PMF Definitions, 21 Meals, and Why VC Funds are Overstaffed!

Sajith Pai's very irregular newsletter #21

Welcome to the latest edition of my rather irregular newsletter! For the 402 new subscribers who have signed up since my last newsletter in January, and have been waiting to receive the next issue, my deep sympathies!

Quick housekeeping announcements. The newsletter has two permanent sections. Writings - where I usually write and / or refer to one or more original pieces, typically about venture or the startup ecosystem, that I published in the previous months, and, Readings - about what I read and learnt about. My reading diet is tilted heavily in favour of podcast transcripts (and of course books) and against articles / newsletters. This will naturally reflect in the reading list.

This is a long newsletter - think of it as akin to a monthly magazine from me (only the frequency may not be monthly!). I don’t know if you can read this entire newsletter (and peruse the links) in one sitting. Even if you do a second run (or more which i very much doubt), you will have to pick and choose what to focus on. A good way to read this newsletter is to certainly read my original writing (What is PMF? Learnings from 10 Interviews) below, and then glance through the rest and pick 1-2-3 more items that pique your interest. Anything more is a bonus.

Writings

I have been interviewing founders, operators, and investors on their perspectives on product-market fit (PMF hereafter) over the past few months, as part of research for the book I am writing on this topic. I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of the first ten interviews and review the definitions of PMF that have emerged. In my new piece below, I tease out common strands and themes across their definitions and unpack what they tell us about the topic.

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What is PMF? Learnings from 10 Interviews.

A common theme that has emerged across these conversations, and one that surprised me, is that very few founders think of the startup journey in terms of working towards PMF and after. There is no intentional mindset of “Oh, I am working towards PMF, and this is X, Y, Z, I need to do to achieve PMF.” Instead, founders aim for product love, and then solve for growth and retention, hoping to hit the milestones for the next round of funding. PMF is achieved as a result of the work they undertake to hit the growth and retention metrics. It is useful to think of PMF as an abstraction layer laid above growth and retention.

Nishchay A G of Jar puts it well here – “And to be very honest, we never thought that ki haan product market fit ho gaya kya (Is PMF achieved)? That’s not a question that we ask ourselves. That’s more of a thing that others are defining that apka yeh product market fit ho gaya (you have achieved PMF).We drive numbers and the outcome of that is a product market fit that has happened with us.“

A related strand to the above, is that PMF seems to be a topic that is far dearer to VCs, and one explicitly articulated by them. It is in fact a concept that was invented by VCs or at least first articulated by them (Andy Rachleff / Marc Andreessen) and is a topic that has largely been articulated from a VC’s perspective, though there are exceptions. I don’t think this is entirely surprising, because for VCs, and specifically for Series A VCs, PMF is a gating mechanism to determine if the companies are worth evaluating for funding (as laid out in the below graphic). Hence the VC’s fervent articulation of PMF.

Six types of PMF definitions

The different PMF definitions across the ten interviews coalesce into six broad buckets. I list them one by one. The further down the list, the more unusual the definition.

1. PMF is intense customer love for the product.

Now, I don’t entirely agree with this personally given this excludes the market part of it (i.e., product love scaling to reach the entire market) but I can understand why founders like this. Most founders are drawn to startup to build a great product that solves a deep customer problem, and thereby to have validation of their effort via customer feedback or signals of love, is extremely meaningful for them.

Rajan Bajaj of Slice said “PMF for me is when customers are asked, how disappointed will you be if this product or service doesn’t exist from tomorrow, and they rate the disappointment on a scale of one to 10 as at least 8 on 10. You want to be closer to 10 on 10, but at least 8 on 10 is somewhere you found PMF…if I’m very disappointed that the product is out of the market, I would give 10 on 10 and would be screaming, shouting, unhappy trying to grab it if someone is taking it away from my hand. That’s product market fit.”

Vasanth Kamath of smallcase: “I honestly think, it might not be the business definition….I just think like if there are people who are avid lovers of your product, you have hit PMF. Like who love the experience, swear by it, now the scale of it depends on how large your business is going to be. But PMF is when people love your product, not just use it because they have to or just like it.

