Sun.Oct 15, 2023

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Dear SaaStr: What is Your Worst Memory as an Entrepreneur?

SaaStr

Dear SaaStr: What is Your Worst Memory as an Entrepreneur? Let me make a short list: Having a critical co-founder walk out the door and never return. This happened to me once with a true co-founder, and once with a critical early employee (a critical COO). The learning is, slow down sometimes to go fast. Losing a very key customer — due to the product not being ready.

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Level of Effort in Project Management: Definition, Calculation, & Tips

User Pilot

What is the Level of Effort? Why is it important for project managers to track? And how relevant is it to product management ? These are just a few of the questions we tackle in this article. We also share tips on how to calculate it accurately and… effortlessly. Let’s dive in! TL;DR According to one definition, the level of effort includes all the work needed to successfully deliver the project.

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My App Stack: Robby Allen, Chief Revenue Officer of AgentSync

SaaStr

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business. I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. Last week we had a great one with Frank Dale, SVP of Product at SalesLoft, check it out here. This week we have Robby Allen, Chief Revenue Officer at AgentSync!

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The Growth Marketer Role in SaaS: All You Need to Know

User Pilot

Marketing your SaaS is a complex task involving many roles, one being a growth marketer. But you may be thinking, what exactly is the role of a growth marketer, and how do they help grow your product ? This article will help answer that exact question. TL;DR Growth marketing focuses on enhancing customer lifetime value and retention through continuous experimentation and optimization.

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Navigating the Future: Generative AI, Application Analytics, and Data

Generative AI is upending the way product developers & end-users alike are interacting with data. Despite the potential of AI, many are left with questions about the future of product development: How will AI impact my business and contribute to its success? What can product managers and developers expect in the future with the widespread adoption of AI?

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Top SaaStr Content for the Week: monday.com’s Co-founder and Co-CEO, SaaStr’s CEO, Lattice’s CEO and lots more!

SaaStr

Each week, we round up our most popular content so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: Pitchbook: VC Returns Are at a 10+ Year Low The Cloud 100’s 2023 Growth Rate Has Plummeted From 100% in 2022 to 55% Today. But They’re Much More Profitable.

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The Economics of Carbon Removal with Nan Ransohoff

Andreessen Horowitz

What happens when there’s demand for a solution that doesn’t quite exist yet? Today, we bring on Nan Ransohoff to talk about this exact problem as it relates to carbon removal, and how Frontier — the initiative out of Stripe that she is leading – is using a nearly $1B advance market commitment to try to jumpstart this market. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

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Trend Analysis Reports in SaaS: How To Use Analysis To Drive Growth

User Pilot

Trend analysis reports help you make data-driven decisions that boost SaaS performance metrics such as user activation, product stickiness, and retention. But where do you start from, what data points should you track, and how can you leverage these insights? This article helps answer core trend analysis questions. As you read on, you will also find use cases and examples to inspire your own analytics.

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Why Technology Still Matters with Marc Andreessen

Andreessen Horowitz

With much coverage of technology lined with pessimism, the a16z Podcast returns to highlight the bright side of technology, alongside the founders building it. But before featuring the solutions in progress, we wanted to explore why building the future is still so important. And who better to traverse this ground than a16z’s own cofounder Marc Andreessen, who has built and invested in the future time and time again, especially when it wasn’t the obvious thing to do.

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Product Analytics Marketing Automation: A Guide for SaaS Companies

User Pilot

How do you leverage product analytics marketing automation to boost customer acquisition, retention, and account expansion? If you’re after the answer to this question, you’re in the right place! From our guide, you will learn: What product analytics marketing automation is Why marketers should use product analytics How to collect and analyze data to gain actionable insights Key metrics to track Best product analytics tools Let’s get right to it!

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SaaS: How They’re Turning Payments Into Profit Centers

Discover how top SaaS companies are earning up to $700k + and zero upfront cost with Usio Integrated Payments.

