Published inInside 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 inInside 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 inInside 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 inInside 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
Published inInside PJC·Aug 13, 2020Robotic Automation For Farming: Our Investment In Root AII first met Josh and Ryan from Root AI back in 2018 when they were getting started with Root AI, and was impressed with their backgrounds and experience. But at the time, I knew nothing about indoor farming. I’ve been very interested in robots for some time now because, with…Robotics2 min readRobotics2 min read
Published inInside PJC·Jul 24, 2020A Different Approach To Performance ReviewsI’ve always hated highly structured performance reviews. They feel forced and artificial, and I often feel like some of the questions don’t really apply. While I understand the need to make performance reviews standardized for legal reasons, so you can feel like you judge everyone fairly and consistently, I think…Performance Reviews5 min readPerformance Reviews5 min read
Published inInside PJC·Jun 20, 2020The Tetris Opportunity For Services As Software CompaniesA while back I wrote a piece on the Services-As-Software business model for AI, where you take a workflow that is largely human today, keep the same user interface, but replace the rest of the workflow with automation. …Services As Software4 min readServices As Software4 min read
Published inInside PJC·Jun 2, 2020The PJC Voice ThesisFor about a year, I’ve been looking at the voice space. I have no idea if voice will become a ubiquitous user interface, but, it’s a good bet as in investor to figure out IF that happens, what kinds of things will be valuable. The best overview I’ve read so…Startup3 min readStartup3 min read
