Sid Sijbrandij

One of my favorite people is Bob Van Nortwick. He started & built AWS for Startups in 2010. Let me share a story about Bob. It’s 2012. By this time I’ve known Bob for a few years - he was the AWS liaison to our portfolio at a16z. Credits, technical support, meeting Werner Vogels, you name it, Bob got it done. He built this team to over a thousand people by the time he left ten years later. This is a HUGE role. Startups are a large part of AWS, which is the growth engine of Amazon. You’d expected Bob to have self-portraits adorn his home, start off meetings with grandiose introduction, & relentlessly name drop founders & investors. Not Bob. He’s hilarious & humble, a combo of dad jokes with f-words sprinkled in. He listens to you with complete attention. Even when I call Bob, I can HEAR his focus. He sees me even when he cannot see me. Most of all, Bob was (& is) RESPONSIVE. Anytime I’d email him, he’d reply in five minutes or less. If I explicitly wrote “this can wait” he’d STILL reply in five minutes or less. Back to my story. It’s about 11pm ET on a Tuesday in NYC. I’m in my hotel room winding down. I should sleep but jet lag. Then I see the email no one wants.   A founder emails me about how his entire infrastructure melted down an hour earlier. I’m not technical but I understand adjectives. This is disaster. And, he’s launching his new ipad app this Thursday.   Less than 48 hours.   Which will be featured on the App Store. To millions of people. I immediately email Bob but I’m sure we’ll have to delay the launch and therefore lose the feature. As usual, he replies in five minutes, asks to be connected directly with the founder. I email the founder the next day. No reply. Not a good sign, but understandable. I email Bob. No reply. Shit. What I didn’t know was that Bob & his team were meeting every hour, pulling all nighters, do everything possible. They probably needed a week; they did it less than 48 hours. On Thursday, the founder emails “WE’RE ON THE STORE!!” The launch is a success! Whenever I share this story about Bob, he smiles & says “We’re just doing our job.” Amazingly, everything I just wrote is not the best part about Bob. He’s a fantastic dad with three grown & accomplished children. But of course he’d be a great father! He’s humble, hard working. Even though we’ve never worked formally together, when you work with Bob, you feel like you share an email address with him.   Why did I write this?   Do I owe Bob a poker debt? Is this a sponsored post by AWS? No, I just caught up with him, reminiscing about old times, & he has the same warmth, same deep attention, same dad humor. Our industry has wild & extreme personalities.   I’ve worked with some of them. It’s fun but exhausting. BUT there are very decent people here too.   They don’t get headlines. They don’t want them. But their stories,  their achievements, their character,  deserve sharing. If you know Bob, please tease & embarrass the shit out of him. 😁

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PSA: If you send a founder product nits + feedback with concomitant screenshots/mocks you instantly vault into being an S-tier user. (Friction logs are even better, of course.)

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Alexey's growth eng class is an awesome and refreshingly different approach to accelerating growth teams. I spoke last year and cohort had incredible talent, and Alexey really brought out what problems growth teams concretely face when getting wins. Take Alexey's class!

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Thanks Joanne Chen and Jaya Gupta from Foundation Capital for the nod! Great to be in the cohort of top notch AI companies. Observability data is untapped goldmine of information, but when the time comes (in the middle of incident), it still requires "expert" skills to find the needle in the haystack. We at Deductive AI are democratizing the expertise to everyone in the organization.

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📣 🚀 I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Lekko as their Founding Head of Business. Today, we’re coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in seed funding from Lux Capital, Addition, BoxGroup, Abstraction Capital, SV Angel, and a host of incredible angel investors. Lekko is a more comprehensive approach to solving the problems traditionally addressed by feature flags. Our founding team was inspired by best-in-class dynamic configuration solutions pioneered by leading software companies like Uber and Meta. Software teams don’t have the luxury of long release cycles with clearly articulated product requirements. Instead, they’re challenged to ship more code more quickly than ever before in an uncertain environment where users’ and companies’ needs change rapidly. Lekko’s novel approach allows engineers to write dynamically configurable functions in their code, these functions are then ingested by Lekko and made reconfigurable at runtime. Enabling engineers to move faster and make decisions in the moment even when they don’t have all the information without leaving code littered with stale flags or exposing companies to the risks of misconfiguration. If something needs to change down the line it’s easy to adjust in an IDE or our web UI without needing to redeploy. We even perform analysis to prevent configuration problems before they happen and predict the impact of changes before they’re made. I chose to join Lekko because I’m genuinely excited about how our technology can connect the technical and non-technical sides of a business. With Lekko, engineers can be confident that they can hand off the ability to make dynamic changes to software systems to non-technical team members without worrying about a bad config. taking down a major customer. This means that other teams can move faster and optimize across more parameters without needing to disrupt engineers or putting the business at risk. I’m honored to be a part of this team alongside Konrad Niemiec, Sergey Passichenko, David Kang, and Jonathan Dobbie. Try it out today at www.lekko.com, your first 25 lekkos are free forever and we'd love to get your feedback.

