- Google was not a search engine, page rank for improving search engines - YouTube about sharing videos of parties from one another - Started very small - No fabulous resume of experience - Apple - hobby computer market when [[Don Valentine]] invested - Billion dollar markets, large TAMs, not as exciting as solving very specific pain points for very specific customers - Sales Learning Curve -> fabulous case of startups in the early days - "Revenue ramp" - 100-120 page well thought out business plan - Just not interesting to [[Sequoia]] - What's compelling and unique - What is your unfair advantage - Market strategy and tactics - Founding team - More interested in the DNA of the actual founding team - Financials - Compelling and unique: very difficult challenge - What is your unique compelling value proposition? - Cisco: they network networks - Clarity of purpose - Can you explain what is unique, compelling, why you're going to win and what is your unfair advantage - Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm - Positioning template - Depth of expertise - Depth and substance of passion and your ability to orchestrate strategies - YOUR DETAILED EXPERTISE IN A DOMAIN - 3-5x improvement in price performance in existing markets - Intimately know your competition - Very comfortable with technical risk - 3-4 individuals with very different expertise - 10x programmers, marketers, pedigree is not important - World class programmers - Intelligence, ambition, clear understanding of a pain point, immigrants, underdogs, unknown - Mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Leone - Numbers are incredibly important - Numbers tell them a lot about how you think about the business - Portfolio Review - Every 6 months, compare company plans and where they are today - Take time on financials - Other companies and their filings - Being balanced on the numbers early on - Nomenclature around unit economics - yields for semis - gross margin - MRR for a SaaS business, CaC, churn - Knowing the economics of the business - UNIT ECONOMICS - Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie - Recipe involved in building revenue -