Making Connections #5: From 10 to 100
As you can tell from the last newsletter, I’m a strong believer in the benefits of building community.
Working with startups is so enjoyable because it’s positive-sum. Everyone is trying to create something from nothing, and if we all help each other, everyone can succeed.
Which is why I’m so excited about the new community we’re launching at AirTree, 10 to 100.
Where On Deck is designed to help build new companies, 10 to 100 will cater to founders of companies between 10 and 100 employees, who have found early product-market fit and now face a new set of challenges.
The goal is to create an environment for small groups of founders to share their biggest challenges and hear advice from peers who have been there before.
Each event will have a theme, and we'll bring in leading experts from across the country to guide conversation and answer questions.
We held our first event last week, a dinner for 10 founders on the topic People & Culture led by Andrew Donald, AirTree's internal recruiter, and Megan Bromley, the Head of Employee Experience at Hotels Combined, Campaign Monitor and Red Balloon.
We had founders from within the AirTree portfolio and outside it, venture-backed and bootstrapped, from fintech to social media, and from 9 employees to 103 (we cheated a bit).
Our next event will cover storytelling, led by Kate Mason of Hedgehog + Fox, who previously led Comms at Medium and Khan Academy.
As well as targeting the areas most founders face when scaling (hiring, pricing, building teams, growth, personal tax planning etc) we'll also be putting together sector-focussed dinners in areas like fintech and healthcare.
If you'd like to apply to join the community, click here
Books
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
This is a meandering journey through the life of a surfer who travels the world in search of the perfect wave. From surfing Honolua Bay on acid, to teaching in South Africa during apartheid, William Finnegan tells stories of people, places and politics through the experience of the waves he surfed in the process. The prose is gorgeous, and the author’s drawl is the perfect accompaniment if you choose the audiobook.
“Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.”
Online Writing
“The intelligence coup of the century”
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. Little did they know it was secretly owned by the US and German intelligence agencies.
Crisis Investing: How to maximize returns during market panics
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. The opposite is true in markets, according to this in-depth analysis of market crises from Verdad Cap. Standard models for predicting returns in equity markets are 8x as effective during recessions as during market expansions.
40 powerful concepts for understanding the world
A brilliant tweetstorm from Gurwinder describing some more mental models to pretend you’ll remember in your everyday life.
Podcasts
Two VC podcasts this week - Doug Leone from Sequoia and Mike Maples Jr from Floodgate.
Their investment theses contradict each other on the face of it — Doug talks about investing in the present and Mike prefers investing in the future, but they both seem to be using opposing descriptions for the same idea - investing in the adjacent possible. In the adjacent possible you probably don’t need technological innovation for the company to be successful, but you do need technological adoption.
For more on how the adjacent possible propels innovation, I highly recommend Steven Johnson’s Where Ideas Come From
Let’s Connect
Not sure if you heard but there’s a bad case of the flu going around, so dinners are off for the foreseeable future.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the newsletter though, as always.