Published in Inside PJC·May 17, 2021The PJC Notification Thesis: We Are Over-Notified And Something’s Gotta GiveNotifications are failing us. The last time I ordered lunch from Doordash, I was notified 3 times that my order was successful: once in the app, once in email, and once via text. Then I got another text when my order was picked up from the restaurant, and another when…Startup5 min readStartup5 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Apr 13, 2021Our First Investment In Edge AI — DeepliteMy number one investing thesis for 2021 is around AI at the edge. As machine learning proliferates, there are so many small devices that can benefit from ML functionality. …Startup2 min readStartup2 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Mar 30, 2021Customer Validation Examples: Attempting to Scale Customer Acquisition With 29 Marketing ExperimentsI originally wrote this post in 2012 on the Backupify blog. It has since been lost and my friend and colleague Rob Stevens managed to record it. Rob and I both think it’s a useful example of how to think about scaling marketing through the next phase of a startup…Marketing8 min readMarketing8 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Mar 4, 2021Building Startups On GPT-3When I first entered the workforce, every business had a server closet where it kept the computers that ran the applications used daily by employees to run the business. Cloud computing changed that, and it is much less common now. …NLP3 min readNLP3 min read
Dec 7, 2020Why I Never Tell My Daughter She Is SmartBefore you trash everything I write in this, please read the whole thing so you don’t miss the nuance… When I ran my first company I used to give these mini talks at our all-hands meetings every month. The goal was to expose the team to a new idea or…Psychology6 min readPsychology6 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Nov 18, 2020Introducing PJC Uncovered Season 2: The Corporate Development SeasonListen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify When I sold my first company, I was deeply intrigued by the corporate development role at the acquirer. How do they decide what to buy? How do they decide what to pay? How do they decide when to walk away? If you are an entrepreneur, understanding the M&A process is…Startup2 min readStartup2 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Oct 21, 2020How To Think About TAMOne of the things that VCs will tell you is that we love big markets, and the way we measure market size is usually called TAM, which stands for Total Addressable Market. I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs get tripped up on this in pitch meetings, that I want to lay…Venture Capital5 min readVenture Capital5 min read
Oct 6, 2020Why Republicans Should Vote For Joe Biden — He Has More Republican Values Than Trump.“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” — Ronald Reagan “What we do now echoes in eternity” — Marcus Aurelius I hate…Trump18 min readTrump18 min read
Sep 28, 2020If Trump Loses In a Landslide, Who Runs The Republican Party?Up until recently, it was assumed the Republicans would hold the Senate even if Trump lost the White House. The latest polls call that into question. …Trump4 min readTrump4 min read
Published in Inside PJC·Sep 16, 2020Why The Unity IPO Is Good For AI StartupsWhen you want to train a machine learning model to discriminate between pictures of dogs and cats, you can show the model thousands of examples per minute because it’s all digital. If you want to train a robotic arm, using a machine learning model, to set a table, you can’t…Unity 3 D2 min readUnity 3 D2 min read
