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Product-market fit is “the only thing that matters” early on in the startup journey, wrote Marc Andreessen in June 2007. Conventionally, product-market fit comes down to early signals that the market has voted your p...
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I spend hours and hours in my inbox every single day. When I was CEO of OpenDNS, I would triage constantly to not block some critical path for my team. In particular I dreaded the “death spiral” of threads that led t...
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Since the startup (and founder) journey doesn't go neatly linear from technical to product to sales, tightening one knob (whether engineering or marketing or pricing & packaging) creates slack in one of the other knobs, which demands turning to yet another knob. So how do you know what knob to focus on and when? How do you build the right team for the right play and at the right time?
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One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. The concept can be defined many ways, but the simple definition shared in this episode is: it’s when you understand the business value of your product.
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In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Bob Tinker, author of the book Survival to Thrival and founding CEO of MobileIron, and a16z general partner Peter Levine, talk with Hanne Tidnam all about how to find the right go-to-market fit for the enterprise startup. How do founders avoid that moment of reckoning after product-market fit, but before growth? When should an enterprise startup accelerate sales investments? -- the "Goldilocks problem" (not too early, not too late!) -- and pick the right sales team and go-to-market model for their product and their customers? And if you're stuck in that moment where growth stalls, what are the right tools to get out of it? What are the important metrics to know both where you are, and when you're out of the woods?
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Nearly every early tech startup at some point gets enamored with the idea of partnering with another tech company. This is usually driven by the heady, very seductive idea that a partnership will accelerate credibility, ...
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Services are a well-established way to helping a deployment be successful and help your startup become a strategic advisor to the target customer.
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The purpose of category creation, argue the guests in this episode of the podcast, isn’t just about making a dent in the way companies work and changing what people do every day… it’s about setting the ...