PODIUM: June 2020

Monday, June 29, 2020

Lululemon CEO on the $500M Acquisition of SportsTech Startup Mirror

Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald talks about the $500 million acquisition of sportstech startup Mirror and how digital fitness will grow over time.

PodiumVC is a venture fund, accelerator and community across sports and entertainment, based in Silicon Valley.
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Sunday, June 28, 2020

Startup Lessons | Early Startups Be Accurate on Early Traction

One of the most common questions for startups by investors is about traction.

It's intended to provide insight into adoption, growth, sales, use or potential trajectory of a startup in the current format (knowing that most startups will iterate and adjust).

In recent years, startups have become better at measuring traction metrics, but sometimes, too good, where the information is intended to impress rather than give accurate data.

While tempting to impress, it can lead to startups or investors overlooking problems or challenges that are often easier to solve or fix at the early stage rather.

It's one of many reasons we encourage startups to share the good, bad and yes, even ugly, of any metrics, even if it's not impressive.

Great investors will appreciate reality and startups will benefit long-term.

Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, explains:

Parker Thompson, aka Startup L Jackson, wrote: “Every investor who comes in after me is a spreadsheet jockey, and every investor who comes in before me is a dart-throwing monkey.”

If you fixate on spreadsheets and traction as an early-stage investor, you’ll annoy good founders. These are craftspeople who love what they do and are trying to build the perfect product for their customer.

If you can put yourself in the shoes of a future customer and appreciate the product, you’re much more likely to recognize and win hot deals.

If you see a company with amazing traction that’s monetizable, has a good founder and is willing to let you do all the spreadsheet analysis you want, ask yourself: “Why am I even getting to see this deal? Why hasn’t a top-tier firm already picked it off at a valuation that’s 10x what I could pay?”

It’s difficult to truly understand metrics

Companies are also getting good at faking and exaggerating traction. At accelerator demo days, companies are trained to present graphs in the best light. They’ll show cumulative graphs rather than incremental ones. They’ll cherry-pick stats. They’ll report explosive growth during an incubator session by selling to their batchmates or doing their sales all at once—these are not sales that are sustainable.

It’s difficult to truly understand their metrics, unless you access their dashboards, know their market and are willing to dig very carefully to separate truth from fiction.

When there’s a hot round and you have no time to decide, that’s when you get taken advantage of with rosy traction stories.

Mike Tyson on the Road to Greatness and Second Chance

Podcast / Fireside Chat
with Mike Tyson and Tony Robbins
June 2020

Steve Wozniak on Creating the First Apple Computer

Today, Apple is among the global leaders of any industry, including sports, media and entertainment with Apple Watch, health, fitness, gaming and, of course, the iPhone that has enabled a generation of apps, startups and technology disruption.

Co-founder Steve Wozniak shares the background of the first Apple Computer, how they got started, why it was priced at $666.66 and what actually happened in the Silicon Valley garage in Los Altos, California.

Steve Jobs | How a Dreamer Changed the World

Bloomberg's Game Changer series profiles Steve Jobs and his style of leadership, management and creative process.

Interviews include:

Steve Wozniak
John Scully
Michael Moritz
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Guy Kawasaki
Robert X.Cringely

(Bloomberg June 2014)

Zoom's Rise and Challenge During the Pandemic

Before the pandemic, most of the tech community and many large enterprise companies were familiar with our friends at Silicon Valley-based Zoom.

Now, everyone knows Zoom as the use expanded for everything virtual.

While most of the rise has been positive for Zoom, the attention has brought challenges of security and scale.

Hey from Basecamp | AMA with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

In case you haven't heard, Hey is the new email app from Basecamp launched a couple weeks ago causing a lot of buzz across tech, from taking on Google's Gmail to Microsoft's Outlook as well as challenging the business model of the app store.

No matter what type of startup you are working on, it's important to learn lessons how startup founders approach disruption of giants, product design and tackle problems with new solutions.

Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson sat down for this AMA and Q+A to discuss Hey.