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Ben Horowitz and Brian Armstrong on Building and Overcoming the Hard Things

Andreessen Horowitz

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably heard of the recent FTX scandal. While there’s much still unknown, in this episode we get the unique opportunity to hear from Brian Armstrong – co-founder and CEO of Coinbase – about what’s top of mind for the crypto industry. That includes the impact of this current event on future regulation, how this crypto winter might be different from previous ones, founder psychology during downturns, the transparency that comes with being public, and muc

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Multivariate Testing in SaaS: What is it And How to Use it

User Pilot

Tests are a crucial part of a product-led motion , and multivariate testing is an important addition to your testing toolkit. Like A/B testing, it can be used to test the performance of different elements or variables in your product. However, there are key differences between both testing methods. In this article, we explore these differences, highlight the pros and cons of a multivariate test, and lay out a step-by-step process for running the test.

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Disrupting the World’s Largest Asset Class with Adam Neumann

Andreessen Horowitz

Back in August, after a16z announced our investment into Adam Neumann’s new company, Flow, it felt like almost everyone – whether it was other VCs, founders, or journalists – had something to say. But the one person that you didn’t hear from was Adam himself. In this never-before shared footage from a16z’s American Dynamism Summit in Washington DC, Adam Neumann sits down with Marc Andreessen and David Ulevitch, to discuss the opportunities that have emerged from post-pandemic shifts in both work

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2023 Big Ideas in Technology (Part 2)

Andreessen Horowitz

At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023. Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.

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How Embedded Analytics Gets You to Market Faster with a SAAS Offering

Start-ups & SMBs launching products quickly must bundle dashboards, reports, & self-service analytics into apps. Customers expect rapid value from your product (time-to-value), data security, and access to advanced capabilities. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools can provide valuable data analysis capabilities, but they have a barrier to entry that can stop small and midsize businesses from capitalizing on them.

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The Robot Lawyer Resistance

Andreessen Horowitz

What happens when you don’t have the resources to fight for your rights? Whether it’s a major medical bill or a more minor parking ticket… even if you were in the right, is it easier to just… pay? Well, Joshua Browder’s answer is Do Not Pay! He’s built a thriving company of the same name, that helps consumers “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, and sue anyone at the press of a button.

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The State of Apps

Andreessen Horowitz

A few weeks ago, Apple released a stunning statistic: they’ve paid developers over $320B — yes, billion! — since the launch of the App Store in 2008, highlighting the cast opportunity in the marketplace. And around the same time, a16z Consumer Partner, Olivia Moore, compiled a list of the top apps across the US app store throughout 2022. In this episode, you’ll get to hear which apps made it to the top and what they have in common.

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The Rise of the Exponential Organization

Andreessen Horowitz

Many companies today are grappling with a few things: an economic downturn, potential layoffs and restructuring, and trying to keep up with the latest tech trends… all while still maintaining a growth trajectory. In this episode, you’ll learn which companies are uniquely designed to weather this storm and what attributes these exponential organizations have.

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The Factory of the Future with Chris Power

Andreessen Horowitz

Today, we have an episode with Chris Power, the founder and CEO of Hadrian. Hadrian is a company trying to build the most efficient factories on the planet. In this conversation, we’ll introduce the audience to advanced manufacturing, and expose them to the reality that it’s a remnant of the first space race. We also cover the challenge of manufacturing, the importance of visibility in complex systems, the killer app for space, how simplifying the world of atoms can be done through bits – and ul

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Beyond the Basics of A/B Tests: Highly Innovative Experimentation Tactics You Need to Know

Speaker: Timothy Chan, PhD., Head of Data Science

Are you ready to move beyond the basics and take a deep dive into the cutting-edge techniques that are reshaping the landscape of experimentation? 🌐 From Sequential Testing to Multi-Armed Bandits, Switchback Experiments to Stratified Sampling, Timothy Chan, Data Science Lead, is here to unravel the mysteries of these powerful methodologies that are revolutionizing how we approach testing.

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AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng

Andreessen Horowitz

Generative AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have taken the world by storm in recent months, wowing the masses with their uncanny ability to produce images via text prompts. In this interview, we’ll chat with Karen Cheng about how she’s leveraged these tools among others, with a focus on how this new paradigm is reshaping the creator landscape.

