Death of the Scalers

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Vimcal is the world’s fastest calendar — beautifully designed for busy founders drowning in meetings. Trusted by top execs, YC S18 (Link)

• Angel Investor Josh Payne on 10 red flags he looks for (Link)

• Brett from Designjoy on foundational clients (Link)

• Matt Gray on 9 ways to get more clients (Link)

• Ben Lang on YC's advice on how to spend money at a startup (Link)

• Palmer Luckey on why science fiction is a great place to look for ideas (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki shares Acquire.com's annual SaaS report (Link)

• Chris Bakke on the best way to hire salespeople for early stage startups (Link)

• 7 best tax software for SaaS businesses (Link)

Also ICYMI on Saturday — here’s my full video on how founders become billionaires:

💡 Opportunity: SaaS for Airbnb Hosts

On Airbnb, Superhosts run the show.

These are hosts who typically have multiple properties and run their Airbnbs as a business.

Both first-party and third-party tooling for Superhosts is only ok, but there are a lot of them, they have money to spend, and they love optimizing their businesses.

Greg Isenberg shared a few ideas for how to capture some of this market, but there are likely many more for someone who’s willing to dig in and talk to a bunch of the Superhosts on the platform.

Likely not a venture-scale business (you never know, though, Airbnb is huge and global) but definitely some good cashflowing opportunities.

🧠 Framework: Copy that Converts

Attention spans aren’t getting shorter.

People are just getting better at making decisions about whether they want to keep paying attention or not.

They might only consider your product for a split second before they decide.

Your landing page, or social media content, or ad needs to hook them right away and then hold their attention each step of the way towards a conversion.

Here’s how to improve it:

📈 Trend: Consumer Venture Investing

Consumer VC investment dollars, as a percentage of total VC investment dollars, peaked almost 10 years ago.

I’ve always thought that “consumer” is too broad of a category for startup categorization, and maybe some of that is reflected here.

But I also think it speaks to the idea that, for a few years, people felt like all the good consumer ideas had already been built.

With AI we’ve seen that (faulty) mindset start to self-correct, but the issue for VCs is that the best consumer founders tend to know how to market their startups to consumers very effectively, leaving the investors outside looking in at a good chunk of the resurgence.

💬 Quote: Death of the Scalers

Over the last 15 years, what was the easiest way to get rich in Silicon Valley?

No, it wasn’t being a founder.

It was by opportunistically job hopping from one senior management role to the next at the next hot company every 1-3 years.

These folks would join startups after the primary risks early on had been solved, and the company was just in scaling mode.

From the company’s POV it seemed to make sense — their needs were changing from building to scaling, so they wanted to bring in proven scalers and were willing to pay a lot for what essentially amounted to a glorified delegator and internal politic-wrangler.

When I was working at Uber and (especially) Airbnb, these people were transparent, easy to spot, and nearly impossible to take seriously. They were intelligent, but nearly always ended up slowing things down.

This week’s quote is an interesting take that maybe, hopefully, the need for these folks is starting to go away in a world where productivity is supercharged with AI, teams are smaller, and contributions are more binary.

I’m skeptical, but it’s not impossible:

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 75,000+ founders.