The NFX Podcast

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

Netflix’s memo on company culture on their employee website is geared toward those looking to join the company. Netflix's leadership outlines its values, company structure, communication style, and overall mission as a company and is widely regarded as a center of excellence with a strong culture in the tech industry.

Read the full memo here - https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

Cyan Banister is an early stage investor in Uber, Niantic, SpaceX, many others. She’s a partner at Long Journey Ventures and spends most of her time dreaming about what the future could look like. In this NFX conversation with James Currier, they talk about the opportunities of AR, VR and the future of human connection. 

Highlights from the conversation:

- Allow yourself to become obsessed with something. Really obsess about the product and dream about what it can become.
- Invest in things that will become part of your life. 
- Futurism is more than being intellectual, it’s more about daydreaming, it’s about how you feel and how you live.
- Silicon Valley is getting too serious. Where did the hacker mentality go? AR, and crypto are real frontier categories where there is still bright eyedness of “we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
- Endless curiosity helps identify people who are solving problems that are actually real problems.
- Be curious about how systems work. Analyze businesses and what makes them special. Try to figure out the economics of everything, anything.
- Sometimes it makes sense to paint inside the lines, but sometimes you really have to paint outside the lines.

Regarding the future of VR: There's no reason why you and I, if we want to hang out, that we have maybe 8 options… go to dinner, have a phone call, see a movie, maybe go for a walk… but why aren't there thousands of options? There should be so many, that's why Founders need to think bigger.

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 on Aug 5, 2016 by Margaret Gould Stewart, VP of Product Design at Facebook. Read the full article on Medium here:

https://medium.com/newco/how-a-single-conversation-with-my-boss-changed-my-view-on-delegation-and-failure-ae5376451c8d

"Mobility as a service" is the idea of packaging together one person's entire portfolio of transportation options. Even if it’s a different mode of transportation for the first mile, the bulk of the journey, and for the last mile. Car, ferry, ride share, bike, scooter, whatever - all serviceable in the same app. This is the future that Nir Erz, CEO at Moovit, can see clearly, and why Intel bought Moovit for $900M.

NFX partner Gigi Levy-Weiss sits down in Israel with Nir to discuss how Moovit beat Google Maps in data, why KPIs are pure gold, how to think globally when launching locally, and what the future of transportation looks like.

Highlights from the conversation:

1. Building data and data network effects

How to leverage your user base to build a volunteer workforce of data (the Wikipedia volunteer model) >> pseudo-automatic data capture
Two tricks for launching in new markets: acknowledge to users that the app is not complete, and directly ask them for their help
Why data is central to Moovit's product value (an important factor discussed in our essay on data network effects)
How to build a verticalized data moat (public transit data) that allows you to compete and beat a big horizontal incumbent (aka Google Maps)

2. The Importance of KPIs - "KPIs are gold"

Knowing what the right industry benchmarks are can be extremely valuable for your company. The right KPIs can save you from wasting time and effort.
Why Founders should set clear success metrics for their company or quit
"Guys, those are my best years and I'm not gonna waste my best years on a company that is not going to take off. So my only request to you is -- let's set measurable goals for every stage of the company. If we’re not going to hit those goals, I’m not going to stick around."

3. The future of transport and mobility
The future of transport is multimodal
Cities, in particular, will be multimodal, with different transportation for the first mile, the bulk of the journey, and the last mile.
People will want one seamless solution that allows them to pay for various modes of transport.
"Mobility as a service" is the idea of packaging one person's entire portfolio of transport options at one access point / platform

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 on Oct 6, 2017 by Max Mullen, Co-Founder of Instacart. Read the full article on Medium here:

https://medium.com/the-product-co-op/how-to-run-a-product-brainstorm-666a90a0986d

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 on Oct 2, 2018 by Julie Zhuo, Former VP Product Design at Facebook & Co-Founder of Inspirit. Read the full article on Medium here:

https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/how-to-be-strategic-f6630a44f86b

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 on May 12, 2000 by Joel Spolsky, Co-Founder of Trello & Stack Overflow. Read the full article here:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/

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 on Oct 16, 2017 by Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder & CTO of HubSpot. Read the full article on Medium here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aligning-vectors-how-optimize-impact-dharmesh-shah/?trackingId=AyxTmFVyQ7iCFm6409fYeA%3D%3D

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 Elizabeth Yin, Co-Founder & General Partner at Hustle Fund. Read the full article here:

https://elizabethyin.com/2019/05/17/15-annoying-things-that-vcs-say-or-ask-and-how-to-think-about-them/

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 on Sep 9, 2019 by Scott Belsky, Founder of Behance. Read the full article on Medium here:

https://marker.medium.com/creativity-is-the-new-productivity-d287d6ad7533