Jason Lemkin

What I often have to be much more on the lookout for is the grandiosity piece.

Reminds me of a Jason Lemkin tweet, which I think it was during COVID where he said, in San Francisco, I'm unhappy, but productive.

Outside of San Francisco, I'm happier, but less productive.

Therefore, I will stay in San Francisco.

You know if you did that you'd actually be able to accelerate the sales process.

What I want to share with you and I've learned from a lot of incredible folks like Jason Lemkin at Sastr and the folks at HubSpot and many others in the SaaS pricing world, Why in the early days specifically it might make sense to not show your pricing so that you have more flexibility, more opportunities to learn and then finally design your packages to something that's repeatable, scalable once that's figured out.

Now I learned this by accident when I was building my company Spheric Technologies.

I was 24 when I started.

And one of the, one of the venues I love to, kind of bring some of those big annual insights to is Sastr.

My friend Jason Lemkin puts that thing on.

He asked me pretty like every other year to go and keynote it.

And I've always done different things from like the best plastic practices of product led growth to like common pitfalls in SaaS.

Whereas I think in the past, you would probably put like a negative 80% on that number.

Well, Jason Lemkin, who I do a lot of shows with every week, we do the weekly show and he's like 100 60 you'll be diluted is that not true in your i don't think the best companies

now like not every company goes up and to the right and never sort of runs into bumps i think the macro when you get big can cause some bumps in valuation you're seeing it right now in some of the biggest labs going out and trying to raise rounds and sort of re re-evaluating the price that they're raising at if you go back in history Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Ramp, which I think is one of the best modern companies ever, they've all had a bump, a down round.

And so I don't think it's always just up and to the right, but I think in this specific sort of three-year window, there is a lot of continued momentum in terms of valuations.

today's world.

But looking back, you know, Jason Lemkin, the SASTR guy, the big SASTR conference in Silicon Valley, big following, he asked founders, okay, VC-funded founders, now that starting your next company, you're doing it again, would you raise more money? Would you raise the same money? Would you raise less? Would you raise none? 70% of VC funded former founders said I would raise none, 45%, almost half.

And then, you know, the other 30 something percent said, you know, I'd raise a lot less.

So it's pretty common, right? You know, we get moving and then you kind of get this thing rolling and you kind of have to keep raising to keep the engine going.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

This is my favorite show of the week, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the news that matters.

And let's be clear.

There is one story that matters more than any other this week.

And why would I waste my time with anything that's 10 to 12 years to IPO? But, you know, it's just one deal in the fund, another two years to distribute, you know, versus five

years.

No, I won't ask you, Jason.

I mean, I think that, you know, I saw a tweet that basically said the same thing.