Josh Elman on Product Management, Dropshipping mini-dive, Bessemer's historical internal investment memos, and more.
Weekend reads and listens (What We've Been Following [September 11, 2020])
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Hey everyone 👋,
Welcome to the September 11th Edition of What We’ve Been Following, our bi-weekly newsletter highlighting some of the newsletters, podcasts, blog posts, tweets, startup news, and more that our Team found interesting over the past few weeks.
If you missed the last Edition of What We’ve Been Following, published on August 28 and written by Michael, be sure to check it out, here.
In case you missed it, we recently launched a Telehealth podcast series. Make sure to check out the podcast series if you haven’t already, and stay tuned for more episodes:
As always, you can find us on Twitter @_TheTakeoff.
(Today’s What We’ve Been Following newsletter is written by Roshan.)
Since today marks 19 years since September 11th, 2001, we would like to take a moment to honor those who lost their lives — as well as the first responders who arrived at the scene — in the tragedy that occurred that day. 🇺🇸
Quick rundown of today’s newsletter:
2 Podcasts🎙3 Tweets🐦4 Articles, Newsletters, Blog Posts, etc.📝4 ‘More’💡Dropshipping Mini-Dive🛍1 opportunity from Envision Accelerator
Podcasts 🎙
Lenny Rachitsky and Nadia Eghbal on Village Global's Venture Stories. Lenny and Nadia discuss starting and growing a newsletter. Some of our takeaways were:
Provide value for people continuously (help people learn, entertain them, etc.). Figure out what your advantage is, put in the time, and hone in on adding value that helps subscribers / listeners.
Newsletters allow you to provide value for the same people over time (blogs, on the other hand, are read by different people over time). If you want to repeatedly create content on a certain topic, consider starting a newsletter.
Brand Ambassador Program. In this brief episode, Alex Lieberman (CEO of Morning Brew) reflects on Morning Brew’s brand ambassador program BrewU.
When setting up an ambassador program, quantity matters more than quality. Accept more ambassadors instead of spending your time reviewing applications to see who the most qualified ambassadors are.
It’s important to provide ambassadors with as many resources as possible (e.g. scripts to pitch your brand) so they don’t have to do the guesswork.
Focus internal resources on ambassadors who are successfully pushing your brand/product.
Twitter 🐦
(We’ve given some of our takeaways from the featured book in a previous Edition of WWBF).
Articles, Newsletters, Blog Posts, Etc. 📝
A Product Manager’s Job by Josh Elman. John Elman, Partner at Greylock and former legendary PM, tackles the question of “what is a product manager?”. In this brief but meaty piece, Josh writes that the job of a product manager is to “help your team (and company) ship the right product to your users” and then proceeds to break this down into five smaller pieces. Some of our takeaways include:
“Great product managers understand the very tricky balance between getting it right and getting it out the door.”
PMs need to advocate for users and represent them in conversations.
PMs need to help their team coordinate and communicate.
The Coming Digitization Of Enterprise Software Sales: Four Trends Winning Teams Will Embrace. My dad Asheem Chandna, also a Partner at Greylock, recently published his second Forbes contributor article. In this piece, he breaks down how the traditional software selling process is undergoing a reinvention due to COVID-19. Some of our takeaways include:
AI and Analytics are increasingly being used in video calls, including sales calls.
Sales teams are gathering intelligence from software trials in order to shorten the time until value is added.
Digital contracting is becoming more and more common.
Bessemer Memos. Bessemer Venture Partners released their historical internal investment memos on some of their best investments (including $SHOP, $TWLO, $PINS) along with commentary. Reading these has been incredible to get a sense of how VCs think. Some things we learned include:
Valuations have changed (drastically) throughout the years
Deep diligence helps add conviction
BVP’s narratives are simple yet effective
It's hard to learn from successes, but pattern-matching is often a good way to start. Publicizing these memos is a great way to help up-and-coming investors understand how to properly do diligence + identify certain patterns.
