This Week in Startups Weekly Recap December 13-17
Jason Calacanis
I invest in 100 new startups a year... get a meeting with my team at launch.co/apply, or learn how to start a company by joining founder.university (our 12-week course). watch thisweekinstartups.com if you love startups
Hey Everybody!
This was our last full week of shows before 2022! Jason spoke with?Twitter’s Tony Haile?about product development of their longform news feature. He also chatted with the top venture capital meme account,?Praying For Exits, as well as?Rad Power Bikes Founder & CEO Mike Radenbaugh?about building one of the largest ebike companies. Full recap below!
***Producer’s Note***
We want you to help us pick the best moments from TWIST 2021! You can reply to this email with your favorite episode or?submit this google form?which has a few different categories to pick from.
Tony sold his startup Scroll to Twitter and is now a leader on Twitter's product team. If you are a Twitter super-user, you won’t want to miss this one.
Consuming digital news is increasingly fragmented across social media and other aggregators. Scroll set out to allow micro-payments to publishers in exchange for ad-free browsing. By combining with Twitter, Tony and the Scroll team were able to relaunch the product as a feature of Twitter Blue (Twitter’s premium subscription). Tony shared what it was like to work at Twitter now and helped paint a picture of where the platform was headed.?
Tony on bringing longform news into Twitter…
"There are a whole ton of ways in which we can work with publishers to help them build more of an audience relationship, in a way that makes them more money, while releasing some of the frustration that occurs when people are going across the web."
Praying for Exits, the top meme account in Venture Capital, and Jason discussed their shared experience as pseudonymous commentators (90s flash-back for Jason). We expected Mr. Exits to be funny, but instead he brought a well-read historical perspective to the conversation.
In the wide-ranging discussion they cover, why VCs spend too much time brand building, current entitlement in tech, assessing founders and companies qualitatively and quantitatively, crazy VC stories plus so much more!
On investing in early stage founders…
"Integrity is one of the most under-appreciated metrics in evaluating early stage startups. It's also one of the metrics that has the most latent value if you can understand how to accurately underwrite it."
领英推荐
Mike has built a massive ebike company, known for their rugged all-terrain bikes. So far, Rad Power Bikes has over 350,000 customers and 700 employees. Jason and Mike discuss Rad Power Bikes’ most innovative features, the state of ebike regulation and Mike’s vision for the future of transportation.
Mike’s product strategy…
“We wanted to focus on a really great, super scalable fundamental product and then fold in new features and accessories. We will launch 40 accessories this year.”
Jason spoke with three founders he invested in:
News
P.S.
All-in fans, did you catch the behind-the-scenes discussion of how?All-in is produced?with Nick and Jason?
Best,
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