The NFX Podcast

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

"Superpowers cut both ways. They may spur meteoric growth, but without enough self-awareness, they can just as easily lead to a startup’s undoing." As a founder, it's important to be your startup’s biggest advocate, but it’s also important to create strong self-awareness and rise above your own ego. Listen as Pete Flint explains how to detect your own B.S. and allow your company to succeed. Pete is a general partner at NFX.

Read the full article here - https://www.nfx.com/post/reality-distortion-field/

All early-stage companies are in search of traction. It’s notable that the opposite of traction is distraction and top Founders have an inverse response to distraction. As the world around them gets more distracting, what they see is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break out from their competitors and win.

NFX partner James Currier talks with Nir Eyal, 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.

Nir walks us through his frameworks for product building, focus, traction, and building a culture centered around speed and growth. We’ve organized some of Nir’s insights from our podcast conversation for the benefit of focused Founders everywhere. Visit nirandfar.com for more.

On this episode of the NFX Podcast we have one of the most generative people in Silicon Valley, Chris Anderson. He was famously Editor in Chief at Wired for over a decade during an insanely influential time in tech. He also is an author of The Long Tail, Free, and Makers.

Chris has since founded 3DR, an American company headquartered in Berkeley, California that makes enterprise drone software for construction, engineering, and mining firms, along with government agencies.

In this episode, we cover:
- How regulations need to catch up with technology
- What is Simulation
- Why it’s the Golden Age of AI/Simulation
- Virtual Reality for Robots
- We’re transitioning to an abundance of data, are we using it right?
- & different use cases for simulation

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

"The 20s will see San Francisco face down some really big problems, and we’ll see if the city makes it out better or worse. But the wealth of social capital they’ve compounded will remain an undeniable asset to the tech community for a long time. "

This is the audio version of Alex Danco's popular essay on Social Capital in Silicon Valley. Alex is currently head of Shopify Money and was a previous associate at Social Capital.

Read the full article here - https://alexdanco.com/2020/01/23/social-capital-in-silicon-valley/

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

The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’.

"When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws. But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower."

Read the full memo here - https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

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

"The broad networks are everything to everyone, the niche ones are something special to a certain group."

This is the audio version of Greg Isenberg's popular essay on The Unbundling of Reddit. Greg is a co-founder of Late Checkout, venture partner at Indicator Fund, and Growth advisor at TikTok. Previously he was the head of product strategy at WeWork and Founder of Islands & 5by.

Read the full article here - https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-reddit

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

A Must Listen for all Founders - audio version of Eugene Wei’s hugely popular essay on the role of status in product development. Eugene was a product leader at Amazon, Hulu, Flipboard, and Oculus.

Read the full article here - https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

NFX partner James Currier talks with Selina Tobaccowala - co-founder of Evite, CTO and President of SurveyMonkey, and cofounder of the fitness app Gixo. It’s rare to get a candid view into what happens behind the scenes of companies that break out from the pack - and the hard decisions that lead to their success. In this episode, James and Selina talk about:

- Knowing when and how to sell your company
- The difference between selling Evite vs. selling Gixo
- Why to build strategic relationships as early as possible
- How to upfront the hard conversations
- How to build and measure product virality
- & more great advice for early-stage Founders

Read the full essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/good-vs-great-companies/

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

This essay was written and published by James Currier, General Partner at NFX. Read the full article here:

https://www.nfx.com/post/psychology-winning-founders-downturns/

NFX partner James Currier talks with professor Tom Eisenmann about why, exactly, over 75% of startups fail. Tom has been teaching entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School for more than a decade and has uncovered patterns of startup failure that we want every Founder to hear -- so you can avoid making these same mistakes yourself.