Keeping the Streak Alive!

What a week! Kevin and I are starting to get the hand of co-editing, though I think we might have pushed the editorial tasks to the end of the week a bit too aggressively. We have more technology helping us with the reading process now, thanks to Kevin’s coding and an awesome startup called Retool (also one of our angel investments) that made it super easy to build the UI. We are able to go through ~50 posts per day in the course of just 1-2 hours and quickly score them as on topic and graded the quality of the content. We’re following ~430 feeds right now, and looking to identify more.

At week’s end we take the top scoring content and whittle it down further based on our editorial perspective on what’s most relevant to readers. Someone has suggested we could turn this into a newsletter-as-a-service business but we are a little early for that… this is still a mostly manual process. However, we are toying around with the idea of starting a second newsletter focused on software development tools, hiring, and practices. Is there another topic you’d love to see us focus on? Hit up the comments!

If you’d like to recommend a piece of content, suggest a job post, or sponsor the newsletter please get in touch with us at editor@daniellemorril.com

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Danielle & Kevin’s Newsletter With No Name #2

This newsletter is curated by hand with love from Denver, Colorado by Kevin Morrill and Danielle Morrill. You can reply to editor@daniellemorrill.com with any feedback. If you love what you read today, please consider forwarding it so others can subscribe. Thank you

Woo hoo! It’s week #2 of our newsletter that still needs a name (read the 1st issue here). Thank you to everyone who has forwarded this newsletter on to friends and colleagues. If you have open jobs at your startup, just wrote a blog post you’d like us to consider, or have a cool “Request for Startup” idea for the new section we are going to start running please drop us a note with a short blurb no more than 30 words and a link. We can’t promise to include everything, but we’d love to hear from you! 

The Best Thing We Found This Week

Peter Thiel is one of the most interesting vocal personalities in the technology ecosystem, and this interview brings together thoughts on his investing strategy, experiences serving on the board at Facebook for the entirity of its existence (14 years), and our personal favorite: a lot more detail around the founding story of Paypal. “Peter Thiel on Trump, Gawker, and Leaving Silicon Valley”

The headline of the interview is salacious with mentions of our current Cheeto in Chief, a blockbuster celebrity lawsuit, and his move to Los Angeles — but we think the other tidbits we mentioned are the real meat of the conversation.   

From the Operators

Carl Tashian of Nerd Coach digs into startup postmortems, finding founder communication and underlying passion deserve more attention in “What Really Kills Most Startups”

Rand Fishkin of SparkToro reminds us that great marketing doesn’t start with optimizing ad campaigns, but rather understanding what the people you want to reach pay attention to in “You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?”

Mathilde Collin of Front emphasizes the value of building relationships before you raise in in “Fireside Chat with Founder and CEO of Front, Mathilde Collin”

Patricia Aas of TurtleSec lists “Survival Tips For Women In Tech” (isn’t it sobering that such a list is even necessary?) and Knut Melvaer of Sanity follows on with 23 tips we can all do to help make tech better for women in “Making tech survivable: What Can Men Do”

Russell Smith of Rainforest doesn’t think your startups tech stack needs to be a special snowlake in “5 Foolish Reasons You’re Not Using Heroku”

From the Investors

Congratulations to Austin Clements on his promotion to Principal at TenOneTen Ventures

Kyle Poyar of OpenView lays bare the metrics you need to hit to raise a Series A all the way up to Series D in “What Does It Take To Raise Your Next Round In 2018?”  The full report is also available.

David Beisel of NextView Ventures shows early stage companies how they’re being compared to their peers in “Seed Stage Startups Are Now Graded on a Curve” Founder mental health is on the radar this week

Mahendra Ramsinghani of Secure Octane is now cowriting a book with Brad Feld on Depression, and shares his early observations in “Investors are waking up to the emotional struggle of startup founders”

Felicis has decided to carve out 1% of all checks for exec coaching and therapy

Michael Seibel of Y Combinator details “How to Email Early Stage Investors” and maybe the era of signaling prestige by getting a warm intro is finally over, at least at the angel stage

Diego Rey of Y Combinator claims that “over the last two years, YC has made more seed investments in bio companies than any other investor in the world.” More over, “the percentage of bio companies in each batch has been increasing linearly since 2011.” in “There Are Now 141 Bio Companies Funded by YC”    Are these bio companies getting financing downstream? LifeSci VC breaks down the stats in “Biotech Venture Deal Terms Are More Startup Friendly Than Ever”

Ali Hamed of CoVenture challenges the investing advice of Warrent Buffett and LPs should take notice in “Investing on an 0–2 Count”

Working at a Startup? It’s Time to Learn About Equity Compensation

Our dear friend and Mattermark cofounder Andy Sparks is working on a new startup, Holloway, building tech to help people find, consume, and improve tactical knowledge. Their first guide came out a few weeks ago, offering a comprehensive overview of stock option compensation.   To learn more, check out “The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation”

This Week’s Book Pick

“The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood”by James Gleick

Do you know the surprising story of how the Information Age got underway? The Information tells the story from early African tribes and their own form of Morse code, to how England’s need to dominate the seas led tinkerer Charles Babbage on a journey to build the forerunner to ENIAC as early as the 1800s, to information theory pioneer Claude Shannon. After 20 years in software industry, Kevin was surprised to finish the book wondering, “How did I come this far knowing so little about what got our industry going?!”