Insights

Our perspectives, learnings, and insights on traction, venture capital, and product management.

Category: Traction

The Fundamentals of Traction

What is Traction? Where does it come from? And, most importantly, how do you generate it? Startups are in an endless pursuit of product-market fit. If they are very young, they might still be defining their vision of what the world will look like should they find it. If they are more mature, they are justifying…

Q3 2017 venture funding by region

The 5 Traits Every Startup Needs to Raise Venture Capital

…and how to get VCs to give them to you. These common traits define every startup successfully raising venture capital in today’s traction-centric market. What it Takes to Raise a First Round VCs are ultimately judged by their own investors on their Internal Rate of Return (IRR). In order to optimize that metric, they need to time…

startup matriculation rates

Why It’s So Difficult to Disrupt

How rising VC expectations are causing founders to ignore user experiences in favor of unsustainable growth. The trouble with innovation… Through my experience as a repeat technical startup founder, I’ve found the greatest difficulty in developing a new technology is not getting something to function. It’s discovering that a user’s tolerance for learning a new…