startups – Max's Two Cents

A Happy Job Launch

April 7, 2020June 6, 2020entrepreneurship, recruiting, startups, talent acquisition, technologyLeave a comment

Today my co-founder and I are launching the product we’ve been working on for months. It’s an odd time to launch anything but we’re proud of what we’ve built and we hope that our product can also help some people who were laid off recently.

A Happy Job is a team-based and culture-centric recruiting platform. We help job-seekers — engineers at first — find teams that are actively hiring and fit their preferences. Search by product type, tech stack, team set-up, culture, values, working styles or perks.

See it in action!
Say hi👋 and support us on ProductHunt today
Sign-up for email updates about new companies or to get notified when we launch the support for non-engineering jobs
If you’re an engineering leader or recruiter, we invite you to showcase your team on the platform to attract and retain top engineers who care about your team’s values

If you’d like to learn more, keep reading.

Favorite Books of 2018 (and early 2019)

January 28, 2019March 9, 2023AI, books, entrepreneurship, future, leadership, lifelong learning, management, negotiation, neuroscience, social impact, startups, technology, worldLeave a comment

Here are some books I’ve enjoyed more than others in the last 14 months or so. I’ve included some notable quotes but not all are equally representative of the book contents.

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

“What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari

“Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective condition and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvement in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.”

Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

“Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

Monthly Newsletter: Issue 6

October 9, 2018March 9, 2023AI, documentaries, economy, Facebook, marketing, meditation, personal development, startups, technology, TeslaLeave a comment

Hi, this is an issue of my monthly newsletter. I’ve picked a few interesting articles on technology, startups, growth, marketing and other topics for you.

I hope you enjoy the read with your morning cup of coffee. Let me know what you think! ~Max

Technology and Startups

Fake videos of real people — and how to spot them. (TED video)
The Cloud 100. The top private companies in cloud computing 2018.
Magic Leap One first look: worth the hype? Spoiler: not quite. (TechnologyReview)
The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People. The struggle is real. (VICE)
Tesla, software and disruption. A deeper look at Tesla’s business strategy and future. Is Tesla going to completely disrupt the car industry? Or will the incumbents learn to build software faster than Tesla can learn to make cars at scale? (Ben Evans, a16z)
Everybody Dance Now. “Do as I do” motion transfer facilitated by machine learning: given a source video of a person dancing, that performance can be transferred to a novel (amateur) target after only a few minutes of the target subject performing standard moves. (3-min video)
WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind. The story behind the conflict between WhatsApp founders and Facebook business strategy. Bonus: promising messaging apps that prioritize privacy, such as Signal and AnchorFree. (Forbes)

Growth and Marketing

Slack Copywriting: What They Say to 9.6 Million Pageviews Every Month. Sometimes talking about specific product features can be more effective than talking about customer benefits.
All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders. (a16z)

Monthly Newsletter: Issue 5

August 2, 2018March 9, 2023AI, Amazon, communication, growth, marketing, marketplace, metrics, psychology, social impact, startups, technology1 Comment

Hi, this is an issue of my monthly newsletter. I’ve picked a few interesting articles on technology, startups, growth, marketing and other topics for you.

I hope you enjoy the read with your morning cup of coffee. Let me know what you think! ~Max

Technology and Startups

The State of Artificial Intelligence in 2018: A Good Old Fashioned Report.
Learning Dexterity (3-min video). Open AI trained a robot to manipulate physical objects. Plus, the NYT article on the same subject.
How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs? A person who is 40 is 2.1x as likely to found a successful startup as a person who is 25. The average founder who had a successful exit through an IPO or an acquisition is 46.7 years old. (Kellogg)
Amazon’s Facial Recognition Wrongly Identifies 28 Lawmakers, A.C.L.U. Says. ACLU used Amazon face recognition software, trained the model on a mugshot database and applied it to pictures of US congressmen. This led to some false positives — 28 members of Congress were identified as people who were arrested. The high false positive rate was mostly due to the low confidence threshold (80%) and the biased training set but the point that this technology can be misused is well taken. (NYT)

Growth and Marketing

19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace. A short read and practical advice.
Intercom on growth. The new book by Intercom that provides a high-level overview of all key growth drivers — from acquisition to retention. (Intercom)
On writing for deprecation. How to announce feature deprecation: be clear, be compassionate, communicate early and provide a path forward. (Slack)
DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but here’s where it fails. Andrew Chen on when to focus on daily/monthly active users and when not to.