2. PMF is like love. You know it when it is happening.

This is the most common definition of PMF that you hear from founders, that it is hard to define, but you will know it when you have it! A bit like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of porn – “I know it when I see it.”  It is also what was mentioned in the original Marc Andreessen PMF piece – “You can always feel product/market fit when it is happening.”

Sheel Mohnot, Better Tomorrow Ventures: “I think it’s one of those things that’s like what is love? You know when you’re in love.

Anshuman Bapna, Terra: “The qualitative part of it almost sounds like the way you describe love, right? Which is, I can’t tell you what it means to be in love. But when you’re in love, you’ll know it. So that’s kind of the completely over a beer kind of a version of PMF.”

Pulkit Agrawal, Chameleon: “PMF is something that every founder thinks about. I think I ended up having much more of a touchy-feely definition of PMF than a robust scientific definition, which is like, do I feel it? I think it’s a combination of, like, are we winning, are customers happy using the product? Is the system working for us to take the product to market?”

3. PMF is pull or effortless sales.

This is the next most common definitions of PMF that I usually encounter in the wild, in articles, in podcasts, in conversations etc. PMF is when push (and effort) shifts to pull from the customer end (inbounds, referrals etc.) and near effortless sales.

Konark Singhal, Mountblue:  “…it’s really about effortless sales. I would almost say if a sale is effortless, and you’re almost throttling it, because you can’t service it, I think it’s a probably a good empirical way to say you have a certain PMF. “

Sheel Mohnot, Better Tomorrow Ventures: “I think for product market fit there are signs that you have it. You can say it’s basically a strong pull from the market.”

4. PMF is when you have a sustainable, profitable business.

Profitability is an interesting but relevant qualifier for PMF, for it shows that customers are willing to part with their hard-earney money for the product you are selling, as it is solving their pain. That said, it doesn’t specify the scale or growth of the business and hence can be misleading.

Chaitanya Ramalingegowda of Wakefit: “So, when we started about 6 months later, my third startup, his second startup, Wakefit, we said “Screw everything. No Paul Graham, no YC, no Lean Startup.” We will, first of all, survive as a company….PMF for us meant that we could run the business in a sustainable manner, and unlike a tech business where it is a winner take all, in our industry it is not… And we always, always make money on the first transaction itself. So, for us that became the definition of PMF. “

Prashant Singh, the product czar at fintech app Jar said: “The way I think of product-market fit is an event where a product, a service or a company stumbled upon a solution, which serves the articulated or unarticulated needs of a consumer…. Sometimes people confuse it with scaling. Scaling is a function of TAM and everything else but product market fit – it is a solution made for unserved needs. When you apply it to the startup context, it means that a need is being served and it is also being served in a somewhat profitable way.”

5. PMF as curiosity from the customer’s side, spurring a reaction to the product.

I admit I found this definition highly unusual, but Asad Khan of LambdaTest, who shared it, is a differentiated thinker.

Asad: “PMF for us is that when you give the first cut of the product in hands of the user, the very first PMF is: are they curious about it? The product can never be perfect, but if they have any questions and if they come back to you & ask you to solve something, it means that they did not write off the product;… It’s good for you because when someone is writing you off, they don’t talk, they don’t want to waste their time. If they are talking to you, they’re coming back and spending some money, it means something is working, they like the whole approach of the product….If you are getting feedback, it’s a good sign; it means that the customers are interested in your product even though it is not working perfectly. This is the basic idea of PMF.“

6. PMF is non-linear or sublinear correlation between input and output metrics.

This was another unusual, and a somewhat complex definition. Essentially with PMF, the correlation between input and outputs changes positively. You spend less to acquire similar customer, or the same spend generates better output.

Nishchay A G, Jar: “See, PMF is like an evolution of a system, right? A working system where the output of the system will stop being linear. Meaning say you spent ₹100 and got 100 customers. The moment you say you achieved PMF you will start getting 110 users for the same hundred rupees, and if you spend 110 you get 130 users, and if you spend 130 you will get 200 users. And I mean, I mean this, this can change for every product. For example, for a social it can be something different, for a DropBox kind of a platform, it can be something different.”