Jeff Bezos In 1999 On Amazon's Plans Before The Dotcom Crash. This CNBC re-run from 1999 popped up in my recommended videos on YouTube recently and was a fascinating watch. In this interview, a young Jeff Bezos explains his ambitious vision for Amazon. Throughout the interview, a recurring theme that Bezos reiterates is that Amazon’s company focus was on great customer service. Bezos believed superior customer service got Amazon past selling just books and believed great customer experience (and service) would be a key driver in their success moving forward.
More … 💡
Bumble swipes right on IPO. Bumble plans to go public in early 2021 with a valuation of more than $6 billion. This move follows a frenzy of IPO activity in the second half of 2020, with upcoming IPOs including Snowflake and Sumo Logic (where I was once an intern!).
Elon gets in some Twitter beef.
The Bay Area turned orange as wildfires continue to rage throughout California.
The Apple and Epic Games saga continues. In early August, Apple pulled Epic Games’ Fortnite app from the App Store for offering a direct payment option in the app (rather than giving 30% of the payment transaction to Apple, as outlined in Apple’s App Store policy). Later in August, Apple terminated Epic Games’ developer account for continuing to break their rules. In a more recent development, Apple is now seeking damages from Epic Games for their breach of contract.
Dropshipping Mini-Dive 🛍
Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to learn more about the world of e-commerce, specifically dropshipping. What is dropshipping? According to Shopify,
“Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product using the dropshipping model, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the seller doesn’t have to handle the product directly.”
I’ve decided to share with you all some of my favorite resources around the topic of dropshipping that I’ve come across so far, both serious and fun:
Complete Tutorials:
This video from Dan Vas has been my favorite resource thus far in learning about dropshipping.
This tutorial from Jeraun Richards “J Rich” is another great tutorial for creating a dropshipping store, this time starting with no money.
Supplemental Videos:
YouTuber Biaheza explains how he made $25k in his first month of dropshipping at 25 years old.
Dan Vas outlines his strategy to find dropshipping products.
Dropshipping Challenges. These videos are more fun and less serious, but still contain a lot of valuable information:
Jeraun Richards builds a Shopify dropshipping business in 20 minutes.
Justin Painter spent 7 days running a dropshipping business and shares his process and results.
Some of my biggest takeaways while learning about dropshipping have been:
Building a brand is the key to success in dropshipping, as there’s nothing special about your product, and there’s almost no barrier to entry in this business.
Shopify is a far more powerful tool than I realized. I highly recommend Bessemer’s Shopify investment memo to learn more.
There are a lot more dropshipping businesses around the web than I realized. The global dropshipping market size was expected to reach $557.9 Billion before the pandemic even hit.
Envision Accelerator Cohort 2 (Applications are live!)
Quick blurb from Envision about their second cohort + application deadlines:
“Hey everyone! Applications for Envision are open!!!! Envision is a student-led, student-built virtual accelerator that is on a mission to diversify the entrepreneurship and VC worlds. To accelerate student-built companies with diverse founding teams, we provide access to equity-free funding, a diverse community of motivated founders, hands-on workshops, mentorship, and individualized support for each company.
We are looking for our next cohort of student founders for our fall accelerator! Our program will run from October 5th - December 11th and will be run entirely virtually. Companies in our summer cohort received mentorship from industry leaders (from founders of Product Hunt, Backstage Capital, and more), are moving onto prestigious accelerators like 500 Startups, have met with top VCs (including Sequoia Capital and Lerer Hippeau), and have seen their companies skyrocket — doubling sales growth, massive user increases, and partnerships with companies like ClassPass.
Applications for the fall cohort are now open, and will be evaluated on a rolling basis. Our priority application deadline is 9/13 and the final deadline to submit your application is 9/19 (both at midnight ET). If you’re interested in applying for the fall cohort, check out www.tinyurl.com/envisionapplication or contact James Rogers (james@envisionaccelerator.com) for more information.
Applications are open until 9/19 (priority applications close 9/13). Be sure to apply ASAP if you are interested in taking your business / idea to the next level with Envision!
That’s all for today’s Edition of What We’ve Been Following!
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We have some amazing interviews lined up to be released in the coming weeks, starting with Monday’s newsletter with Sridhar Ramaswamy (Co-founder & CEO at Neeva; Venture Partner at Greylock Partners).
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