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What Ever Happend to Evernote?

While we may be saying the same thing about clubhouse in 5 years. In 2011 I remember driving down the 101 in Santa Clara County in awe of all the big tech companies with their campuses or office buildings and EverNote was one of them. I never used the service till just now and hadn't heard about them nor have I seen their building in Silicon Valley recently but the website and app are still live so it's wading along somewhere I must assume.

Uber Super Pumped Trivia Travis Kalnanick's SAT Score

Listened to a 2011 story and interview with a very young looking Jason Calacanis of The All in Podcast doing episode 180 of This Week in Startups interviewing Travis Kalanick. So a fun fact that comes up is that Travis Kalanick scored a 1580 on his SAT's and got only 2 questions wrong on the verbal part of the college admissions test. So interesting to learn that the founder of Meta/Facebook Mark Zuckerberg who got a 1600 and Travis Kalanick who co-founded Uber were both college dropouts and aced their SAT's.

Maybe there is a quality behind high SAT scores and startup success?

For the interview from 2011 see below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=550X5OZVk7Y

If you can't afford expensive things it may no longer be a problem in the future

So if you can't afford to buy a fine painting or an asset as a whole in the past you had to find joint investors or raise money. Now with the decentralized future we may be able to purchase things as a group using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and other creative financing mechanisms. Like people who think it's crazy that we used to have pay per text message or pay extra to make a long distance call that was outside of our region or even area code we one day may be shocked that we couldn't raise money via a DAO in the past to purchase something. Here is a excerpt from a recent VC Letter with places where you can engage in fractionalized ownership. Why it matters High-quality assets tend to have above average returns. Problem Most of us can't afford to buy fine art, an entire commercial building, or a billion dollar company. Solution Fractionalization democratizes ownership. Don't have millions for a Rembrandt or a Monaco condo? No problem. Buy shares instead. Players Platforms: Fractional.art: Buy, sell, and mint fractions of NFTs. Royal: Buy ownership in songs directly from artists. Republic: Invest in startups, real estate, and crypto projects. FranShares: Earn cash flow from franchises without operating. Pacasso: Buy shares in a second home. Tokenized assets: House of Tiara: A CryptoPunk bought by Crypto Cookout. ConstitutionDAO: An attempt to buy a copy of the US Constitution. CryptoPunk #7171: A fractionalized hoodie punk. Trippy Apedog: A pair of NFTs from BAYC and BAKC. DAOs: WhaleShark: DAO with a token backed by NFTs. Crypto Cookout: A group that pooled funds to buy several CryptoPunks. PleasrDAO: The group behind iconic NFT purchases. CityDAO: An experiment in decentralized land ownership. So in a way buying ownership in the above may be like buying stock in a company and saying that you own a piece of Apple or Tesla.

Startup Advice

Distribution matters more than product. If you can get your product or service out in this push vs. pull society than you will suceed. How many people talked about Clubhouse even if it wasnt a great product it had great distribution.

Problem

Sales-led models limit adoption.

Solution

Build a product that sells itself. Let users try before they buy.

The freemium model has taken off especially in app ecosystems but certain environments are against free trials and that usually is when you have a sub par product.

Elizabeth Holmes Fraud Trial

Interesting to heard about Fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her pending trial for Theranos. In another strange twist she is now blaming her ex-boyfriend and COO saying he coerced her and was under his spell. According to CNBC analyst Scott Cohn he said to Wilfred and Sarah about the Steve Jobs of Turtle Necks in the level of Fraud at Theranos.

The experts say it comes down to intent did she intend to commit fraud or was she under a spell? If she was in this silicon valley fake it till you make it culture and didnt believe there was a fraud or didn't really believe or intend that there was a fraud being committed than it was not a crime and she has a chance of getting off. This fake it till you make it and brand jacking culture is huge in the start up and entrepreneur world.

Can we blame Elizabeth Holmes based on the interview that just aired on CNBC? After hearing that you may think differently but if you watched the Netflix documentary detailing how they knowingly submitted bad tests and were giving people bad health advice it would be very hard to let her off scotch free.

I hope that justice will be served as there are a lot of great entrepreneurs in the healthcare space who are struggling to land deals because of scammers like Elizabeth Holmes and how that shook up the startup world and hurt female founders that looked up to her.

Finding the Right Cadence in your Startup

David Sacks former CEO of Yammer lays it out perfectly in this piece. The advice is worth it's weight in gold in building an unstoppable SaaS army from a potential chaotic startup narrative. His advice is even similar to the two pizzas theory coined by Jeff Bezos & Amazon to keep things small and in line to ensure that you are not building products that will stay perpetually in development and drain resources.

A must read for entrepreneurs building a SaaS platform: https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-cadence-how-to-operate-a-saas-startup-436aa8099e8

Open Store Miami - Keith Rabois Newest Startup

As our South Florida ecosystem continues to grow one of the biggest proponents of South Florida living Keith Rabois has officially announced his newest startup Openstore a Miami based startup. More details to come as Miami and surrounding areas really is the current gold rush of 2020-2021 for those seeking freedom, refuge, and mental health.

How To Invest in Startups Post by Sam Altman Explains it So Well

Instead of going through investing in startups from a philisophical standpoint famed investor and excellent blogger Sam Altman has shared his viewpoints from the investor side as opposed to all the content that focuses on the startup side trying to raise capital.

There are so many great points on Altmans blog and in this post particularly with the biggest piece of advice IMO is not only tell the startup how you can help but show a genuine interest and ability to help. Often times a smart founder will take an offer that isn't as financially appealing on paper to get the help of an investor who can truly make a much bigger impact than one who just writes a check.

When we launched and were growing Protos Eyewear we had emails daily from all sorts of investors and partners but ultimately the most important end game contact came from Luxxottica the owner of Sunglass Hut, Ray Ban, Oakley, and just about every other major eyewear brand.

Read for yourself at: https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups