The NFX Podcast

Jeff Lawson, software developer turned CEO of Twilio, creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation.

General Partner at NFX Pete Flint talks with Jeff about his new book, his Twilio Founder Journey, running a public company through a recession, decision frameworks, and much more. Jeff's new book is released on Tuesday, January 12th and discusses how to use the creativity of code to solve business problems.

Developers are the creative workforce who can solve major business problems and create hit products for customers — not just grind through rote tasks. The landscape has shifted from the classic build vs. buy question to one of build vs. die. Companies have to get this right to survive. But how do they make this transition?

Read more about Jeff's book here - https://www.askyourdeveloper.com/
Follow Jeff on Twitter here - https://twitter.com/jeffiel

Few people can see what Jed sees about the relationship between real estate and labor markets and the downstream effects of their recent untethering. And, ultimately, what this means for startup life after the pandemic.

Now, and in the years to come, Founders will need to design their startup teams in all-new ways. Today is the beginning of building a new playbook for startup life. NFX General Partner Pete Flint talks with Jed to uncover this unbundling, covering key shifts like:
- Unemployment Kickstarting Dislocation
- The Continued Unbundling Of Where You Live And Where You Work
- Commercial Real Estate, Reimagined
- The Transportation Spiral
- Cities Changing From Centers of Production to Destinations of Consumption
- & New Considerations For Where To Live

Jed is currently the Chief Economist at Indeed, the world’s largest online jobs site. Previously he was Chief Economist and VP of Analytics at Trulia, the online real estate site. Follow Jed on Twitter here - https://twitter.com/JedKolko

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

The following is a reenactment of an email conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram between the dates of March 20th and April 9th of 2012. They discuss concerns, how their pathways cross, and how the potential acquisition will benefit both companies in the long-run.

Mark Zuckerberg - "I'm glad we got a chance to talk yesterday. I appreciate the open style you have for working through these issues. It makes me want to work with you even more. I was thinking about our conversation some more and wanted to share a few more thoughts..."

Founded in January 2013, Lightricks is a company that develops video and image editing mobile apps, known particularly for its selfie-editing app, Facetune. Headquartered in Jerusalem, the firm has over 250 employees. As of 2019, its apps have been downloaded over 180 million times and have over 3 million paying subscribers.

Zeev Farbman co-founded Lightricks along with Nir Pochter, Yaron Inger, Amit Goldstein and Itai Tsiddon. In July of 2019, Lightricks announced that it has raised $135 million in Series C financing round at a $1 billion valuation bringing Lightricks’ total funding to $205 million to date. Farbman received his PhD from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Computer Science. In his spare time, he practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Today NFX General Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss talks with Zeev about growing a Billion Dollar Company as a ”top layer” on other platforms, company leadership & navigation, and product strategy. They also discuss the future of content, what's trending now, and the possibilities in the near future.

Erik Torenberg is an entrepreneur, investor, and most importantly a community builder. NFX General Partner James Currier connects with Erik on the intricacies of building online & offline communities, behavioral psychology of users, and useful tactics/frameworks for early-stage Founders to consider when building their company.

Erik is originally from New Jersey and studied economics at the University of Michigan. investments His portfolio includes Rappi, Scale, Nurx, Lattice, Omni, Long-Term Stock Exchange, Winnie, Carrot, Kite, Cover, and ~80 more. He is a son of Israeli and Colombian immigrants and has worked to invest in those ecosystems as well.

He was on the founding team of Product Hunt and hosts his podcast show, 'Venture Stories'. His latest venture outside of being Co-Founder & Partner at Village Global is called The On Deck Fellowship (ODF). The ODF is a 10-week virtual program where you'll have access to a network of 200+ talented founders from all over the world who are all in the early stages of working on their next company. Erik's love for community building and connecting humans is world-class and beneficial for Founders everywhere.

