Ada Chen Rekhi

On stage, @sachinrekhi breaks down 15 essential skills for #AI prototyping, mapped Apprentice, Journeyman and Master. Why it matters: each step shortens time-to-rung and turns demos into durable workflows. #SFTechWeek

I'm back to writing again! Facing my fears and trying a new look on Substack. My latest post: adachenrekhi.substack.com/p/conquering-m…

@noahkagan Congrats Noah and family! Excited for this next chapter. @sachinrekhi and I loved that book, too- it prompted a ton of conversations on parent vs child centered lifestyle. Also, we had our kid attempt the yogurt cake too! 😂

It’s been over a month since I published a piece of content on the internet… What happened? Where did I go? The short answer: I had a baby 👶 The long answer: I’ve been pausing to reflect on how I can better live in alignment with what feels right (right now). Let me explain… Something I’ve been learning from the book Bringing up Bebe (highly recommend for any new parents out there) is the power of The Pause. The Pause is when you take a moment before you go check on your sleeping baby who started crying. If you always immediately get your baby without pausing, they never learn to comfort themselves and fall back asleep. And you won’t get good sleep since your kid is up crying. Similarly, I’m taking a pause on different areas of my life: • I’m simplifying my finances (to mostly cash & index funds plus selling all my real estate) • Reducing (not stopping) my day-to-day involvement with AppSumo • Pausing most of my social media content creation • And pausing all interviews for 2024 If you never take a pause it’s easy to keep doing the things that aren’t serving you anymore. My life today is… 1. Wake up early to help my wife take care of the baby 2. Take a Spanish class from Baselang for 1 hour 3. Grill some food 4. Spend 2 hours studying fantasy football & chess 5. And then go cycling That’s my entire day… and it’s satisfying. This pause isn’t forever. But for now, my focus is on figuring out what feels right for my next phase of life. So many people work towards something and when they get there, they just keep on working. It’s like finishing a marathon and immediately starting another one without pausing to recharge, celebrate, and think about what you really want next. (A great book on this is Awareness by Anthony Demello. H/t Tim Ferriss). As I reflect on my life in decades, it creates beautiful buckets of how life changes: • My 20s (hustle) were all about just doing anything and everything to get rich. I felt like I was always lacking something. • My 30s (stable) were accepting parts of life I liked, doubling down on what’s working and staying consistent. • My 40s (simplify) are simplifying the distractions, and focusing on the few things that matter. • My 50s (enjoy) - if I had to guess it would just be accepting myself, embracing who I am fully with much less apologies or shame around them. Might do this in my 40s! :) Success varies depending on where you’re at in life. What you want can (and frankly should) change. If I’m honest, I’ve had to drag myself to record a small clip for our latest YouTube video. And the idea of interviewing more people just to have more content is not appealing. I feel guilty because I often preach (and truly believe) that success comes through consistency. But at some point, we need to get off the hamster wheel, and reflect which wheel we want to be running on. If you spend so much time getting rich but never enjoy being rich - are you even rich? And let me be clear: “Rich” doesn’t just mean having lots of money. It means living the life YOU want. Sometimes I’ve created YouTube videos cause I think there’s something lacking in me and the only answer is by asking these super-wealthy people. But the real answer is to get clear about how I want to live, create work that I enjoy, and live that life. Actually living my life in alignment is the best way to inspire others on how to live. When I get up at 3 am to check the NFL Fantasy Football waiver wire…That’s me living my life. Even though no one external cares, and there’s barely any money on the line –I LOVE getting to do it. It’s an amazing game that I can play endlessly. That is the ideal work. A game you love to keep playing. So how am I running Appsumo while taking a pause? I'm still involved, but have made a few changes: 1. Removing Slack. Trust the team you’ve hired to run the business. 2. Monthly Business Review (MBR). Get monthly business reports discussing how the company is doing against the budget. 3. 1-Pager Company Strategy. Clarify the outcomes and empower your team to make the best choices to get there. 4. Hiring badass people. Shoutout to Ilona Abramova, Seann Stubbs, Anna Notario, Chad Boyda, and other leaders helping run AppSumo. As a content creator - the external validation of being seen and worthy is addicting. It’s easy to chase more views, more followers, more fame. But recently I’ve been reflecting on how I can be content with just myself. What if no one knew what I was doing, would I still be happy? There’s nothing wrong with wanting attention or enjoying the game of making popular content. That’s why it’s a pause and not forever. As ambitious, driven, and motivated people it’s hard to escape the feeling of guilt that things “should” be a certain way. But it’s that exact internal conflict that creates the uneasy tension that doesn’t feel right. If you fully listened to yourself what would your life look like? Excited for you, Noah “Le Pause” Kagan

@GarrettLord Fantastic pics! Congrats!!