Prashant Singh, Jar: “So if I were to put a numerical filter to this, I’ll say there should be a sublinear correlation between two parameters in your business. It can be with every user who comes, the cost of acquiring new users is reduced. So like in a linear correlation, if x increases by delta, the y also increases by delta. In a sublinear correlation, if x increases by delta, y increases by less than the delta. Let’s say my cost of acquiring customers has gone down, which is a good thing. In the same way, if I’m DropBox, with every customer I acquire, my cost of servicing a customer also goes down because I can buy bulk storage, negotiate better bandwidth prices, etc. So when a good PMF is there, some parameters are sublinearly correlated.”

Stacked S-curves and feature-level PMF

A point which came up on multiple interviews was that PMF could be achieved but the eventual market could be too small, and how this meant that you would have to push into adjacencies or expand the market. Anshuman Bapna had an evocative phrase – stacked S-curves – to describe the process of expanding PMF across different markets.

Konark: “Now, again, PMF may be in a certain market which might be small. So you know, your PMF may still not be able to make you a big company. So I mean, PMF runs out so yeah. But we have to be conscious of what the limit of the market is. Well, you can hit it very quickly, sometimes.”

Sheel: “But in terms of PMF, I think the other thing to know is there’s not just one PMF. There’s like, you have a market and you find a product that fits that market niche, but that market might be too small so you have to expand from there. And so, in the case of Thistle, we start out selling juices and delivering juices. Very small market, but people really liked it. And then we expanded into vegan meals and vegan meal delivery ….eventually we added animal protein options and then expanded the market again and then it became healthy meals on delivery. So there’s a few different markets that we sort of search for product market fit within.”

Anshuman: “About 50 to 60% of all people coming to our programs come from referrals, and the kind of keyword or words that they use to describe the experience at Terra is outstanding.  Now, the challenge with that, is that why that is still not product market fit is because all that we have proven is that for a very small micro segment of the market, we are golden. But PMF, the M part is obviously as important. And what we have to prove now is that this market is large enough. So in that, and another way to look at is these the classic S-Curves, right? PMF is not one S-Curve, it’s S-Curves stacked on top of each other. And to me, therefore it feels like maybe what you’ve done is that you’ve done one of those S-Curves. But you need to find our next S-Curve, or we don’t have a company, or we have a company which is not interesting enough, large enough, impactful enough and so on.”

Another interesting point in this vein was how Asad and Nishchay referred to PMF as a feature-level event, not just at the product level.

Nishchay: “Again, we don’t try to define a product market fit at a product level, the entire product level. For me, we need to achieve PMF at every feature level. We see PMF at each feature level. We see PMF at our basic offering, which is roundups.”

Asad: “A Bay Area VC told us that 65,000 signups and $250,000 revenue & 100plus customers are the benchmark metrics for PMF. But as a founder I don’t believe in this alone.  I have a grocery store & only wheat sale happens. There is everything in the grocery store but people only come for wheat. If so the grocery store is not a PMF, wheat is the PMF. So, the founder has to understand how many features of the product actually truly got the PMF.”

Prashant: “This is a very wrong notion that a company attains product market fit. A use case attains PMF, the company never does. Most likely the company will fuck up the product-market fit. Like short-form video, like UPI, they have attained PMF. If the Paytm server is down, users will go and use any other UPI app unless there is a lock-in. Sometimes you make a fintech company, and maybe you get a product market fit in terms of user acquisition through your QR code or selling recharge.”

TLDR

We will wrap this with a brief summary of the key learnings from the essay. There are many definitions of PMF, though it does seem there are a few popular buckets. Essentially it seems PMF is a VC-lens or abstraction layer over growth and retention. Founders think growth and outcomes and work towards it, and very rarely do they intentionally work towards PMF. VCs look at PMF explicitly as a gating device and have brought into founder consciousness. Merely achieving PMF isn’t enough. The founder needs to make sure that the market isn’t too small, and if it is, needs to expand into adjacent markets or verticals, and stack S-curves on top of each other to grow.

