Almost every tech startup that raised funding from venture capital funds periodically sends them an investor update to showcase the latest numbers, trends and just generally keep them aligned with the direction the company took. When I was working at Day One Ventures I’ve seen hundreds of these emails of various quality. Since my primary job right now is helping startups and VC firms communicate better internally and externally I'd love to give my own perspective on writing investor updates that help both you and your investors.

Investor updates allow to build a sense of connection and show your momentum to your current and prospective investors. As a founder you often want your current investors to participate in further funding rounds (right up until the point Andreessen Horowitz steps in and want the entire round for themselves). You also might be talking with some prospective investors who aren't ready to make the move yet. It's quite customary to include the warmest of these investors onto your mailing list as well. It's much easier to make an investment decision based on a few data points you were able to witness yourself and not just placed on a chart.

All the best updates I saw had these things in common:

1. Had a simple format
2. Came on a regular cadence
3. Pushed the ever-changing startup's narrative
4. Showed both absolute and relative numbers
5. Engaged the investors to keep them closer
6. Gave enough information without being too long

iOS 14 has finally added an option to set third-party browsers and email clients as the default. Unfortunately, iOS still imposes certain limitations on all of them. If you also count these browsers’ own shortfalls, for the best possible experience you might want to stay on Safari.

Somebody at your company fucked up. As a result, millions of rows from the customer database are roaming the Internet. It turned out the results you were promising to your customers aren’t that guaranteed. Maybe they lost their files in your cloud. Or maybe people learned that an executive in your trendy tech company is a sexist who would bee “too much” in 1850s. Now journalists are writing about pieces about your company questioning any credibility you might have.

Often the first reaction in such cases is to hire someone to kickstart what’s known as a crisis PR campaign. There are agencies marketing specifically on that term. Companies try to generate any kind of “positive” coverage to break the trend and ensure the catastrophe will soon be forgotten.

PARA is a methodology developed by Tiago Forte, a revered productivity expert.

When I first learned about it seemed way to specific for me to implement. But as I was changing various tools, recently I realized that what I build for myself in Workflowy very closely resembles it and decided to complete the move.

Here’s what I love about PARA:

Google was founded in 1998. Altavista was created 3 years earlier and although it was probably the most popular search engine for the English Internet it lost its relevance simply because Google was better at indexing the web and ranking the pages to extract the most relevant webpage for your query.

There's an infamous negging question that some investors ask:

"It's cool you folks are doing that but what if Google enters the space?".

That question is mostly useless because Google isn't really a single entity. It has myriads of products that you could compete with:

In the last couple of weeks I moved most of my work into Workflowy and I'm still amazed by what this app allows me to do. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to explain how it works and why it matters.

To quickly reiterate:

Workflowy is an outliner – a text editor that organizes information in a hierarchy, allowing users to control the level of detail and to reorganize according to the structure.

An outliner is a text editor that organizes information in a hierarchy, allowing users to control the level of detail and to reorganize according to the structure.

Recently John Gruber asked on Twitter if anyone is aware of a good native outliner app for Apple platforms. There are two extremely tragic aspects of the reactions:

• There isn’t any.

Superhuman is an app that has been reviewed and discussed from top to bottom, we’ve seen countless mentions of “Superhuman for X”, discussions of “consumerization of enterprise” and I saw Rahul Vohra’s Product-Market Fit score estimations in dozens of startups’ decks at this point.

But I always felt that one topic has remained largely in shadow: how Superhuman moved the Overton window of apps pricing.

Storytelling is largely underrated especially among techy people who often look down at it. I’ve met a lot of people, especially outside of the United States, who had a firm belief that all you need to do is to build something notable and your work would speak for itself.

Well, I’ve been a computer nerd with a degree in applied math and physics and I disagree. All my experience of running events, doing PR for companies, and working as a VC showed me the value of storytelling.

First of all, who am I to tell you about that? I work at Day One Ventures where we invest in startups and help them stand out by leading their communications. I’m on the investment team now but before venture capital, I was doing PR and secured publications on TechCrunch, VentureBeat, CNET and so on. I have a weird background coming from applied science to marketing and communication and then to VC, so I believe I have a more estranged approach that could be helpful to people unfamiliar with PR.

Courtesy of Absurd.design

What is PR

What are your thoughts on hired CEOs replacing the startups’ founders? This is an extremely sensitive topic but let’s face it — it happens. Sometimes the founders are way too technical and look for the business person to replace themselves, sometimes they leave for personal reasons, and sometimes the investors push them out (yikes, I know).

The interesting question is how do these changes affect the company’s performance. In the end, the founders are the people who came up with the original vision and the courage necessary to risk a more stable lifestyle in lieu of a bumpy startup road. Recently we had a discussion about this at Day One Ventures. If you want to talk about something like this the good idea is to rely on facts and not just your perception.

Data

I took the list of all US unicorn tech companies (courtesy of CB Insights) and collected the data necessary to answer a few questions about each of them: 1. Are they still run by their founders? 2. If they aren’t, when did the management change?