Mrs. Lord

@_buames Oh man, I am so sorry to hear that. So good to hear that the treatment has stabilized your cancer and hope it continues to improve!

Today my oncologist said that if chemo hadn’t worked I would have died within 2 months of being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Its been 8 months, my cancer is stable, and treatment continues to work. If you don’t trust modern medicine you’re an idiot.

THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES (FUNDRAISING EDITION) as y'all know, A16Z is running a startup accelerator focused on the intersection of TECH x GAMES called SPEEDRUN and during/after Demo Day I'm always coaching founders on their fundraising. (Aside: we’re investing $30M over the next 43 days, $750k per co - apply here: sr.a16z.com) Anyway, let’s get started. Here are some common lies we tell ourselves: - We're not fundraising - Our pitches went great, the investors all love us - Our product is the best in the market. Here's a 2x2 - Retention is fine, just need more notifications - Yes our CAC is high, but it'll decrease when we scale - Our TAM is huge huge, only need 1% to be successful - Execution is our defensibility, and we execute better than anyone - We hire the best people, full stop - Our sales cycle long but deals will close soon - Our partnerships will drive massive growth - We have no direct competitors, blue ocean market - We don't need more runway, we're raising for offensive reasons - Once we add in XYZ feature, our traction is going to inflect - We a clear path to profitability, but burning cash to grow - ... and many hundreds more variations :) Haha I poke fun at this because naturally founders (including myself, as a former founder!) are an optimistic bunch. And to build a new product against all odds requires a little bit of self deception in addition to the reality distortion field that pulls in both employees as well as investors and other folks. So, in a way, this is meant to be expected, and in fact, it might even be a requirement in order to thrive. However, it's also true, that if a founder is not able to properly assess how their fundraising going, nor which messages are resonating with investors, then they may find themselves with a busted round. many of the lies that we end up telling ourselves start from a place of goodness, but when the reality distortion field collides with reality, then reality usually wins. As a result, I want to talk about some of these lies, and how to assess truth versus fiction. ALL OUR PITCHES ARE AMAZING Let’s start with good/bad pitch meetings with investors. There’s a saying- You'll never meet a sales person who had a bad sales meeting and you'll never meet a founder who has had a bad pitch. I observe this to be empirically true. The honest truth is that it's actually very hard to tell if a pitch went well or not. Often the meetings only last for 30 minutes, there's a group of investors who ask a few questions and are mostly furiously taking notes (or rudely doing emails), and at the end, they excitedly tell you that they will follow up very soon. You have to ignore what they say, and instead watch what they do. If they reach out immediately and try to schedule a second meeting, including more people in the firm, then that's a good sign. If they immediately follow up and ask for data or have other questions, then that’s pretty good. but the majority of interactions will conclude with a nebulous next step, and potentially no further meetings. And sometimes the associate you pitched in the first meeting doesn’t like it enough to pull in senior partners into the next meeting. Sometimes it’s them, not you. Some people deal with the potential for rejection by simply saying that they are not fundraising. This has become a very popular stance among founders, almost to the point where they believe it themselves. Of course, almost all startups are fundraising at all times, they may just not be able to get the valuation and round that they want, and as a result, they will take meetings, but without a specific goal in mind. There's a hope that maybe an investor will pull them into a process right away. I often find this to be a negative outcome, because it leads to a very disorganized fundraising process where one firm is may be ahead of everybody else, but the data room and other meetings are thrown together haphazardly. MY PRODUCT IS AMAZING The products that founders build often become a sort of extended avatar of themselves. If their product is complimented, they feel great. If there are problems with it, they feel a deep personal pain. As a result, in order to manage the ups and downs of product development, it is often easier to lie to yourself, and imagine that things are going better than they really are. Otherwise it can get depressing. As an example, it's often argued that “my product is the best, just look at our logo on the top right of this 2x2.” And our retention