(More content below the subscription button!)

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PMF Convos #7,8,9: Vasanth Kamath, Prashant Singh, Konark Singhal

Over the past few months, I also published three new PMF Convos (Vasanth Kamath, cofounder of smallcase, Prashant Singh, who leads product at Jar, and Konark Singhal, founder of Mountblue, and erstwhile cofounder MockBank). If you read the article above, you would recall the names. These are 1:1 zoom or in person conversations I have with founders, operators, VCs as part of my research on PMF (product market fit). I transcribe these, and if the guest is willing, I release the edited transcript.

Vasanth Kamath, smallcase

smallcase is a great example of how a well-thought through company-building strategy – built on not innovating along the distribution axis for an extremely innovative, concept-sell product, instead going to existing watering holes (brokers in this case), and supporting them in selling the product, by building a superior product and communicating benefits well instead – dovetailed well with the product and category strategy. Yes, they got lucky with the Zerodha partnership, and that has played a part, but smallcase’s success is built on a well-thought through strategy at all levels, as we can see from the transcript.

In this convo, which took place in person, Vasanth shares his perspectives on PMF, including his definition of PMF (‘intense product love’), their GTM strategy of partnering with brokers (and how that freed them to focus on making the product superior) and the three metrics that they tracked closely at smallcase (interestingly they don’t track month on month growth overall, but focus on tracking net inflows for the cohort). One really interesting point that Vasanth makes is that for the wealth category, growth in customers’ parking money with you itself, which shows that they trust you, is a great validation of your product and is an early sign of PMF. (In a separate convo that will have to remain unpublished, Rajan Bajaj of Slice, warned about misleading PMF signals in credit offtake given that it is inherently a pull product, especially if the lending hurdles are eased.)

Link to the transcript, also shared on LinkedIn as an article.

Prashant Singh, Jar

Prashant Singh is one of the most original thinkers I know in the Indian startup ecosystem. An ideal career for him would have been writing fiction, but he is, disappointingly for fiction readers, but delightfully for us in the startup world, now golden handcuffed to product management! I think of him as a Product Manager’s Product Manager; conversations with him always lead to interesting insights and perspectives, a different take on the world, or a different way to look at the world. For those of you who want more of Prashant, after reading this transcript, check out these two threads on the next billion users of India – one, two. These were written when Prashant moved to his hometown of Bikaner in Rajasthan during the COVID-led lockdown in India in 2020. He is @pacificleo on twitter – if you are curious why that moniker it is because Prashant means peace / peaceful (hence ‘Pacific’) and Singh means lion (and thus ‘Leo’). Well!

In this conversation, Prashant shares his take on PMF – a need is being served and in a profitable way; it may or may not have scale, but there is ideally a sublinear correlation between growth and a key parameter, like cost of acquisition of customers, that is, when you are growing the cost of acquiring customers comes down. We then move to look at his startup Shifu and why that didn’t achieve PMF. This is a fascinating case study. TLDR – he essentially focused on the wrong persona (consumer instead of OEMs), and built too far along that axis to be able to pivot easily. In the final sections, Prashant opens up to to share his distinctive takes and views on a bunch of stuff – in particular i loved the metaphor of waste paper basket (or rejected folders) for why you should look at all the rejections / thrown-away scribbles and see the trade offs made in arriving at the final idea.

Link to the transcript, also shared on LinkedIn as an article.

Konark Singhal, Mountblue, ex-MockBank

Konark Singhal cofounded MockBank, an edtech co that provided test prep for government exams. The startup saw some initial traction and were able to raise a small preseed round, but struggled to grow and scale. Eventually, the co was acquired by a well-funded competitor, and Konark exited MockBank to found and run Mountblue, a profitable bootstrapped coding bootcamp play. In our chat, Konark talks about his definition of PMF (effortless sales), whether MockBank had PMF (maybe, but essentially it was a tiny market so it didn’t really matter he says), and the importance of picking the right space. It is a candid confession from a battle-scarred founder. It is also a window into an India that was preJio, preUPI, with limited smartphone penetration, and where building a digital business was an uphill struggle.

