Jon Brelig

how cool is this reflectorbital.com

Lesssgo

@theallinpod 💯. Plz now bring a little more discourse back to All In. You guys had it, and lost it.

David Friedberg: Charlie Kirk’s effectiveness made him a cultural threat to his opponents “He was too smart, too open, too honest, too willing to engage in discourse, too willing to debate.” “He was too effective in changing people's minds, and I think that's why he became such a cultural threat.” “It wasn't his controversy, it was his effectiveness.” “And it wasn't necessarily the things he said, because there are people out there who say far more controversial things than Charlie." "It's that he sounded sensible and he changed people's minds through his discourse.” “And as he changed people's minds, I think he became a real threat to the ideologies that he spoke up against.” “One of the things that we've seen is the power of going direct. He went to college campuses, but he also recorded it and put it on the internet, and millions of people saw it.” “And that new form of media, that new form of communication, where someone can actually have a town square, the internet, that they can stand out and speak their mind and be heard.” “There's no longer these filters and these controlling powers of influence that decide what we get to know and not know and what our opinions need to be.” “The media and the traditional kind of systems are being degraded.” “I think it's important to continue that.” “But since that time, I think it's been amazing to see the optimism, not just from one side, but from a lot of different people from different backgrounds standing up and saying discourse is so important and re-underwriting this American process.” “So I'm very sad, but I'm very hopeful that people take this as a sign of how important this discourse is.”

Can someone plz challenge the Lyft/Uber duopoly. Just paid $63 to get to airport. Driver got paid $18.

Huge congrats to @southpkcommons on Fund III! No better community for founders figuring it out from day zero

end-of-turn detection oddly very difficult problem to solve in conversational voice ai. Big props to the team at Daily for open sourcing this

full circle, the modem handshake is back!

@greenbergnation you're implying there's no political daylight between moderate and trump-right? 🤔

I keep telling everyone the San Francisco elected officials have NOT shifted moderate. Case in point:

SF is so back

Fascinating. Simple yet effective approach to help try and account for desirability-bias in political polling.

@DavidSacks Agh I remember when topics were surfaced on the pod, I could never predict how you each would respond. It embodied independent thought. Now, I already know what political rhetoric you’re going to spew before the question is asked. Bring the discourse back

Starting to wonder if you’ve blocked so many normal people that you don’t know why our pod is successful.

@michelletandler Keep with electoral college (+1 states rights) - though states are required to divvy up their electoral votes similar to NE and ME. Maintains the current system but puts every state in play.

If you could change one thing about the government what would it be?

Fascinating to hear Zuck talk this week at @southpkcommons about the early Facebook days as they were just waiting for a tech giant to eat their lunch and crush their nascent social network, but none of them could get it together. Classic innovator's dilemma.

No better way to finish the SPC-@Meta Llamathon, celebrate the release of new @AIatMeta Llama models, and dive into @finkd’s founder mindset than to host Mark Zuckerberg at SPC! Along with some special guests. 🦙🦙🦙

@HotshotWake Where was this taken from?

Colorado: The Alexander Mountain Fire has grown to 9,100 acres outside Loveland, in Larimer county. #cofire #cowx #wildfire The sheriffs office says at least two dozens structures have been damaged or destroyed by the fast moving fire. The hope is the fire will run into the Cameron Peak Fire scar and slow down. Southwest Area Incident Management Team 1 has assumed command of the fire and it’s 5% contained with 327 personnel. Thanks to the subscriber for sharing this view of the column.

@kevinslavelle @CycloneCowboys @ReedTimmerUSA Curious, where's that taken from?

@CycloneCowboys @ReedTimmerUSA Progression from this morning of the Alexander Mountain Fire to this evening including the fire near Lyons as well

Two wildfires are in progress in the Colorado Foothills and have forced evacuations of hundreds of homes! The southern fire is just cranking northeast of Lyons. These fires are fuels by hot/dry conditions and strong winds, as well as a very dry spring/summer after a wet 2023. Big problems in CO

@APompliano Market cap is misleading. Enterprise value of ~$240m (debt debt debt).

Buzzfeed is in a wild position: - Raised more than $500 million - 2022 revenue was ~ $430 million - Employee count is over 1,300 people Current market cap? Less than $50 million. Wild.

@lennysan @jakefuentes @Cascadeio Thanks @lennysan! Glad we can share these learnings and appreciate all the support throughout the entire Cascade journey.

