What I read this week...

The Best:

Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner (Lenny’s Podcast)

• I loved hearing about the early days of product led growth at Airtable + fantastic advice and insights on early stage thinking around building Marketing + Customer Success strategies.

• My favorite bit: “It's small stuff, but it tells that person, ‘The people who worked on this [product] were thinking about me as a customer, they built it with me in mind, and that means that it is more likely that this is going to fit my needs than something generic.’ And that builds up both the brand trust that we've talked about, but also the personality of the company, and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting for you that you can possibly get. Those little bits of polish that don't take a ton of time are absolutely worth it.” (Minute 00:29:29)

• The little details are so important, they build trust over time and can have such a huge impact on the customer experience. You can’t get so caught up in the details that you aren’t taking action, but there is something really valuable to finding that extra something that makes your customer feel uniquely seen.

The Rest:

• E114: Markets update: whipsaw macro picture, big tech, startup mass extinction event, VC reckoning (All-In Podcast)

All-in pod nailed a largely unspoken anxiety in vc right now. As we move from *momentum chasing* to *investing*, firms & individuals are realizing the fitness function they optimized for the last decade is massively different than the fitness function they’ll need for the next

— Zavain Dar (@zavaindar) February 5, 2023

• How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit (First Round Review) - this is not new, but still one of my favorite reads (and products!)

• A shifting narrative around what Q1 & Q2 early stage funding rounds might look like: The P&L Tells The Story (NBT Substack) & Fast Company’s Even in these times, smart startups can get funded.

• @varunabgupta Tweeted about this event happening Feb 28 in NYC which looks super interesting — What it takes: building next-generation infrastructure in America (Dimi Kellari x Caffeinated Capital)

• Can GPT-3 Explain My Past and Tell My Future? (Chain of Thought)

Three Final Tweets…

#1 What do I need to say no to?

Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer, on what it takes to focus: sacrifice… pic.twitter.com/ltBAbbMzTG

— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) February 5, 2023

#2 This will be interesting…

I think we’re going to see many $25M/yr+ revenue, 1 person businesses over the next 5 years

- No employees, just AI
- No custom code, just Typeform
- No fancy website, just Webflow
- No paid ads, just community
- No venture capital, just bootstrapped
- High cash-flow, low stress

— GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg) February 5, 2023

#3 SF is back!

It’s been said already but SF’s AI energy is 🔥. Went to a meet up hosted by @NFX yday. Lots of gen Zers eagerly showing app demos, VC said 6 friends moving back to sf because “they miss being around builders”, the first ever gen ai conference will be in sf on Valentine’s Day.

— Anna Tong (@annatonger) February 8, 2023