Link to the transcript, also shared on LinkedIn as an article.

So what kept me busy the last four months?

Many of you may also know that I recently co-created and published (with my colleague, Amal Vats) the second edition of The Indus Valley Report. (Last year’s report is here). That was a high intensity, heavy lift effort which took away a fair bit of my creative energy, and is one reason for the newsletter noshow.

The Indus Valley Report (Indus Valley is our moniker for India’s Silicon Valley) celebrates the rise of the Indian startup ecosystem, and its emergence as one of the centres of innovation and enterprise in the startup world. Through 100+ insightful, and some provocative charts, we identify key themes, patterns and trends in the Indian startup and venture ecosystem, as well as hint at what is coming next.

In this year's report, we zoomed into

• The macro picture - why this is India's moment, the distinct Indian production function and WEAGan growth model

• Challenges ahead - a smaller than we think consuming class and market, the brutal power law in consumption, and slowing top of the funnel growth

• Indus Valley deep dive - an oversized growth venture market, its implications for the IPO market, and their advice for Indian startup founders; plus deep dives into ecommerce, saas, media and the distinct playbooks emerging in Indus Valley.

The Indus Valley Report was well received – inspiring memes, a newspaper ad and other reports too. I also appeared on a couple of popular podcasts – The Startup Operator Podcast with Roshan Cariappa (podcast, transcript), Ideas of India, hosted by Shruti Rajagopalan (podcast and transcript) as well as a youtube show hosted by Kushal Lodha (a young creator influencer who is hugely popular in the CA / accounting community).

For a quick glance at the key slides in the report, you can click here.

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Readings

Now to Part II of the newsletter where I share what I read and found interesting. Many of you know that I have been deliberately eschewing articles in favour of podcast transcripts (given the higher signal to noise ratio in these). That trend continued over the past four months too.

Here are ten podcasts whose transcripts I enjoyed reading, with my learning notes on them. For two of them (#8 and #9), I organised the transcript, as the podcast didn’t publish the transcript. You are welcome!

1/ Scott Davis & Rob Wertheimer, Melius Research, authors of ‘Lessons from the Titans’ on Colossus w Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Scott Davis and Rob Wertheimer have written the acclaimed ‘Lessons from the Titans’ where they look at high-performing industrial companies such as Danaher, Roper, Honeywell, and draw out lessons from their success while contrasting them with high profile failures such as GE. 

One of the main takeaways of their book is that almost every successful company has some sort of business system or process that drives alignment and creates focus at the co. Lean manufacturing is one. Sometimes there is a more evolved one such as the Danaher business system which is a collection of a lot of tools that they keep updating with each acquisition (visual management is a key part of the toolkit - what you can’t see you can’t measure).

The purpose of the business system is to keep people focused. (They suggest we don’t overcelebrate the business system; there are many factors that drive or lead to success and factors like culture are as if not more important than business systems; the business system is at best a focusing or alignment tool).

In the podcast episode they cover learnings from the book, including Dave Cote’s turnaround of Honeywell, the Danaher business system, the mishaps at GE through the lens of operational excellence, culture and capital allocation, which to them are the three pillars of sustained success. Good read / listen with lots of interesting anecdotes and stories.

Link to podcast + transcript.

2/ George Stalk Jr., BCG, on Farnam Street Knowledge Podcast w Shane Parrish

George Stalk, Jr. is a BCG consultant and author focusing on how companies can use time or speed as a competitive advantage. He wrote the book Competing Against Time the only book that Tim Cook has made his A-team read, as well as Hardball, a collection of 12 business strategies that are proven to win in the marketplace. The podcast is interesting and enlightening throughout, though for readers of Eli Goldratt, and aficionados of Lean Manufacturing, the benefits may not be as much as it is for an operations newbie.