Monthly Newsletter: Issue 3

March 29, 2018March 9, 2023AI, books, email-marketing, feedback, financial models, growth, happiness, leadership, management, marketing, music, performance management, product management, research, science, space, startups, technology, unit economics, world3 Comments

This is an issue of my monthly newsletter. Main topics: technology, startups, business growth, and marketing. See other issues on my blog or subscribe. ~Max

Now, get a cup of coffee and enjoy!

Technology and Startups

Latest YC Batch: 64 Startups. (Techcrunch)
Crypto Canon. A list of crypto learning resources. (A16z)
A visualization of how self-driving cars see the world. (Waymo on Medium)
Live video of the Falcon Heavy launch. This was just epic and worth a re-watch. (SpaceX)
B2B Buying Guide – AI, HR, legal, finance, marketing, productivity, and other products. (Y Combinator)
Cora. The electric aircraft company that Larry Page invested in unveiled its first “self-piloting” product.
The Building Blocks of Interpretability – visualization of image recognition machine learning algorithms. (Distill)
Here Come the Fake Videos, Too. It gets increasingly easy to develop fake videos using machine learning. (NYT)
YouTube, the Great Radicalizer. YouTube’s recommendations might lead you to increasingly radical content – no matter the topic. (NYT, Zeynep Tufekci)
10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2018. Sidewalk Labs’ “sensing city” and “zero-knowledge” proofs facilitated by Zcash cryptocurrency are interesting. (TechnologyReview)

Growth and Marketing

What 10 Studies Say About The Best Time To Send Email. Best options: Tue at 10 am, Thu at 8 pm, Wed at 2 pm, Tue at 6 am, and Thu at 10 am.
Analysis of the Dropbox financial model based on the S-1 filing. 1.1B revenue; 35% YoY; 7.97 multiple; 67% gross margin; -0.1% net income margin; 2% Free–>Paid conversion; 93% of customers are self-serve. (Tom Tunguz, VC)
Lessons from Spotify. Atypically for tech, Spotify’s marginal cost is not zero as it pays royalties. Since it’s hard to negotiate better rates with the music industry, Spotify will either need to tightly control operational costs or cut out the labels altogether – not a likely option. (Stratechery)

Monthly Newsletter: Issue 2

January 30, 2018March 9, 2023AI, bitcoin, books, crypto, Facebook, growth, hiring, longevity, management, marketing, meditation, podcasts, science, startups, technology, Twitter3 Comments

This is an issue of my monthly newsletter. Main topics: technology, startups, business growth, and marketing. See other issues on my blog or subscribe. ~Max

Now, get a cup of coffee and enjoy!

Technology and Startups

The best products launched in 2017 by ProductHunt.
The list of 26 companies started by 1st or 2nd generation immigrants.
CES 2018 summary by Steven Sinofsky. Big trends: voice interfaces, home electronics, robots, cars, and AR/VR headsets.
AI and Deep Learning in 2017 – A Year in Review. A great summary of progress and links to online courses by UC Berkeley, Stanford, and others.
Amazon opened a store with no checkout lines (NYT). Customers are charged automatically, thanks to machine learning and hundreds of cameras.
Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future by Fred Ehrsam. Setting up the right mechanisms for coordination and incentive structures can be critical for new blockchains.
Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble (NYT). All the hype and crypto speculation aside, blockchains hold a promise of a truly open and decentralized Internet – the way it was meant to be.
How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos (NYT). Generative adversarial networks at work. Getting AI to classify content is important but getting AI to create content is even more exciting.
Twitter’s investigation of Russian interference in the US election. Twitter removed Russian government-linked accounts and emailed 678K people in the US who followed, retweeted or liked a tweet from these accounts during the election period. I’m glad social media companies start to accept more responsibility for how their platforms are used and abused.
Facebook will show more content from friends and family and less content from publishers. Overall, it’s good that Tristan Harris’ “Time Well Spent” ideas are getting traction. I wonder what would happen if FB let users adjust defaults at any time by choosing % of content from friends vs. % of content from publishers; long-form vs. short-form; education vs. entertainment; text vs. video; new vs. old; from currently followed sources vs. discovery; as well as mute specific topics/keywords.

Growth and Marketing

Intercom on Marketing (ebook). A good intro to marketing and, in particular, product marketing that will be interesting to those who are relatively inexperienced.
How to Design Marketing Campaigns. Basics of marketing segmentation, messaging hierarchy, and campaign management – this article will be useful to those who’re new to marketing or looking for a refresher.
HubSpot’s Pricing Page Redesign → MQL Conversions 165%↑ & Free Sign-Ups 89%↑. How: research first – usability testing, internal feedback, and customer intelligence; then design based on insights and A/B test.
“What’s next in growth?” (video) talk by Andrew Chen who leads the rider growth at Uber. Andrew recommends you ignore “growth hacks” and focus on fundamentals that worked for decades. E.g. user referrals, shareable content, and using discounts to jumpstart demand for new products.

