3 BADideas for a Friday: BAD to better with Suhas Ghante, LILEDU and Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah

Hey,

New month, new batch of BADideas, and this one is a good one. Enjoy BAD to better, this time a Techchill special with a dear friend and startup builder,?unicorn spotlight?on a team that gets how doing good is good for business;?and a?golden nugget?from one of my personal heroes.

?? If you find this useful, share it with a founder in your network. Let's dig in.

BAD to better at startup building: Techchill special with Suhas Ghante

"Silicon Valley is a mindset, it's not a location... The way we scale and we grow in the culture - it's something you can bring to Riga, or Tallinn or Madrid."

This is the second time I get to mention Suhas Ghante , a dear friend, 500 Startups batchmate (2x alum), partner at Timely VC, and a serial startup builder, in this newsletter, and no wonder - I learn something new from him every time we meet. Back in SF we'd spent hours sparring, and more recently he helped make our Fundraising School the success it was. This time, I got to tease out some of his insights on stage during Techchill, so check out our conversation here on Youtube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

But that's not it - Suhas believes that it's not the best companies that get funded, but rather the best-communicated companies that do (a belief we share over here at BADideas.fund), so we did what we know best and tinkered around. What came out is BADdecks, a tool and service any founder can use to craft a compelling and crisp narrative. If you give it a go, let me know what you think.

?? Unicorn spotlight - LILEDU

Founders, take notice - investors like seeing companies that combine smart business play and impact-driven vision. The most recent BADideas.fund company, LILEDU , is one such team. Laurynas Pamparas and his team is building "Netflix for toys" with a play & swap subscription, and made us excited to back them thanks to:

1. Serving a growing, underserved market - parents out there will recognize the wish to invest more in educational toys
2. Unique founder attributes - Laurynas' background is in PE, and, together with his first-hand experience, brings a methodical, empathetic approach
3. Smart approach to building traction - before entering the UK market, the team ran an interesting experiment to validate demand, before doubling down on expansion

Golden nugget - Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah on Lenny's Newsletter

Incidentally, this is the second time I get to mention another name - Lenny Rachitsky , ex-Airbnb and now a must-read Substack creator, who recently interviewed one of my startup heroes, Hubspot's co-founder & CFO Dharmesh Shah . The entire conversation is well worth a listen, but here are my takeaways:

• Time is a huge constraint - by saying yes to something, you're saying no to something else (01:02)
• Over time, unless you intervene, things go to crap - when you're small, try not to die; when you're growing, try not to stagnate; when you're huge, try not to crumble under complexity (00:37)
• Startup building is like reverse gravity - eventually all SMB startups are pulled to enterprise, but when every successful startup ends up in enterprise, it ends up competing against everyone else. Paradoxically, if a startup resistes that, SMB can be a very nice business and focus where there is less competition (00:45)

Raimonds