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Startups & Side Hustles
"The explosion of seed funding means tens of thousands of companies that previously languished in their basement are getting funding, likely two orders of magnitude more than received Series A funding during the Dot-Com bubble" - Steve Blank on the Death of the Lean Startup

Hey there,

In his latest essay, author Steve Blank wonders whether the years of positive economic signs for startups have finally removed the need to prove a business model is viable before raising big money.

This strikes at the heart of those of us on the side of reasonable, measured growth, but his argument makes sense. In the right environment, maybe crushing your competitors with size really is the best way to win.

Then again, maybe we're seeing a bubble like we did in the 2000's dotcom era. Read this, and let me know what you think.
Around the Web
“I think of startup growth in two distinct stages that require very different strategies: Zero-to-one. This is where you’re trying to figure out, does the product even work at all? And one-to-n, where you ask, ‘How can we add in more channels and get very metrics-oriented to scale as quickly and efficiently as possible?’”

"Y Combinator announced this morning that it will increase the size of its investments to $150,000 for 7% equity starting with its winter 2019 batch." This is up from $120k for 7% last year.

"You Should Never Build a Product Before You Sell It..Although your product is important, no matter how good it is, if people aren’t interest in buying it, then your business is likely going to struggle."

I had a blurb in Fullstack's latest blog post this week: "First asking for more time. If two companies have each offered you a job, then they are serious about taking you on. Nine times out of 10, they won’t have a problem with giving you additional time to come to a decision."

By default, a category page is merely a list of products or posts, with occasional links to subcategories...In comparison, a Hub Page acts as a central overview of a topic or category

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I love RSS feeds, so it's cool to see there are still new tools coming out in the space.

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Your wish is someone else's command. Submit your ideas and maybe it'll be the next app built.

Looks like an ugly version of Pinterest explicitly created to sell you stuff, but it's Amazon, so maybe we'll all use it anyway.

Thanks for reading,

Karl Hughes, Portable CTO