is great, but it's going to be even better once we add all these notifications and viral hooks. The challenge with this view is that usually a brand new startup is actually not going to have the best product in the market — it’s just too new to say that. Instead of competing with more established products based on the best features, I advocate that founders talk about there, asymmetric abilities. Perhaps it's better suited for a premium audience, or perhaps it incorporates some cutting edge, technology or platform that most companies are not focused on (i.e., web3 or VR/AR). Often times the features that a new product offers are simply not what customers really understand to be better. (Reference Marc Pincus’s proven/better/new framework). Founders say that their products are better, but instead maybe it’s enough to just be different? And instead of attacking via the front door, to go through a side door in the market, one that feels too small to start. And most retention is not great, by definition, and it's often very very hard to change. So much of retention/engagement is just built on the nature of the product. Travel products are low frequency because people don’t travel much. A used car marketplace is not going to be used more than once a year. If you build a SaaS product that’s not part of the daily workflow, your prosumer usage at work will suck. And although you could change that by small bits via iteration, I’ve never seen a team A/B test itself from non-PMF to PMF. Rather than lying to yourself with optimism, I would always advocate for bigger bets. And to move on quickly when things aren’t working. OUR MARKETING IS AMAZING The sad truth of marketing is that everything is always getting worse. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs encapsulates the forever war between marketers at different companies, who all converge to the same channels with the same messaging and eventually use up the channel. That’s why it’s so hard to grow with paid marketing, and SEO, and all these long-running, mature channels. Of course, as founders, how else do you tell the story of growth? I think it has to ultimately revolve around the fact that — first, you have to be so efficient in your growth channels that even as they degrade, you have a margin of safety. A 10:1 LTV/CAC with mostly organic traffic is a lot easier to start from than if you are already 2:1 and you want to increase your spend 10X. Or you have to embrace the magic of direct sales teams — not everything can just be product led. Sometimes you need lead bullets, not a silver bullet. When it comes to sales and marketing, obviously we want to all believe that the entire pipeline will convert. And that the deals you strike with stakeholders are the ones that their product teams will integrate, thus giving you a successful partnership. But what I often see is the opposite — the corp dev teams and corp VC arms of large companies strike deals, then struggle to actually execute it. Months turn into years. Nothing happens. If you lie to yourself and say a particular deal will save you, you’re so dependent on them. And your investors will have questions too. Better to have a strategy that gives you control of your destiny — and lets you acquire customers yourself. THE TRUTHS WE TELL OURSELVES All of this is to say, there is a fine line between pitching to others and lying to yourself. When you pitch, you are telling “the most attractive version of the truth” (as my colleagues often say). And that is a necessity. When you lie to yourself and it starts to color your day-to-day decisions, it often leads to subpar decisions that ultimately lead your startup off the golden path. And startups are hard enough as it is, without losing the ability to seek the truth. Thus, let's all maintain the contradiction -- of pitching hard and selling, but also being truth seeking when it comes to your own assessment. Maybe that investor meeting didn't go well, because they laughed at all our jokes and said great things, but 3 days later there hasn't been a followup. Maybe our retention numbers are actually shit, and we need to reset. Or maybe we should stop wasting time with these partnership people at BigCo and take control of our destiny. That might just be the truths we need. As I mentioned, I give advice on all this — and more — via the A16Z SPEEDRUN program we’re running later this year. We’re investing in preseed/seed startups at the intersection of TECH x GAMES, and happy to tell you more if you want to apply! sr.a16z.com

@sachinrekhi @thejustinwelsh @hnshah And Huberman-gate too 😂 but no good gossip in the royal family or actual celebs

So @adachen just told me that she finds it hilarious that every day I detail to her the daily gossip. But not what the Kardashians or Tay Tay are up to, but instead @thejustinwelsh’s latest LinkedIn analytics technique, @hnshah’s new podcast, and Reddit’s post IPO performance 😂