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For folks selling in the cybersecurity market, how do you think about the trade-off between exposing product capabilities self-serve vs. gating behind a compliance check? At Stytch, we’re big believers in product-led growth. As a dev-focused company, we know and understand that our target audience likes to see how things work. They like to get into the details. They want to try it. That’s why our auth products are all free to get started, with the details of our API in the docs. But our device fingerprinting products are a bit different - to access them, we require a basic compliance check, proof that you are who you say you are and have a legitimate (non-nefarious) need for our product. Having to gate products isn’t fun; we’re proud of our solutions and want people to try them out. But we also want to make it more difficult for attackers to set up easy lab environments for brute force testing. This GitHub repo is a perfect example of how that plays out in practice; without precautions, your cool sales demo becomes a reliable testing site for new evasion tactics: https://lnkd.in/gaNFXnF2 Anyone else building security products who’s dealt with this kind of trade-off? How did you balance encouraging product discovery/PLG with maximizing product security?

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🪧Zvonimir’s first company, AWW app - A Web Whiteboard, went head-to-head with Miro, hit 100k MAUs, and was ultimately acquired by Miro 🏎️💨Pythagora (YC W24) dropped an open-source devtool that builds apps from scratch just by chatting with you and hit 30k GitHub stars at lightning speed 🎓In this video, he’ll tell you about his learnings with AWW and what’s different for a second time founder🎥 👣Here’s some counterintuitive startup advice: Don’t get pulled into industries just because your customers are asking you to. Choose your own path 😵‍💫Are you thinking of getting a few customers just to learn and perfect your product? Don’t. Instead, aim to get more customers than you can handle!

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Upstash just hit a major milestone—$1M ARR, two years after their seed funding. 💥 What’s behind this fast growth? Simple: a pricing model that doesn’t hit your wallet until data flows. If you’re using Redis or Kafka, this is a game-changer. What’s new: Series A: $10M led by a16z A brand-new vector database tailored for AI developers Plans to double their team in the next year. Their consumption-based pricing reduces barriers for developers. You don’t pay until your app starts scaling. 🚀 PS: Do you think this model will disrupt more platforms? #startups #dataplatform #AI

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💯 agree with this viewpoint Today there are hundreds of products in every vertical that should really be features not products 🤯 Who actually enjoys having 20+ software applications to run a business? I’ve yet to meet a degenerate who does 😂 Building a compound startup or true system of record is not for the faint hearted. Everything is harder. Navigating through the complexity and the breadth vs depth conundrum is agonising 🛣️ 🧟‍♂️ But if you can stick the course and execute on this strategy successfully to build the ‘one stop shop for X’ both the customer and the software provider get incredible rewards 🏆🏆 #compound #startup

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“You can’t solve climate with SaaS.” 🌎 Going from science project to profitable business model is hard for most deep tech startups. It’s the valley of death. But some—like the ones that need hundreds of millions in capex to prove their tech at scale—have it harder. Here’s to the climate tech startups that are literally saving the world for us when there are much easier ways to make money. And shout out to the investors large and small who have the patience and vision to back them. Founders, you can do it! You’ll need more focus than most, and your capital stack will be different. But we’re running out of time to get this right, and we need you to succeed. Lisbeth Kaufman Stephen Blalock Shaima Sharif Jason C. Alex Anderson Khaled Al Huraimel Fares Almazrooei Laura Bowen #climatetech #deeptech

