The NFX Podcast

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

In this article (published in 2014) Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin challenges the Bitcoin maximalist movement a few different ways. Bitcoin maximalists believe that all other digital currencies are inferior to Bitcoin. The idea that an environment of multiple competing cryptocurrencies is undesirable and that it is both righteous and inevitable that the Bitcoin currency comes to take a monopoly position in the cryptocurrency scene.

Maximalists argue that a single road—or a single cryptocurrency—will have more value because more people will have to use it.

Vitalik does a deep dive into the technicals of launching a protocol, the network effects that take place, and the incentive/psychological arguments that can be had against the maximalist movement.

Read the essay here - https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/20/bitcoin-maximalism-currency-platform-network-effects/

Over the past twenty years, tech entrepreneurs have created and captured enormous value by launching new marketplaces to the world.

Today NFX Partner James Currier talks with Professor Scott Duke Kominers, who has been teaching the course 'Making Markets' along with other classes at Harvard Business School. With over 80 academic papers published, he is in the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics, the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences & Applications, and a Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Scott's course helps students identify and capitalize on marketplace design opportunities. James and Scott discuss attributes that determine whether and how marketplaces create value in the world as well as common causes of marketplace failure. They then present frameworks for designing marketplaces in response and discusses tactics for building trust and liquidity when launching new marketplaces.

This is the ultimate course on marketplaces.

Read the NFX essay - https://www.nfx.com/post/scott-duke-kominers/

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

Everyone knows that KPIs are critical, but often Founders are not looking at KPIs from the right angle. As a General Partner at NFX, Gigi Levy-Weiss now asks three questions to every Founder he meets. Their responses speak volumes about their odds of success:

- Do you diligently track KPIs?
- What KPIs have you chosen to track?
- Have you set appropriate goals based on your KPIs?

Read the full NFX Essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/how-vcs-see-your-kpis/

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

When the economy eventually normalizes, demand for labor will recover, and work will recover, but the shifts in supply and demand will result in a new and sizable set of unmet market needs for job placement.

Online marketplaces will be a critical tool in getting people back to work quickly, efficiently, and at scale. They will also enable new ways for people to build the skills they need to succeed, and for them to work in an increasingly remote and distributed fashion.

Listen to Pete Flint's essay on the 4 trends in the next generation of online labor marketplaces, including greater complexity, improved experience, tech-enabled labor, and re-skilling and upskilling.

Read the full NFX essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/labor-marketplaces/

In the face of a global pandemic and a financial meltdown, Founders are confronted with a new reality. If you are running a startup today, this will likely be one of the most challenging climates you’ll ever face.

Launched in July 2012, Bizzabo is a SaaS All-in-One event success platform. They help organizers create successful events by empowering them to build amazing websites, sell tickets, grow communities, go mobile and maximize event experiences - using a beautiful, user-friendly platform. Despite Covid canceling all conferences and in-person events, Bizzabo was able to complete a funding round of $138 million.

NFX Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss talks with Bizzabo Co-Founder & CEO Eran Ben-Shusham about their strategy during COVID including customer acquisition, fundraising, and overall growth during the downturn. Eran shares his mindset as a company leader and how he and his team navigated the crisis to come out the other side ahead in hypergrowth mode.

Read the NFX article here - https://www.nfx.com/post/bizzabo

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

Fundraising is a learned skill – and VCs almost always have the upper hand because they deal with it all day, everyday. Over the years of founding, advising, and investing in companies, Gigi has learned that VCs are better at startup fundraising than entrepreneurs. In reality, knowing what to expect from VCs – the negotiation dynamics Founders are likely to encounter – is half the battle.

Before you start communicating with VCs, take the time to learn how to detect and manage these 8 little-known fundraising dynamics. This is what we at NFX call “high leverage fundraising” – it gives you speed & clarity, while still helping cultivate strong, long-term relationships. Let’s dig in.

Read the full NFX Essay - https://www.nfx.com/post/8-top-skills-founders-startup-fundraising/

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

Life is, by some measures, an infinite game, where the rules constantly change and winners turn into losers, and vice versa. This article is titled, “7 Principles of Game Design” and was written by The Design Gym - an NYC-based agency that has worked with top companies like Instagram, Netflix, Etsy, and many more.

Setting up games, with clear goals and constraints helps focus our energies and efforts and can improve and clarify outcomes and motivate us to move forward to the next clearly defined challenge and reward cycle.

Read the essay here - https://www.thedesigngym.com/seven-principles-of-game-design-and-five-innovation-games-that-work/

Saar Gur is one of the best investors in Silicon Valley and has a gift of identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most. As a General Partner at CRV, he was recently highlighted as #34 in the Forbes Midas List of the World's Best Venture Capital Investors In 2021. Saar loves products that consumers and customers love and is passionate about helping his companies succeed.

His early investment in the food delivery company DoorDash was in the 2013 seed round, which eventually resulted in the company going public last December. Gur made a similar early bet on smart home company Ring the same year; Amazon acquired that company for $1 billion in 2018. Gur is also an investor in multiple fast-growing tech startups like Patreon, which is now worth $3 billion, and Classpass, which is worth more than $700 million. Others include Niantic, Bird, and Dropbox.

Today, longtime friend and NFX Partner James Currier talks with Saar to uncover these early investment stories and his pattern recognition in early-stage founders. James also uncovers who he is as a person, what he looks for in early-stage Founders, and how he sees the world as a whole.

The team at C2i Genomics is combining cutting-edge genomics and sophisticated AI to provide the world’s first whole-genome cancer intelligence platform, transforming the way cancer is monitored and treated.

C2i uses a blood test that can detect and quantify tiny amounts of residual cancer to better monitor cancer treatment, progression, and recurrence. NFX was an early stage investor in C2i due to their long-term vision and world-changing technology.

Listen to NFX Partner Omri Amirav-Drory talk with Asaf Zviran, Co-founder & CEO of C2i Genomics, about the future of their company, their latest technological breakthroughs, and where the industry is headed in the near future.

Asaf and Omri's conversation begins at 11:15

Visit C2i to learn more - https://c2i-genomics.com/