The war for talent could not be more brutal these days and I love solutions like the Future Founder Promise from GraphCDN and TurboRepo - it’s what makes the startup world go round and round!

GraphCDN ⚡️ @GraphCDN

We've started a list of startups offering the Future Founder Promise! 😍 Do you want to build your own startup eventually but aren't quite ready? Consider working at one of the companies! github.com/graphcdn/futur… 👈 You're a company with the promise? Add yourself to the list!GitHub - graphcdn/future-founder-promise: A list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employeesA list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employees - GitHub - graphcdn/future-founder-promise: A list of startups that offer the Future Founder Promise to their employeesgithub.com

July 21st 2021

13 Retweets75 Likes

Speaking of talent, Dipti Salopek, VP People at Snyk ( a portfolio co), shared her playbook for scaling your talent engine and published her Hypergrowth Playbook. I’ve seen Dipti firsthand help Snyk go from 100 to 700 people in two years with hires from all over the world and highly recommend learning from her experience. Here are 7 💎 to start as you go from startup to scaleup:

1. Don’t  just recruit, build a recruiting engine
2. Keep raising the talent bar
3. Lean in to your culture
4. Create a learning organization
5. Adapt how you communicate
6. Strengthen your Core HR processes
7. Operate with Data

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.

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Scaling Startups

1. Rahul at Superhuman (a portfolio co) is one of best storytellers I know and here he shares how to tell a billion dollar story along with parallels to the Hero’s Journey (I recommend reading the classic book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces)

   With the right story, you can close investors, captivate customers, and inspire your team toward your next big milestone.

   The most powerful stories have 3 key ingredients — and the way you tell them will make or break your startup. Let's dive in…

   Call to Adventures, Victory Over Crisis, Transformation…

2. Let’s not forget this 👇🏼

   Marcelo Lebre @marcelo_lebre

   Remote work is not the future of work, it is a way to get there. The future of work is working to achieve your dreams and not sacrificing your dreams to work.

   July 19th 2021

   71 Retweets478 Likes

3. So many ways to hire and scale - here is one at Gumroad

   Sahil @shl

   Our hiring process at Gumroad is now 100% asynchronous except for a 15-minute phone call. Meaning there’s now a bunch of people I work with everyday and I have no idea what they look like.

   July 22nd 2021

   144 Retweets2,965 Likes

4. this could be you - Zoom acquired John’s company for $14.7B

   john sung kim @JohnSungKim

   I started @Five9 in my apartment in SF many years ago with the idea of liberating call center agents (like me) from centralized boiler rooms. As a longtime fan and user of @Zoom, I’m proud to say that this is the final chapter for my first startup. google.com/amp/s/texasnew…

   July 19th 2021

   80 Retweets1,350 Likes

5. Love this

   Nick Mehta @nrmehta

   If you intend to run your company for a long time, one key role as CEO becomes being the "historian." Many people that work for you won't have the context of how your team got to where they are at - and of why things worked and didn't work. It's your job to remember the stories.

   July 20th 2021

   93 Retweets1,035 Likes

6. 👇🏼 great advice from Mathilde (Front - a portfolio co) - a great skill to learn for founders as they continue to scale their business

   Mathilde Collin @collinmathilde

   Giving AND receiving feedback is hard, so I wrote my best, most practical tips to make it easier for everyone. It's helped me both in my professional and personal life! 7 do’s and don’ts to get better at giving and receiving feedbackWhen I tell future hires that we practice radical candor here at Front, everyone’s bought in to the idea. What’s not to like about it? Everybody wants to learn fast, tackle problems when they’re…collinmathilde.medium.com

   July 13th 2021

   1 Retweet36 Likes

Enterprise Tech

1. Great read from Jean Yang at Akita Software Why Aren’t There More Programming Languages Startups along with🧵 on HackerNews: don’t let title mislead you as it’s beyond programming languages and also about dev tools and developer needs in general

   ⚡️ Jean Yang ⚡️ @jeanqasaur

   Why aren't there more startups based on programming languages and software analysis? There's definitely a need for SOMETHING, as developers have so much pain. I was recently on a panel where someone asked this question. I didn't have time to answer then, so here's a thread. 1/

   July 14th 2021

   39 Retweets266 Likes

   And 👇🏼 this is huge and many times forgotten and the difference between a true developer first tool and one that is not

   ⚡️ Jean Yang ⚡️ @jeanqasaur

   I also often see programming tools people ignore design. Design isn't about increasing prettiness, it's about reducing friction to solving valuable problems. Today, there's a design gap in between many cool programming technologies and the tools they could become. 5/

   July 14th 2021

   15 Retweets105 Likes

2. State of DevOps report from Puppet is out

   Yvonne Wassenaar @ytechdata

   One decade ago @puppetize released our first #StateOfDevOps Report. Today I'm proud to share our 10th report with you. This report is focusing on cultural blockers are keeping mid-evolution firms stuck in the middle. Download it now: State of DevOps Report 2021 | PuppetRead the 2021 State of DevOps Report to learn why firms are stuck in the middle of DevOps evolution, how automation and cloud relate, and more.bit.ly

   July 20th 2021

   5 Retweets12 Likes

3. Capital One is one of most forward thinking Fortune 500s - still so much room for innovation for everyone else which means more spending on 🌥️ and developers 💰 - Capital One Adding 3,000 Tech Staff to Build on Cloud Banking Leadership

   More than 75% of this year’s expected 3,000 new hires will be engineers, he said, with expertise in areas such as cloud, data, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and security. Designing for mobile will also be a key area, he added, since online and mobile are increasingly popular ways that Capital One customers interact with the bank.

