Essays for founders

It’s not obvious what drives them

We should take AI models seriously, which means taking their evaluation seriously

Capital deployment remains depressed, sitting about 50% below trend

Investors have lost faith in Series A as a sign of product-market fit. In other words, they expect more but believe less...

Measuring the state of the venture "business cycle"

Valuations are 60% too high relative to the volume of venture funding

It's Jay Powell's world. We're just living in it.

Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?

Private valuations substantially lag public tech valuations

Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think

Revenue surprises permanently shift the trajectory of SaaS companies

Hiring freezes matter more than layoffs

COVID put software companies on a permanently lower growth trajectory.

Exploring the vast "dark matter" of the software universe

Low monetization requires extraordinary traction, and vice versa.

A frothy funding environment means more competition for talent. Funding gets easier; hiring gets harder.

Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception

Preferred equity exists in a constant state of quantum superposition. It's neither equity nor debt, until it is.

ACV isn't as useful a concept as people think. We need a different SaaS monetization metric.

Companies don't catch up to their valuations; their valuations catch up to them.

In startup land, we talk way too much about relative growth. We'd do better to ground our thinking in absolute growth.

The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.

Why you shouldn’t filter for social media following or prior experience

Quantifying the billion dollar impact of developer inefficiency

Adding more cooks to the kitchen rarely helps

Developer productivity is falling. But it doesn't have to. The solution? The Developer Productivity Flywheel

The biggest challenges facing developer productivity startups today

Magic number is a bad metric. Sales and marketing drives much less revenue than this not-so-magical number implies

The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.

Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers

In enterprise software, averages are meaningless. Instead, focus on the tails.

What's top of mind for developer productivity leaders

We interviewed developer productivity leaders. Here's what they said.

Do college-educated developers earn more? Yes, but less than you might think

When to raise capital, what to expect from VCs, and the "new normal"

Working remote even just a few days per month leads to higher pay

Progress on narrowing pay gaps among software developers

Engineers are the basic economic unit of modern software development. The software production function depends critical...

A quick visit to the Red Sea

Venture capital is changing — for the better

Why SaaS revenue retention is a double-edge sword

Waitlists, registered users, and other cumulative measures better measure the size of your pride than the size of your b...

Understanding cohort performance is critical for modern, high-velocity businesses, especially those with subscription or...

Managing risk is hard work. In evaluating potential opportunities, leaders must consider both probability (the odds o...

Note: You can find this analysis updated for 2020 here . Dev fell in love with code at a young age. He graduated from ...

Einstein once (supposedly ) said: > Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe Of compound interes...