Founders rarely get to hear the inside story of building a massive marketplace business from idea to IPO. Today we analyze the core startup decisions you need to make in the early days about your market, product, pricing and customers — and how those early decisions define your roadmap for the next 10 years or more.

Today NFX General Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss sits down and has a conversation with Micha Kaufman, the Founder and CEO of Fiverr (FVRR). Fiverr’s stock price has soared since their 2019 IPO — posting an impressive 797% growth since last year — but this conversation makes evident that their DNA for success was set from day one.

Micha gives us access to the early days at Fiverr and what startup lessons he learned while leading one of the world’s biggest marketplaces, including:

When You’re Told The Idea Is Too Crazy To Work
A 3-Part Framework For Finding The Right Market
Fiverr’s Epiphany: Productizing Services
Reverse Your Storytelling In Order To Build The Best v1
Supply Generates Demand: The Fiverr Law of Business
Doing The Opposite Of What You’re Told For A Go-To-Market Strategy
Keeping “Startup Speed” Even As A Public Company
& more

This is a tremendous resource for early-stage Founders everywhere as they make key decisions that will set their startups into motion. Read the essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/fiverr-road-to-growth/

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

From the outside, it's hard to understand what's going on at Tesla. Here are 10 quick examples of advice centered around the Model 3 production bottleneck pulled from real internal emails sent by Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. Topics include:

- Always Start With The Good
- Challenge, Demand, But Always Offer Help
- Production only Moves as Fast as the Least Lucky
- Don’t Be 10% Better, Be 10x Better, Seriously
- Encourage Customers to Bring Out the Measuring Tape
- If Molehills Turn to Mountains, Follow the Money Train
- If You Can’t Explain it to A Five Year Old, You Don’t Understand it Well Enough
- It Must Be Ok For People To Talk Directly And Just Make The Right Thing Happen
- It Is Not Rude To Leave, It Is Rude To Make Someone Stay And Waste Their Time
- Hold Contractors to the Same Standards of Your Employees

"Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”

In this candid conversation with iconic tech thinker Kevin Kelly (founding Editor of Wired), we discuss inspirational and transformative advice for early-stage Founders reflecting on the work they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how it all adds up in the long term.

Kevin and NFX General Partner James Currier talk about:

“You want to work on something that nobody has a name for.” You don’t just want to be the best -- you want to be the only. This applies to the companies you start, the projects you tackle, as well as to how you live your life.
“It’s fine to focus on scaling a wall, but you need to make sure your ladder is leaning against the right wall.”
Transforming from short-term founder to long-term steward is a mental shift that many Founders need to start making.
“If you operate on a longer term perspective you have an advantage because everyone else is completely short sighted.”
Why Wired? What was the reason for it to exist?
We need to listen to the technology to see how people actually use it vs. how it was invented.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His most recent book is called The Inevitable, and is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is also founding editor of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. Every Sunday, he and the Cool Tools team mail out Recomendo, a free one-page list of 6 very brief recommendations of cool stuff.

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

"Becoming indistractable requires an understanding of why you lose focus and learning the skills to do as you say. This guide is for people who want to harness the power of focus, but don’t have a lot of time. The more we respond to external triggers, the more we train our brain in a neverending stimulus-response loop."

This is the audio version of Nir Eyal's focus guide, 'How To Make The Most Out Of Your Time And Your Life'. By reimagining a task, you can make anything more enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding because in our digital age, it's very difficult to “muster enough energy” to stay focused.

Nir is a former instructor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and author of the bestseller, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.” 2013 His latest book, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life,” 2019 is out now. Check out his website and content at - https://www.nirandfar.com/

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

'Thoughts on Flash' is an open letter published by Steve Jobs, Co-Founder and then-CEO of Apple Inc. on April 29, 2010. The letter criticized Adobe Systems' Flash platform and outlined reasons why the technology would not be allowed on the company's iOS hardware products, specifically iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Now it's available to listen to on The Founders' List.

Read the full memo here - https://www.nfx.com/post/founders-list-steve-jobs