"There is so much more to life than just work." I honestly didn't really believe that until my mid-30s. Once I left corporate America behind I finally had the space to really appreciate that this was actually true. Since then, one of the best books I've read is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. The exercise I love the most from the book asks you to make a list of the activities you do in each of these 4 categories of life and rate how satisfied you are with them. 1️⃣ Work - Not just what you’re paid to do, but also other duties you take on such as second jobs, consulting, advising, volunteering, home-making. 2️⃣ Play - Any activity that brings joy just for the sake of doing it, which can include organized activities or productive endeavors so long as they’re done for fun and not merit. 3️⃣ Love -  The health of your primary relationships, children, pets, community, or anything else tied to affection. 4️⃣ Health - Not just physical health, but an engaged mind and satisfied spirit. You can then do a gap analysis of where you are currently at and where you aspire to be to figure out how you might move the needle on each category. I've been so inspired by this framework that I now categorize my annual resolutions across the same 4 dimensions to ensure I'm being thoughtful about each of them. To learn more about this framework, I encourage you to read @adachen's fantastic summary of the Designing Your Life book adachen.com/finding-meanin…

@sachinrekhi Thanks for sharing! Still remember my surprise the first time you did this exercise and how much I learned about your approach to life

Want to know what the most important tool has been for optimizing my own career? A simple 10 minute values exercise. It led me to turn down lucrative product executive roles which optimized for traditional signals of career success in favor of continually trying my hand at early-stage startups that fully aligned with my own values. I'd encourage you to check out this podcast where @adachen talks at length about this values exercise with @lennysan. YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=N64vIY… Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/28j08T… Are you ready to do the values exercise yourself? You'll find it here: adachen.com/build-your-inn…

@alischwanke @FerraroOnAir Weirdly true that writing on paper feels more effective to me. It’s the good old fashioned dead tree method

@FerraroOnAir @adachen oooo yes, we shall be fast friends

I got a new notebook and colored sketch pens and that weirdly has boosted my productivity. Ok not weirdly, I like color coded tasks. Yes, that's me.

@Raadmobrem @nikitabier @useintro Love this! You guys just keep innovating, can't wait to turn it on 🔥

I didn’t want to share until @nikitabier did, but this is the power of @useintro. You could take months & years to **maybe** figure out your business or you can book/subscribe to someone who’s done it before successfully through Intro, and 10x your speed to success.

@5le @SurveyMonkey @Quora I consider you my go-to expert for all things SEO and growth. At @SurveyMonkey, you were always one of the mvps. So excited to see you on @useintro!

Every week I get asked for my “cheat codes” for building billion-dollar SEO strategies. As the author of product-led SEO and creator of growth strategies for giants like @SurveyMonkey and @Quora , people expect me to have secrets. I don’t have secrets. But I do have a process - and it works...

Big news! ✨ Starting today, I'm available on @useintro to give personalized executive coaching to founders and CEOs. Need someone to act as a sounding board on an issue you’re working through? Keep reading ⬇️

What I’m listening to today on my morning run 👇

@5le thanks @5le - the feeling is mutual!

Ada is the person I rely on to help me think through any tough decisions. Now you can too!

@thedanielmazur @useintro thank you!!

@adachen @useintro So exciting! I can’t wait to hear about all of the folks you will be able to help now.

Honored to be on Intro alongside world-class experts like @davekashen, @andrewchen & @mejoff. Want to hop on a 15-min call this week? Book me here: intro.co/AdaChenRekhi

Schedule a call for advice on: ✔️ Scaling teams from 0 to 100+ of people ✔️ Creating alignment between functions ✔️ Entrepreneurship / scaling yourself ✔️ Growth for SaaS business ✔️ Share lessons from other successful founders ✔️ 0 to 1 marketing ✔️ Co-founder issues ✔️ & more

That’s why I’m excited to open a few 1:1 slots on @useintro each week to be your personal coach & business advisor. To pay it forward, I’m starting with a limited-time introductory price.

These days I get countless requests from founders asking for advice on how to scale, but unfortunately, I’m not able to get back to everyone as I’d like to.

I help early-stage founders scale themselves alongside their teams, and I’m known for my straight-talk, no BS approach to helping others overcome obstacles.

As a 2x founder with an exit, I’ve been through the emotional roller coaster ride of fundraising, the trough of sorrows, and the joy of shipping products that connect with people.