn’t matter. That is the single most important trait I’ve found. Because for whatever reason, the world likes to reject change. There is such inherent resistant to anything different. So you have to literally will your idea into existence. It’s exhausting but fulfilling.” Keeping especially the last takeaway in mind as we forge new paths ✨

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I work with a lot of lost startup founders. They want to build but don’t know how to do it. It’s easy tho. You only need 4 things: 1. A few smart people aligned to a mission bigger than themselves. 2. A proven process for how to iteratively build and improve a product (LOTS of examples out in the world to copy). 3. A thorough understanding of your market and users. 4. The work ethic and heart to grind until you hit product market fit. If you’re missing any one of these you’ll fail, but with all 4 you can’t lose. Instead of going out this Friday night, stay in and grind on that big idea. Go get it 🫡

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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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🚀 Headstarter Pathways to Tech Event: Key Takeaways 🚀 🗒 I had an amazing time at the Pathways to Tech Event, featuring inspiring speakers who shared invaluable insights: 1. Dennis Crowley (Founder of Foursquare):    - Emphasized the importance of innovation and persistence in building a successful tech company.    2. Tariq Ahmed (First Engineer at AppLovin):    - Shared strategies for scaling a tech company and the importance of team collaboration.    3. Julian Alvarez 🚀 (Former SWE at Meta, CEO of Wisdolia):    - Highlighted the significance of product-market fit and exploring diverse revenue streams.    4. Hamza Ali (CEO of Olostep):    - Discussed talent development and partnership opportunities, especially with Headstarter.    5. Erik Cupsa (ML Engineer Intern at TRC):    - Showcased the impact of content creation and practical machine learning insights. Favorite Speaker: Hamza Ali, for his dedication to hiring and developing talent and his practical insights on building a tech company. Maximizing My Chances of Getting Hired by Olostep: 1. **Skill Development**: Focus on software development and machine learning relevant to Olostep’s projects. 2. **Networking**: Engage with Olostep team members and leverage LinkedIn. 3. **Project Excellence**: Ensure high-quality, innovative projects and seek continuous feedback. 4. **Professional Development**: Participate in interview prep sessions and refine my resume and LinkedIn profile. #PathwaysToTech #TechEvent #Headstarter #SWE

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The VC funding market has literally flipped for AI venture funding! Early-stage AI startups in Q1 `24 commanded higher median valuations than their late-stage counterparts. It begs the question: is there a dearth of truly groundbreaking early-stage AI companies, or is there an influx of too much capital chasing the next big thing? Likely both. Here’s why: AI Hype: There's no doubt AI is a transformative technology. But with so much excitement, some investors might be throwing money at anything with "AI" in the name, regardless of long-term viability. Limited Proven Winners: While there are some incredible AI success stories, the field is still young. This lack of established, late-stage AI companies with strong returns could be making investors hesitant to invest in them at high valuations. Limited enterprise adoption. Startups are betting that the tech giants, esp. AI tech giants, will have limited appeal to large enterprise. But the solutions are getting more and more compelling, and security and data privacy is being addressed. Meanwhile, the majority of capital is still going to a few players like Anthropic, Mistral AI, xAI, just like last year it went to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI. The future of AI is bright, but for venture to succeed, sustainable growth requires a focus on companies that can clearly differentiate themselves in the market fray. What are your thoughts on the AI VC market? Where do you think the opportunities are? #AI #VentureCapital #Investment 

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We're proposing a Community-Driven Idea Protection System: A public platform where creators log their innovative ideas with timestamps and development intentions. Each entry includes a brief description, planned milestones, and a 6-12 month timeline. Community members can follow projects, offer feedback, and verify progress. This creates a network of witnesses and supporters. If someone develops a logged idea without permission, the community can easily verify the original creator and timeline. This system relies on social accountability and transparency rather than legal mechanisms, making it lightweight and accessible. What do you think? How could we improve this to better serve creators while maintaining openness in innovation?

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3 takeaways for startups about monetization from Daniel Chalef, CEO/Founder of Zep AI (YC W24) 1️⃣ Know that your pricing & packaging will change. Plan for flexibility from day 1 so that you don't lose agility. 2️⃣ It’s necessary to separate entitlements from billing systems to enable monetization flexibility. Without a flexible entitlement service, startups get stuck, unable to innovate, and ultimately frustrate their customers and sales teams.  3️⃣ Don't build monetization infrastructure. It's not core to your product, and the result is almost always something hard-coded. Our conversation was packed with insights about building startups, LLMs, & SaaS monetization (full episode in the comments). Some of the topics we covered: 1️⃣ Daniel's vision for Zep and the drive that comes from being highly curious & easily bored :-) 2️⃣ The power of small language models 3️⃣ How B2B SaaS companies should implement monetization to deliver flexible pricing & packaging from day 1 At Schematic, we've learned tons from Daniel over the last year. He's founded several companies and served in executive leadership roles across nearly every function at growth stage companies like SparkPost, a MessageBird company & Domino Data Lab. At Y Combinator-backed Zep, he's building against an huge vision to be the state layer LLM applications. If you're an enterprise building on LLMs, you have very specific needs around data retention (think integration into data lakes, integration to line of business applications, etc), and Zep allows you to instantly recall, understand, & extract data from chat histories, so that you can power personalized AI experiences.

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As YC Demo Day approaches, I had the privilege of speaking with some founders from the current cohort and hearing about the numerous VC meetings they are attending. This brought to mind a piece of advice from YC that has always resonated deeply with me: "Raising the most money is not the metric of success. Building a great company is." Venture capital can be thought of as debt with the upside of equity. If it looks like debt (investors get repaid first through liquidation preference) and acts like debt (restrictive covenants on operations), it likely is debt. Moreover, if your liquidation preference is greater than 1, you effectively have an implied interest rate on that debt. For companies that have raised substantial venture capital, particularly during 2021 and early 2022, the following statements are likely true: - The company is no longer under the founders' control. - The company's valuation is upside-down, leaving founders with little incentive to stay. Venture capital often encourages companies to spend unsustainably, pushing them to grow rapidly or face failure. The assumption is that fast growth will enable further fundraising, but this is not the current reality if your last valuation was high compared to today's standards. In the summer of 2022, YC warned that a VC "winter" was coming, and it persists today. If a company boasts about its greatness based solely on the amount of money it has raised, it is wise to be cautious.

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Are you a startup or a small team who needs world class housing data and have seen the types of insights we produce at Parcl Labs? DM me and I will get you wired up. I personally understand how challenging it can be to sift through mountains of vendors to find the signal in the noise to ultimately get locked in at a significant price before ever really having exposure to the underlying. This is particularly challenging with housing data. The current state looks something like: 1️⃣ Coordinate a call, 30-60 minutes 2️⃣ View a powerpoint that you already read on the site 3️⃣ Go through extensive paperwork 4️⃣ View the absolute best sample of data that can be provided 5️⃣ Pay handsomely for more data 6️⃣ Realize the sample was the best it gets As a startup/small team, this is particularly expensive. This is time against the clock on execution and creating value. We lead with our product which is 10x better housing data with an experience designed around developers. Our product drives our content (which might be how you stumbled onto me). And we open source all of our research to accelerate the next builder. And having gone through the startup process, I respect the heck out of folks building. We have a special program for you at Parcl Labs that teams are raving about. 12 million housing insights pulled in just 8 weeks. 🧱 by 🧱

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3 and 8 are the best ones in my opinion.

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