Why Travis Kalanick is a Winner

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• 33 ways to grow your startup with AI (Link)

• Marc Andreessen on why not to start a startup (Link)

• How to build a $1k/month mobile app (Link)

💡 Opportunity: AI Led Compliance and Archiving

Ready to shudder?

Compliance.

It’s a bad word to founders. It means extra, likely tedious work that doesn’t improve the customer experience (it probably makes it worse).

But we have to do it. We have to cross our t’s and dot our i’s.

Except… maybe we don’t now (as much).

In basically every industry there’s compliance work to do. Why not delegate it to AI?

This type of standardization-work, that can take time without having a noticeable impact on growth or UX, is a perfect candidate to be automated by AI.

Boring SaaS can end up being a really big business, in some cases.

🧠 Framework: Should I Run an A/B Test?

I was a data scientist at one point before I was a founder.

One of the things I learned quickly that my job wasn’t just to run experiments to understand what was happening — no.

Surprisingly, maybe even more often, my job was to tell people we didn’t need or weren’t ready to run an experiment.

If you’re a non-technical founder, here’s a cheat sheet to skip ahead and decide if you should really run an a/b test or not:

📈 Trend: Seed to Series A

Graduation rate is the percentage of venture-backed startups that make it to the next fundraising stage.

The most common benchmark to look at is seed to Series A.

Here’s how to read the chart below: the percentage of seed stage startups that graduate to Series A hasn’t changed much despite fluctuations in the funding markets.

Roughly 50% of startups that raise a seed are able to raise a Series A within 4 years, but how quickly it happens has changed a lot.

For example, a whopping 19% of startups that raised a seed in Q3 of 2020 raised their Series A within a year. Compare that to only 4% in Q1 of the 2023 seed vintage.

However, since at least 2018 the 50% who make it to the A within 4 years has been steady.

This is evidence of higher funding benchmarks, and is honestly is probably a sign of a healthier ecosystem.

💬 Quote: Why Travis Kalanick is a Winner

One of the best reactions a founder can have to criticism of their product is “ok, what would you do differently?”

There’s no ego involved in that answer. It’s a genuine desire to improve the product, an admission that your decisions aren’t infallible, and an acknowledgement that startups need to constantly be improved as they grow.

Here’s a fun interaction where Travis Kalanick put that on display, to the extreme:

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