The podcast covers topics such as knowing your cost better than competition (specifically by deaveraging all cost heads), being faster than competition on serving customers (how Walmart beat Kmart, and Toyota the rest of the industry), how private family businesses operate against public ones (the biggest concern of family business patriarch is that the next generation not be playboys!) etc. Along the way he presents some fascinating case studies and anecdotes such as

• Wausau Paper Mill in Wisconsin, that pivoted to selling specialty paper on high turnaround times to survive and thrive

• how Walmart beat Kmart (a big factor was Walmart behaved like a logistics co, using their own trucking to move inventory fast from the time they received it at their warehouse to the stores)

• the story of the Ford factory in Japan which despite scale was more inefficient than their Japanese competitors (who were using lean techniques but were also focused on speed and quick turnaround times of small batch sizes)

Could speed be a moat in VC? Tiger is a good example of a VC who competes on time, by being superfast on transactions. I am not sure how much of an advantage that is in the VC industry. One way to look at it could be to be fast on second-time or elite founder transactions where the VC is selling themselves and fighting for access, while not bothering on speed on first-time founder transactions which are more buyside type transactions. This could also extend to any kind of interaction with elite founders including their referrals or queries.

Link to podcast. Transcript is paywalled.

3/ Ravi Gupta, Sequoia on Farnam Street Knowledge Podcast w Shane Parrish

I first came across Ravi Gupta through a couple of his short posts (this on joy and competitiveness as his cultural lodestars, and this on the best leaders being both demanding and supportive) which I found interesting. Since then I have tried to read his occasional writings and podcast transcripts as far as possible. This one, with Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish was enjoyable reading. The highlights were his 19-meal guideline (of the 21 meals in the week, make sure 19 are healthy if you want to lose weight), on overinvesting on the 5% of people who account for 90% of value (intriguing rule but that 90% seems overstated) and Sequoia’s most important item to do mail (every tuesday everyone writes their most important to do of the coming week and shares it publicly in a google sheet).

Link to podcast. Transcript is paywalled.

4 / Frank Slootman on Colossus w Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Slootman is a legend in the SaaS world, associated with unicorns such as Data Domain, ServiceNow and Snowflake all of which he led and accelerated growth at. He is known especially for his tough love approach to leadership, wonderfully espoused in his book ‘Amp It Up’. What I found interesting from the podcast was his contention around ref checks as superior to interviews (hard agree), his philosophy of narrowing the focus (reminded of Ravi Gupta’s statement about the most important to do mail at Sequoia) and his rather Patton-esque statement of breaking the competitor’s will by hiring away their people.

Link to podcast + transcript.

5/ Joost De Valk on 20VC w Harry Stebbings

Good podcast featuring Joost de Valk, one of the OGs of SEO; founded Yoast, which began as a side project and became a multi-million dollar business, that he sold and exited a few years back. In this podcast, Joost clarifies queries abt SEO incl what budget to allocate, when and how to begin (clever idea of using the content generated from reply to customer support queries for the first few blogposts) etc. He makes two really interesting points. First, investing in SEO per him starts with thinking about which problem of our users we are solving. To understand, get the words used by customers to explain their pain and use these words in your content to take advantage of SEO. Second, he says that 10% of your CPC (Cost per click or adwords) budget should be a good point to start your SEO spends with.

Link to podcast (transcript available with a sign in).

6/ Tom Tunguz on 20VC w Harry Stebbings

Very interesting given it covers many issues around raising a first-round found including the process of raising it. Usually this is something that is hidden. Theory, Tunguz’s fund, is also a differentiated bet on portfolio construction with a heavily concentrated approach to portfolio construction - $230m across 12 to 15 portcos with 40% on top 3 positions. I thought this concentration aspect was quite interesting - it resembles Private Equity portfolio construction in a way. Fits into my hypothesis that one strand in venture will evolve to look more like private equity (weaker power law, low ability to tolerate losses in portfolio, possibility of change in founders etc.)

Link to podcast (transcript available with a sign in).

