Push the Urgency

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Is there a “Series A crunch” going on? (Link)

• The best performing fundraising “hack” (Link)

• VC is a bubble-resilient asset class (Link)

• Carta put out a pretty interesting report on VC fund performance (Link)

Growth

• The playbook for early-stage startup sales (Link)

• Paul Graham on the secret value of recurring revenue (Link)

• Good influencer marketing is mostly picking the right influencer (Link)

• Low hanging SEO fruit (Link)

• How many emails does it take for someone to buy a product? (Link)

ICYMI

• Two things every successful tech startup must do according to Ben Horowitz (Link)

• Elon says he does zero market research (Link)

• Not everyone is winging it (Link)

• Why the Silicon Valley mindset is special (Link)

• Garry Tan on the direction AI is still accelerating (Link)

• The advantage of being a generalist (Link)

• A guide on how to apply to Y Combinator (Link)

• Why taking recruiting extremely serious is a competitive advantage (Link)

💡 Opportunity: ChatCPG

CPG is notoriously tough since you either have to educate a market, or you’re selling them on a product they probably already buy from someone else.

Neither one of those is particularly easy.

Layer on the downward pressure on margins from legacy retailers if you ever make it big enough to get their attention and… well… it’s not always a fun space to build in.

The good news?

Starting and running a CPG business has some consistent problems that are solvable with repeatable processes, playbooks, and simple tooling.

Generalized tools could do this decently well, but a specialized tool that removes the need for the user to understand prompt engineering would be more appealing to many users.

In fact — I bet we’ll see this emerge as a trend. We thought a chat interface would abstract programming away and make it accessible to anyone.

In practice, we’re seeing prompts have their own nuances that most people won’t bother to learn. Tools that abstract this away by providing hyper-specific experiences will win.

Another reason this would work well — newer/younger businesses prefer all-in-one solutions. They don’t yet have the complicated workflows that require verticalized tools. So a “full suite” would work in this case.

🧠 Framework: Jeff Bezos Hiring Heuristic

I love straightforward frameworks.

Jeff Bezos says he hires people only if they pass 3 separate bars:

1. Can the person do exception things?

2. Does he admire them?

3. Will the person raise the effectiveness of the team?

You can get answers to all three of these questions in a single, 30 minute interview if you ask the right questions.

📈 Trend: AI Calendar

Calendly has always felt “almost-great” to me.

Yes, it’s great that you no longer have to co-ordinate times to meet.

But what if you prefer certain times you have available over others?

I run into this all the time (I highly prefer meeting blocks) and this is just one issue.

We’re seeing a rise in interest for AI-powered calendar tools.

Don’t get me wrong — some solutions, like Clockwise, exist and work great for teams.

But I get the sense there’s more opportunities in the AI scheduling space.

💬 Quote: Push the Urgency

Steve Jobs once said that he “hire[s] great people and then get out of their way.”

But he also had a reputation for being intense, and in the details with his teams.

That quote often gets used by first-time CEOs, or even employees thinking wistfully about a manager or exec who was less invested.

It’s a warped understanding. I think what Steve was saying is more like don’t get in their way. As in, know when to pull back. You need the emotional intelligence to understand your team and the situations you’re in with them.

That’s very different from not being being in the weeds in the first place.

My own style is to be a truth-seeking CEO, which means leading by example about working hard, and not shying away from conflicts. I’m always pushing the urgency.

The result has been teams that have consistently developed a shared devotion to our mission, and earned leadership. (The only people this approach doesn’t work well with are ego-driven, and you probably want to root them out anyway.)

Frank Slootman has used this philosophy to great success:

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