The NFX Podcast

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

"For a startup, understanding VCs’ mindsets is often as important as understanding the mindsets of your customers. With no capital most Founders will not win, so you’d better learn the language."

VCs speak a different language, one that Founders must learn to be able to raise capital. Understand the psychological drivers and use them to evaluate your counterpart’s state of mind. And repeat the core narratives: we are low risk; we will be huge; others are interested and moving forward.

Read the original NFX Essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/how-vcs-think-investing-decisions/

The usual Silicon Valley response to regulation is to offer self-regulation instead — but only tech companies have the skills and speed to fix what they broke, unable to manage the influence over the public sphere they attained almost by accident.

Unless the few who know how to actually build these tech networks speak out, it won’t just be technology that suffers - it will be the entire world. Having built, funded, and analyzed “unicorn” social networks for 25 years and former Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson and NFX Partner James Currier formulate a solution that resurrects a concept from the golden age of newspapers - the ombudsman.

The ombudsman is another important node in the network that has proven itself in the past and is still missing. Listen as Chris and James outline together why these network problems require network solutions, here on the NFX Podcast.

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

This is Valve’s new employee handbook, delivered to every new person working at the iconic gaming company. It is an abbreviated encapsulation of Valve's guiding principles. As Valve continues to grow, they hope that these principles will serve each new person joining the ranks as an employee.

Read the full handbook here - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve\_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf

Read the essay here - http://blog.eladgil.com/2014/01/5-people-who-destroy-your-culture.html

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

The data is clear – diverse teams win. Companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation, and 9% higher EBIT margins. Iman Abuzeid MD (CEO & Cofounder of Incredible Health) has gone through the full diligence process of the best of the best Series A funds in Silicon Valley and shares her findings in this essay.

"We are coming to terms with what we have or have not done right in tech in relation to diversity. Data is one way Silicon Valley has won this far, and it’s the way we can keep winning. The data is clear – diverse teams win."

Read the essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/frameworks-using-diversity-to-win/

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

"On Monday, October 21, 2013, I sent this letter to our entire team at Airbnb. I have decided to publish this in the event it is helpful to entrepreneurs building their cultures." In this famous memo from the early days of Aribnb, CEO Brian Chesky stresses the importance of having a succinct company outlook on culture.

"Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous."

Read the full letter here - https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4

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

Pulled from a Quora post in 2015, Greg Brockman (former CTO at Stripe, now co-founder + CTO at Open AI) answers the question, "What is the engineering interview process like at Stripe?" Greg goes into detail around the frameworks and thinking behind the Stripe technical interviewing process and why they use this formula to build a world-class team at Stripe.

Read the Quora post here - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-engineering-interview-process-like-at-Stripe

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

Amazon has and operates by its own set of leadership principles--a set of principles referred to during company decision-making, problem-solving, simple brainstorming, and even hiring. Here are the 14 leadership principles Amazon workers refer to on a daily basis:

- Customer Obsession
- Ownership
- Invent and Simplify
- Are Right, A Lot
- Learn and Be Curious
- Hire and Develop the Best
- Insist on the Highest Standards
- Think Big
- Bias for Action
- Frugality
- Earn Trust
- Dive Deep
- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
- Deliver Results

Read them here - https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

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

In 2007, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop (a former Microsoft executive) was planning radical action to revive the company's fortunes on what they will do to stem the loss of market share, notably in the smartphone market, where despite being the biggest player it has been unable to compete with incomers, notably Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

Gabi Shalel is an amazing games founder - he understands the type of innovation, fast iteration, and quality required to create a successful games company. These things are also very valuable for every founder, every startup.

So today, NFX General Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss talks to Gabi about the lessons he's learned from starting, growing, and selling Plarium for $500M that other founders can take and apply to their own startups, including:

- Psychology of ultra-fast iterations
- People and Hiring
- Pivoting
- Social in your product
- Conversion tactics
- much more

Read the NFX essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/gaming-superpowers-plarium