7/ Dan Rose, Coatue Ventures, on Colossus w Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Entertaining listen / read given Dan Rose’s stints in Amazon and Facebook. Lots of interesting anecdotes and stories. For me the biggest take away was his perspective on negotiation and partnership - that the best negotiators split the orange not by halves so much as figure who really wants the rind and who the flesh and enable that split. Very memorable way of putting that. This reminded me of Emil Michael’s 20VC podcast where he covers his approach on negotiations.

Link to podcast + transcript.

8 / Zach Lawryk, Sales @ Rippling on 20VC w Harry Stebbings

In this podcast Harry and Zach cover the field of solutions engineering, including the role of a solutions engineer, how s/he dovetails with the overall sales teams, how to hire and comp them, and so on. Zach leads the solutions consulting team at Rippling. Previously he has worked in similar roles at Slack, Optimizely and Box.

I thought the podcast was a useful listen for any founder, senior operator doing enterprise sales. High ACV top down sales is the domain of solution engineers, who work with Account Executives to design and ensure that the solutions that they craft and offer to the buyer have the right business value so as to delight the buyer, and thereby help the sales rep close the deal. Lots of actionable content here such as when to hire the sales rep, the interview process, how to design their comp etc.

The most interesting takeaway for me was on how important content-creation is becoming (see the section on Outbound below) in enabling better and earlier conversations of the Solution Engineers with the buyer.  Another was on how the buyer sees the Solution Engineer as a champion of the buyer’s interest, while the Account Executive is seen as focused on closing sales.

Link to podcast. Link to transcript (organised by me).

9/ Glen Coates, Product @ Shopify on 20VC w Harry Stebbings

Really good podcast that is relevant for anyone in the tech world, but PMs and anyone with a strategic bent of mind will really dig it. Glen comes across as some one who can do both blue-sky thinking / strategy and building / coding really well. He is thus able to talk nitty gritties and tradeoffs while building, even as he speaks about PM-ing and org strategy from a 30k view.

What I really liked from the podcast

• The Outcomes-Principles-Assumptions framework that you should align your team and peers in the org around before you start building. While it isn’t strictly a PM framework, I thought this was particularly relevant for product development.

• When you build products that have extremely wide appeal and user bases, ensure progressive disclosure of features to keep life simple for your users, and ensure that third party apps can build high quality products for your users

• The closer you are to the bottom of the stack, the less likely that you will be able to tie a particular feature development to revenue generation, and hence the more you should ensure you build for the future, not the next 2-3 years

• Storytelling matters – if someone cant see your product as relevant to them, or cant empathise with it, no amount of numbers will convince them. And, repeat repeat, repeat. People forget all the time. There is barely three words you can lodge in people’s minds, and you need to chose what they are.

Link to podcast. Link to transcript (organised by me).

10 / Marc Andreessen on the Lunar Society podcast w Dwarkesh Patel

Venture is our craft and Marc Andreessen is one of its shokunins. So when the Shokunin speaks, you stop everything and listen, or in my case, read (the transcript). Dwarkesh Patel asks some very good questions to PMarca in this wonderful podcast. I particularly enjoyed reading PMarca’s riff on managerial capitalism vs bourgeois capitalism, and venture as the managerial firm that is a catalyst of bourgeois capitalism. Really good 2 or 3 pages or so. The other ones I enjoyed was his take on what ultra mega rounds could do to spark new forms or scale of problem solving, and thereby startup models, sharing Bill Janeway’s posit on why software and biotech are the hero sectors of venture, and, channelling Andy Rachleff on why he thinks venture is overstaffed, but it is a feature, not a bug.

Link to podcast + transcript.

Bye

Phew, that was long! As I shared earlier, you should think of this substack as akin to a monthly magazine - you don’t have to read it all in one sitting, and you don’t have to read all of it!

That is all for now folks. Feedback in the comments or at sp@sajithpai.com (Please don’t send pitches or CVs or anything work-related at my personal id; I may / may not respond to them; instead please use sp@blume.vc for pitches please).

See you whenever I hit publish!