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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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Ever been in a meeting where the CTO starts talking about "complex database work" and you just know—deep down—they're stalling because they really don’t want to do it? Yeah, we’ve all seen it. Instead of tackling a simple feature request, they spin it into some mystical tech problem, drop a line about "focusing on growth, not features," and suddenly your whole idea is on life support. Brilliant deflection. And if you’re using an outsourced tech platform? Welcome to the development queue of death—where good ideas go to die, or get resurrected with a price tag that makes you wonder if you’re paying for an actual resurrection. Even worse, that “innovative feature” you paid through the nose for ends up farmed out to your competitors. Feels good, right? You end up feeling stuck—constrained from growth, forced into clunky workarounds, battling limited resources, and hoping the CTO stops having bad days. But here’s the thing—DIY tools like OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, and a growing list of others are rewriting the script. The old song and dance of "we can’t because it’s too complex" is getting real tired—if you know where to look. Still hesitating? Keep in mind, while you're sitting there debating, others have already grabbed the tools and moved on. Can you relate? How often have you seen a platform bottleneck your business? In Leadgen, it's practically a rite of passage. Let’s hear your stories—how did you handle it?

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Super excited about the *SpotDraft Fall 2024 Release* At SpotDraft, we engineer integrations to fit into your existing ecosystem—not disrupt it. Our Fall 2024 Release comes loaded with features that elevate how legal teams operate within their preferred tools, aligning with our vision that great software should empower teams effortlessly. Here’s what’s new: 1. Microsoft Word Sync I’m particularly excited about this one. Our new MS Word desktop integration allows users to open, edit, and save contracts back to SpotDraft directly in Word. Best of all, it takes a single click to begin reviewing within your favorite editor. In the words of one of our beta testers - “Insane work, much easier, so so much better!” 2. Enhanced Slack Notifications Our new Slack notifications make it much easier to see contract details in an instant including reviewer details & approvals. You can also take action directly from Slack, without leaving SpotDraft! 3. Simplified Salesforce Integration Designed for complex needs, our upgraded Salesforce integration enables multi-account connections, custom field mapping, and dynamic data sync, all with a heavily simplified configuration that is super easy to set up. These integrations aren’t just a few of the enhancements that we are bringing to SpotDraft this fall. They were designed to make SpotDraft a fully adaptable, invisible ally in your daily operations. By meeting teams exactly where they are, we’re transforming SpotDraft into a unified, frictionless source of truth and collaboration. Check out all the new features coming to SpotDraft here: https://lnkd.in/e4Pr2d7y #SeamlessIntegration #ProductManagement #LegalOps #SpotDraft

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Wiz is the fasting growing startup in history. They went from $0 to $100m ARR in 18 months 🤯🤯🤯 That's faster than Ramp, Deel, and any other company you've heard about. Just five years, Wiz is generating over $500m ARR, serving almost half of the Fortune 100, and Google was rumored to be in talks to acquire them for $23B. Oh, and they pivoted from their original idea a couple of months after founding. Raaz Herzberg joined as their first PM, and one of the first 10 employees, and is now CMO and VP of product strategy at Wiz. Prior to Wiz, Raaz led security products at Microsoft. In our conversation, Raaz shares: 🔸 How Wiz pivoted from their initial idea and found intense PMF 🔸 What Raaz learned about listening to customers 🔸 Lessons learned from scaling a hypergrowth startup like Wiz 🔸 Why she moved from product to marketing, despite no prior experience 🔸 How she thinks differently as a marketer with a product background 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gnFZAxb7 - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gCSJEXpV - Apple: https://lnkd.in/g_ve3XvH Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/ 🏆 Rippling — Automate HR, IT, and finance so you can scale faster: https://lnkd.in/gKG4WG93 🏆 Cloudinary — The foundational technology for all images and video on the internet: https://lnkd.in/gQ8mKaic Some key takeaways: 1. Don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t understand something, even if you think you’re the only one. Raaz’s willingness to say “I don’t understand” led to a crucial pivot for Wiz. This openness encouraged deeper discussions within the team and helped clarify the project’s direction, ultimately aligning everyone on the vision. 2. When pitching early ideas, pay attention to specific actions customers want to take, like asking about pricing or requesting to start a proof of value (POV). These are stronger indicators of interest that tell you they really want your product, versus general positive feedback. 3. Don’t rush to hire a sales team before you’ve closed some deals yourself. Closing contracts as founders not only builds your confidence but also equips you with the insights needed to effectively train your future sales hires. If you can’t sell the product yourself, it’s unlikely someone else will. 4. Be willing to take on new challenges, even if you don’t feel fully prepared. Raaz took on the CMO role despite having no marketing experience. It’s OK not to have all the answers; what’s important is your willingness to learn and adapt. 5. Unlike product management, where a misstep could haunt you forever, marketing allows for rapid experimentation. Use this to your advantage: launch that quirky campaign, try out a new format, and don’t be afraid to fail fast.