Not enough stories get told about startups that don't make it. @jakefuentes and @brelig recently shared a bunch of hard-won and incredibly insightful lessons from their attempt at building @Cascadeio (a data logic and analysis tool). Some of my favorite takeaways: On taking on an entrenched incumbent: "The only major player that occupied our category was Alteryx, a $10B+ legacy incumbent. The Alteryx product is both extraordinarily old-school and massive: a Windows-only, desktop product that grew up in the 2000s and was far from modern. But we underestimated two things: the amount of product we would need to build to start repeatably winning, and how high switching costs would be for many of their customers. We didn’t have a clearly identifiable market force at our back, other than broad trends around collaboration and cloud-based solutions. Those trends helped enormously, but we needed more than that to overcome the hurdles we faced." "You’ll also notice a subtle flaw in our logic that later became clear: we had just defined our audience as whoever Alteryx’s customers are, and our strategy was now to get feature parity with the incumbent so that we could go head-to-head with them. What we lacked was a clear bead on customer pull: most of the end users we talked to said that they wanted the improvements we proposed, but answers got a lot fuzzier when we tried to figure out what they would pay or what it would take to switch. We thought that we just needed to find the segment of their customer base with the largest need for an upgrade." On GTM for a general-purpose tool: "We underestimated two things. First, the more use cases a product can tackle, but blunter the overall value proposition is. The sales and marketing motion for blunt products needs to be incredibly strong, probably stronger than most early-stage companies with founder-led motions can assemble. Each customer cares only about their use case(s), not all the rest of the things a product can do." On the value of "why now:" "We overestimated our 'why now'. Even with comps like Figma, we weren’t as clear as we should have been about why the world needed a cloud-based version of Alteryx now. We could have answered that question in a number of ways, but that would have forced us to examine larger market forces more closely, establish allies and try to ride a wave rather than swim the distance." On the importance of a focused ICP: "We allowed our ICP to fray, replaced by a focus on a competitor. In our fight to prove that we could win against Alteryx, we over-rotated on any customer that might be interested in switching or considering alternatives. While being responsive to customers sounds good, being responsive to any customer creates a slow death of a thousand cuts. In the pursuit of breakout traction, we were too responsive to any sign of that traction, which pulled us in a million different directions at once." On trapings of a second-time founder: "There is a long list of things reasons that repeat founders do well: prioritization is clearer, more scenarios are anticipated and gaining the trust of the team, customers and investors is all easier. In total, the company can move a lot faster with experienced leadership. We're incredibly grateful for a broad group of supporters rooting for us along the way, some of whom were customers or were instrumental in getting deals done. But we overlooked an important nuance: deals done on the back of personal relationship equity is not the same as market signal. Founders can sell almost anything, and we did. We took those early wins and strode forward, using our ample cash to try to build our way to breakout growth. No product-focused founder is immune from the instinct to build, but repeat founders especially are given the runway to indulge that instinct. We must be especially careful to see the market clearly." On building in the data and analytics market: "A big reason we sold our product that way because of precedent: BI and analytics tools have typically been sold without presupposing the specific analysis being produced. Companies from Looker, Tableau, Mode, Metabase and many others are sold as general-purpose data tooling, in contrast with products like Amplitude which are more use case-specific. The problem was that we were trying to sell a data tool to business teams. In fact (and I know this sounds obvious), data teams buy data tools, and business teams buy business solutions. We were selling data tooling to business teams. We knew we were breaking that rule, with the assumption that business teams needed to expand their own data capabilities. We knew that data teams did not feel the pain of the “analytics breadline” as much as business teams did, who had to wait weeks for report adjustments or ad-hoc analysis. For their part, business teams had far more context on what they wanted, and we thought that they would jump at the opportunity to take on some of that work themselves. We found a few prospects to back up the conclusion we had already come to." See thread for links to the full posts. Massive props to @jakefuentes and @brelig for taking the time to share these lessons, and for taking a shot at building something great.

@joshelman She’s putting on a superbowl every night. Wild.

Wow - to get into Taylor Swift at Levi’s Stadium on Stubhub: $1200 minimum for nosebleed seats $2200 minimum for seats in the bottom bowl. This is superstardom. I was just checking prices for a friend.

@kimsterv It’s a mess. Mine was canceled today, they put me on a sfo => den route on Sunday that had a 10 hour layover 🙄. If it happens just refresh United screen all day, one popped up and was able to change and get on a direct.

Are we going to make it out on our United flight tomorrow?