After four venture launches, we’ve refined a communication strategy to ensure our limited face-to-face time is spent making crucial progress. The approach has maximized the effectiveness of what we’ve dubbed our Founders’ Strategy Sessions.
In a world where it’s increasingly feasible for anyone to build anything, it’s no longer about hitting traditional startup milestones like minimum viable products (MVPs.) It’s about how fast you can iterate to achieve product-market fit.
It’s one thing to attract one of the most proven entrepreneurs in the area to lead your new company; it’s another thing to attract two.
In researching for our next venture, we dove deep into the exploding world of voice AI to develop criteria for high-potential conversational AI use cases.
The most recent major shift in business operations was the rise of B2B SaaS products, which augmented human work in a serious way. However, with the more recent rise and proliferation of AI, technology is able to do the whole job.
In late 2022, the launch of ChatGPT took AI mainstream, with the LLM tool acquiring 1 million users in just 5 days. Instagram needed approximately 2.5 months to reach 1 million downloads, and Netflix around 3.5 years. The ChatGPT splash began an explosion of consumer-facing AI tools within familiar software, as well as entirely new companies, products and applications entering the market.
We recently welcomed Lawrence Ganti to the Prelude team as CEO. Prelude, our venture in the deathcare space, is in the perfect phase to bring on impressive talent like Lawrence. As we acquire early funeral home customers and get in front of real people across Oklahoma who are pre-planning through Prelude, we’re continuing to develop new product features and capabilities. We’re incredibly excited that Lawrence Ganti is coming on to lead Prelude through its next phase of growth.
Our entire thesis is to find and define problems worth solving in different vertical spaces. But to find a problem, you first have to know where to look. This begs the question — how do we choose the right vertical? We propose that instead of ‘how do we choose the right vertical?’, the better question is ‘how quickly can we choose a vertical?’
Finding a Subject Matter Expert for your venture seems pretty straightforward: enlist an expert in an area where you don’t have previous experience. For the most part, you’ll always be ahead when you do this. However, we have learned that finding the right SME and activating them appropriately has a major impact on accelerating progress in the critical first months or years of a venture.
In the early stages of a new venture or product/business idea, you’re devoting so much time, money, and energy to exploring an opportunity. Sometimes it’s clear from the start that you’re onto something, and you see early signs of validation and product-market fit. Far more often, however, it’s not so obvious.
Hiring C-Suite talent for your startup can feel like handing your baby over to a stranger; yet, it’s a core part of our venture creation process and should be a positive inflection point for a new venture’s trajectory.