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Legit quotable and actionable advice: * Power of Threes - 3 mentors, 3 peers, 3 mentees. * If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

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"If we’re measuring velocity in days or weeks, it might seem obvious to directly tie a startup’s velocity to the number of hours you work each day. But startup velocity is far more than just hours worked (a nuance that many adherents to startup “hustle” culture get wrong). Velocity is not only about how hard you work, it’s about how you work. At a fundamental level, startup velocity is a measure of a company’s sense of urgency." https://lnkd.in/gV9Z_ift

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In a world drowning in data, most people tread water. Systems thinkers build submarines. Systems thinking is a powerful lens that reveals the hidden connections shaping our world. It's a crucial tool for designers and founders navigating our hyper-connected, data-driven reality. It's how you turn chaos into clarity, whether you're designing a product that puts a dent in the universe or turning your garage-born idea into a billion-dollar business. The Iceberg Model illustrates this beautifully: → Events (What everyone sees above the waterline) → Patterns (The trends hiding in plain sight) → Structures (The invisible architecture) → Values (The bedrock of it all) Most people only see events—the tip of the iceberg. I've seen countless startups capsize because they were too fixated on surface-level symptoms. The ones that thrive dive deep, challenging assumptions and rewiring systems. Systems thinkers dive deeper. Founders and designers, when you hit a wall, don't simply bang your head against it. Work to understand the system and the interconnections between its various components, all with a mind toward uncovering the hidden levers you can pull and the non-obvious leverage points you can push. Your superpower is connecting dots others don't know exist. You've got the submarine. Now chart a course that reshapes the seascape. Your move, systems thinkers.

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Is Founder Mode Grit Killing Startups? Survival of your startup depends on finding the essential balance between grit and practicality. Even though Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen highlight the value of grit, too much grit can run your startup into the ground. The solution? Inject some practicality into the mix. #StartupSuccess #SamAltman #GritAndPracticality #Entrepreneurship #StartupLife #BusinessInsights #Resilience #Founders #MegaWealth #StartupTips

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What a week this has been for innovative companies in Seattle (first Smartsheet and now OctoAI). Today NVIDIA made public the news that they have acquired Madrona portfolio company OctoAI. Partnering with the founders since Day 1 (ok Day -1) has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Luis Ceze, Jared Roesch, Tianqi Chen, Jason Knight, Thierry Moreau and Carlos Guestrin were all involved in the research and insights that helped create the TVM open source technology at the University of Washington computer science school and then the creation of OctoAI back in 2019 to drive commercial impact with this technology. From sorting out the terms of the original "pre-seed" round over a bottle of Caymus Vineyards wine to helping Amazon Web Services (AWS) understand the dynamics around the open source movement in Applied AI to learning our way in to product-market fit with the BEST inference optimization service available (OctoAI can help customers find their optimal fit of performance, customization, and cost), OctoAI has been the best! The company has helped set the table for AI-driven innovation for the years ahead and they will be a perfect compliment to the many capabilities at Nvidia. Luis, his leadership team, the board (including Carlos Guestrin Lip-Bu Tan and Mike Dauber) and so many "friends of OctoAI" know what a motivated, talented and authentic group of people are associated with this company. It is inspiring to see an acquisition at a total deal value of over $250 million in this highly dynamic and fast-moving phase of AI disruption. It is even more exciting to anticipate what will be possible with innovations powered by AI models and related technologies in the years ahead. Madrona has been investing in Applied AI for over a decade and we truly believe that we are just getting started! One of the hardest judgement calls as an investor and board member is to assess the benefits and risks of selling a company at a key inflection point in the journey. Nvidia made a compelling case that the impact for the OctoAI team and technology would be maximized within the market leader for AI infrastructure. I will be rooting every day that they all maximize this impact in the months and years ahead!

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