Monthly Newsletter: Issue 1

December 26, 2017March 9, 2023AI, AR, biology, books, digest, drones, ethics, ML, podcasts, politics, product management, quantified-self, science, startups, technology, VR, YC6 Comments

This is an issue of my monthly newsletter. Main topics: technology, startups, business growth, and marketing. See other issues on my blog or subscribe. ~Max

Technology and Startups

Ten-year Futures – a presentation by A16z. New technologies enable new use cases. Seeing them, as well as non-obvious “second order” effects, is key. E.g. mobile enabled Instagram, Instacart, and ride-sharing.
Decrypting Crypto – another presentation by A16z. Bitcoin is a combination of three old technologies: hashcash, public key cryptography, and distributed ledger. Value of cryptocurrencies goes beyond the traditional store of value and medium of exchange. E.g. tokens can help bootstrap new protocol-level innovation and incentivize developers, customers, and investors to contribute.
AlphaGo Zero masters the game of Go from scratch. The ML algorithm learned the game without any pre-existing understanding of rules or strategies. Building a general or at least a-little-bit-less-narrow AI appears to be a big priority for DeepMind. Perhaps this can count as a small step in this direction?
Delivering blood with drones in Rwanda – a TED talk by the founder of Zipline. What an amazing application of new technology and a case study in social entrepreneurship.
Tacotron 2 is a new text-to-speech technology by Google that is (almost?) indistinguishable from a human voice. If Google manages to make it less computationally demanding and ship it as part of the Android OS, all kinds of interesting use cases will be made possible. I personally will listen to more of my Pocket articles in audio.
Magic Leap is launching its SDK, shipping in 2018. AR/VR is already quite a saturated market. It’s not entirely clear yet how hyped Magic Leap technology will compare to Microsoft HoloLens, as well as to VR headsets: HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Key Growth Metrics, Part 2: CLV/LTV, and CAC (SaaS)

December 26, 2017June 11, 2020customer acquisition, customer retention, finance, growth, growth-hacking, marketing, saas, startups4 Comments

Managing a business is a little bit like flying an airplane. Keep your eyes on the speed, altitude, drag, and fuel and you’ll get to your destination fast. Try flying blind and you’ll crash and burn.

Who Should Read This

Startup founders, marketing managers, and growth hackers who are new to the growth game. Anyone who’d like to understand basic business metrics tech startups use. Here is why you might care:

You’d like to grow your business faster and understand the highest-leverage areas to focus on
You’d like to evaluate the performance of your marketing
You’re raising a new round and want to be ready for the questions VCs are going to ask

So, let’s dive right in.

What We’ll Cover

Last time we focused on user growth. We looked into acquisition, retention, and virality metrics, as well as interactions among these three. Today, we’ll assess the dollar impact one user has on our business. To do it, we’ll learn to calculate and use another metric: customer lifetime value.

Summary (TL;DR)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = dollar value a company can earn from serving one customer.
Retention ↑ => CLV ↑
Price ↑ => CLV ↑
Discount rate ↑ => CLV↓

Key Growth Metrics, Part 1: Churn/Retention, and Virality (SaaS)

December 26, 2017August 29, 2022customer acquisition, customer retention, finance, growth, growth-hacking, marketing, saas, startups, virality, word-of-mouth4 Comments

Who Should Read This

Startup founders, marketing managers, and growth hackers who are new to the growth game. Anyone who’d like to understand basic business metrics tech startups use. Here is why you might care:

You’d like to grow your business faster and understand the highest-leverage areas to focus on
You’d like to evaluate the performance of your marketing
You’re raising a new round and want to be ready for the questions VCs are going to ask

So, let’s dive right in.

What We’ll Cover

First, we’ll focus on user growth. Here we’ll look into acquisition, retention, and virality metrics, as well as interactions among these three.

Second, we’ll focus on the monetary value associated with users. Here we’ll look into customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.

Summary (TL;DR)

There are multiple variables that will define business growth dynamics
Main ones are acquisition rate, retention rate, and virality coefficient
At any given time you might choose to prioritize some of these metrics over others
This decision will depend on the business strategy, available resources, customer feedback, stage of the product lifecycle, and hundreds of other factors
Models like the one shown here can assist you in making better decisions by letting you see where your business will be at in the future under different scenarios