Through the ScOp Playbook, we’ve refined our strategy for identifying, building, and investing in successful companies.
I too often see marketing plans “focused” on everything: podcasts, site redesign, name change, conferences, awards, etc. When you focus on everything, you are clueless; you will fail at everything and spend all your money. FOCUS. Get one thing working, then move on to the next high-conviction item.
Below is a very brief overview of the three pillars of marketing.
I’m often asked for career advice. People think linearly: I get my degree, work for two years, return and get my MBA, etc. I like to challenge people to think non-linearly if they want to be massively successful. Here are the four career tips I give people:
Guava, one of our investments, is a free app aggregating ALL your healthcare data in one place. They pull data from your consumer, commercial devices, and over 50,000 healthcare providers (physicians, hospitals, blood labs, etc.). You can have a comprehensive view of all of your health data. They added a cool feature called "Insights" that looks for correlations between factors, like how the number of steps impacts sleep.
Jason and I go back to the early days of the Internet. Back in 1996, Jason started “The Silicon Alley Reporter” while we were building DoubleClick. We finally got to catch up on Jason’s “This Week in Startups” podcast. Enjoy.
A few weeks ago, we signed a term sheet with Alpha Design, an early-stage company developing AI to assist in the development and testing of digital chips. The company was founded by William Wang, an accomplished professor at UCSB who has led the university’s AI efforts over the past several years.
PromptLayer has built a tool that enables any company to hire domain experts and leverage their experience with zero software development. They offer an entire development workflow, including version control, testing, deployment, and more.
I focused on hiring Smart Athletes with Great Attitudes (SAGA) for most of my career.
Let’s call this the Money Paradox. You want just the right amount of money for each stage of your company.
I consider myself a hardcore free market libertarian. However, it seems like even free marketers are turning on Big Tech so I felt compelled to stand-up to the attacks.
Kevin O’Connor was interviewed for an interesting new podcast on the History of E-commerce.
Yes, it’s hard to believe that anybody would invest their time and money in a company that doesn’t actually satisfy a customer’s need but it happens all the time. All the time.