   The bank decided 8 or 10 years ago that to compete it had to develop its own software.

   “Before that, Capital One leveraged third parties to build apps, but the bank recognized the winners would be great tech companies with the risk management skills of a leading bank. In 2012 we started to redefine who we were as a company, with the goal to being a bank that a tech company would build,” added Nims.

   “We have reinvented our operating model, moving to 100% agile for delivery of software, leveraging micro services and building on open source software. By moving to AWS and re-architecting our entire data set we have dramatically advanced our ability to manage data at a larger scale, which created the foundation to leverage machine learning.

4. 💯 - best open source and developer first cos I know subscribe to this and over time it becomes an incredible moat

   GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg

   Don't build a customer base. Build a fan base I'd rather a fan over a customer any day of the week

   July 20th 2021

   81 Retweets708 Likes

5. Many times forgotten since focus is on code when it comes to APIs and dev tools - but documentation and ease of use matters as you only have seconds before a dev goes somewhere else

   Matt Asay @mjasay

   The best doc writers don't get paid what the best developers do. Should they? Arguably they have as great an impact on the adoption of that code.... Would love your thoughts tek.io/2UQzj73 by @mjasay for @TechRepublicShould documentation writers get paid more than developers?Commentary: Given the importance of documentation to making software usable, should documentarians earn a bigger paycheck than developers?tek.io

   July 19th 2021

   15 Retweets50 Likes

   Without great documentation, great code...isn't. Great documentation, after all, makes code more approachable, more useful. Bad code? Well, as The Taproom CEO Kelly Vaughn tweeted, "Please, please, PLEASE–I am begging you–invest time and resources into your documentation. I've been running in circles for 3 days now trying to solve the same problem because the documentation is terribly lacking."

6. If you want a quick summary of the NSO Group’s spyware story, read this 🧵

   Bill Marczak @billmarczak

   THREAD with a couple of interesting bits from @AmnestyTech's new report on what they learned from looking for NSO Group's spyware on phones Forensic Methodology Report: How to catch NSO Group’s PegasusNSO Group claims that its Pegasus spyware is only used to “investigate terrorism and crime” and “leaves no traces whatsoever”. This Forensic Methodology Report shows that neither of these statements are true. This report accompanies the release of the Pegasus Project, a collaborative investigation t…amnesty.org

   July 18th 2021

   1,075 Retweets1,737 Likes

Markets

1. What’s ahead for the economy?

   AlexisOhanian.eth 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ @alexisohanian

   😷 Bubonic plague ➡️ Renaissance 😷 Spanish Flu ➡️ Roaring 20s 😷 COVID-19 ➡️ ???

   July 19th 2021

   88 Retweets808 Likes

2. 🦄🦄🦄

   erin griffith @eringriffith

   There are now 900 unicorns worth $1 trillion 🤯 news.crunchbase.com/news/unicorn-s…The World’s Unicorns Are Now Valued At $3T — Up By A Trillion In The Past Year. Who Invested?The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, a comprehensive list of startups valued at $1 billion or more in private financing deals, now hosts more than 900 companies with a collective value of $3 trillion — up by a trillion dollars from our June 2020 report.news.crunchbase.com

   July 20th 2021

   40 Retweets125 Likes

3. More on Zoom acquisition of Five9 - never quit…

   someguyCarl @TheRealCarlChi1

   I love the Five9 story. IPO'ed in '14. Growth deceled - ended 2014 @ 17% Q4 growth and low 20s full year (ouch!) Stock was left for dead but the team put its head down and executed. Averaged 27%+ annually from 2015 - 2020 and accelerated massively in 20/21. 40x stock from bottom.

   July 19th 2021

   5 Retweets151 Likes

4. 🤯

   Ari Levy @levynews

   This is crazy Zoom went public a little over 2 years ago with a market cap of $9.2 bln. Now it’s buying a company for $14.7 bln.

   July 19th 2021

   45 Retweets445 Likes

5. A rising cloud lifts all boats - IBM

   Total cloud revenue grew 13% compared with a year earlier to $7 billion with Red Hat sales surging 20% during the quarter. IBM reaffirmed its prior outlook of delivering revenue growth for the full year. “We are pleased with the early signs of progress,” Krishna said on a conference call of the company’s shift to cloud and AI. “However, it will take time before we realize the full benefit of these changes.”