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Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy with Palmer Luckey

Andreessen Horowitz

Starting in the 1960s, technology companies, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, were essential for creating the processors that would eventually launch satellites and guide missiles. Half a century later, today’s tech companies can — and need — to move even faster and smarter, as international adversaries scale up their aggressions. In this episode, Anduril Industries Founder Palmer Luckey will discuss how Silicon Valley is using new technologies to build new tools, systems, and companies

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The 1000x Developer

Andreessen Horowitz

A small minority – likely less than 1% – of the world can code. Yet it is also widely known that the skillset tends to yield outsized returns, with developers generating some of the highest paying salaries out there. But the field is quickly shifting, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. In this podcast, we get to chat with Amjad Masad, founder of Replit, about these foundational shifts.

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Neal Stephenson on The Future of the Metaverse

Andreessen Horowitz

When Neal Stephenson coined “the metaverse” three decades ago, his book Snow Crash was found on the shelves of “science fiction”. While the book remains in that category, many of its concepts are now found in reality… Fast forward to 2022, where numerous companies are now building toward their version of the metaverse, including Neal himself – working on Lamina1 – a blockchain company oriented toward creators.

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Embedding BI: Architectural Considerations and Technical Requirements

While data platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and programming platforms have evolved to leverage big data and streaming data, the front-end user experience has not kept up. Holding onto old BI technology while everything else moves forward is holding back organizations. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) aren’t built for modern data platforms and don’t work on modern architectures.

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Unlocking Creativity with Prompt Engineering

Andreessen Horowitz

With every new technology, some jobs are lost while others are gained. People often focus on the former, but in this episode we chose to highlight the latter – a highly creative role that emerges alongside AI: the prompt engineer. Until AI can close the loop of its own, each tool still requires a set of prompts. Just like a composer feeds an instrument the notes to play, a prompt engineer feeds an AI a map of what to produce.

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The Challenge of Replicating Reality

Andreessen Horowitz

What would you do if you believed in an idea but everyone said it would fail, nobody would fund you, and the industry was experiencing a nuclear winter? Despite experiencing exactly that, Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao doubled down and invested all of his personal savings into the unproven business. 7 years and 1 bankruptcy later, Steve has built the world’s leading full-body VR experience with over 30 locations across the globe.

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2023 Big Ideas in Technology (Part 1)

Andreessen Horowitz

At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023. Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications.

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Building a Marketplace for Carbon

Andreessen Horowitz

In part 1 of our carbon removal series, we talked to Nan Ransohoff — Head of Climate at Stripe — about what it might take to jumpstart the market of carbon removal solutions. But what happens when there is a true, thriving market of buyers and sellers? How will suppliers effectively reach the right buyers, and as more solutions become available, how will buyers effectively vet the options?

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How Investors & Strategic Buyers Evaluate Integrated Payment Strategies

Explore how integrated payment strategies impact investor and buyer evaluations. Payments are more than a feature — they’re a key to long-term success and market differentiation. They help SaaS companies offer seamless user experiences and efficient operations. Investors and strategic buyers assess these integrated payment strategies as a measure of a company's growth potential and sustainability.

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The a16z Podcast Returns

Andreessen Horowitz

The long-standing (and chart-topping) a16z Podcast returns to cover the most important topics within the world of technology. Brought to you by the minds at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and hosted by Steph Smith, each episode goes beyond headlines, giving listeners insider access to the edge of innovation.

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Balaji Srinivasan on The Network State

Andreessen Horowitz

In this episode, we’ll explore the concept of The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan. As the world becomes more digital, it also becomes more distributed. This is obvious on the individual level – how you order goods, the way you chat with friends, and the news you consume… all from a handheld computer. It’s also becoming more obvious at the company level.

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The Art and Science of Podcasting

Andreessen Horowitz

It’s both easier and harder than ever to build a successful podcast. In this episode, we chat with Sriram and Aarthi from the Good Time Show, who ventured into the world of audio peak pandemic and have since interviewed the likes of Elon Musk, Calvin Harris, and Naomi Osaka. We get their perspective on how to succeed in this competitive landscape, differentiation and the sliding scale of entertainment and information, the difference between an audience and a community, podcast analytics and how