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As I’m writing, it’s the day after Apple’s Special Event. The Steve Jobs Theater has a public event under its belt. We’re past figuring out how to pronounce iPhone X, and we’re done caring what happened to iPhone 9. Even the Face ID demo fail is already yesterday’s news.

If you watched the live stream of Apple’s Keynote as a normal part of your job like I did, you need to know that customer centricity is under attack.

I have a few suggestions how to respond:

“One more thing”

I have to say I’ve always enjoyed Apple’s Keynote events. I’d bet you agree. There’s a fun element of the big reveal. Were our predictions right? Were the leaks accurate?

And the events suit our sense of humor too. There’s a fine line between the reality of Apple on st...

You know that feeling you get when you just know your idea is going to be the next big thing? Well none of us had that feeling when we first started working on DashMetrics as a side-project. I’d love to rewrite history and tell you we knew our project was going to take off from the start, but this began like any other passion project. We had this hard problem of trying to make data visualization easier for the average person to understand without a dashboard looking like some hi-tech stock trading program with crazy looking candlestick charts, or a DevOps monitor displaying two-tone colored website traffic in real-time. No, we were going tackle the gnarly task of making metrics look sexy. It felt like our calling.

People rarely remember exa...

Going digital is now as simple as bringing out our phone to book a ride home. As early as five years ago before Grab hit the market, this was a fantasy for most people. Our world has been changed by digital solutions and the logical question would be to ask: What’s next?

5 Technologies For The Future

To answer this question, we refer to Cognizant’s survey of over 2000 C-level professionals in Asia to tap on their collective wisdom. Such knowledge will be beneficial to both investors, consumers and even business executives would want to stay on top of things.

The top of the list would be artificial intelligence and this has found commercial applications in autonomous drivings such as the testing of nuTonomy in Singapore. The possibility of...

Remote work. Work from home. Telecommuting and teleworking. Whatever you call it, distributed teams are becoming increasingly popular… and it’s here to stay.

A recent Gallup Poll noted that, in the U.S., telecommuting for work is up 37% in the last decade. 34% of business leaders surveyed at a recent Global Leadership Summit in London predicted more than half of their company’s global workforce would work remotely by 2020. Around the world, more and more companies are building distributed teams, just like we have at Mailbird.

When you look at the benefits of having a distributed team, it’s understandable why we chose to build our team this way. Happy people make great work and, generally speaking, those who work remotely are happier, more ...

Nextdoor is backed by some of the largest and hottest VCs in Silicon Valley, including Benchmark and Greylock, which share LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Uber as recent hits among them. Nextdoor is growing steadily and has raised some $200 million in capital. Nothing about this company isn’t a Silicon Valley and startup success story.

And yet, amid the current climate, Nextdoor is an outlier in almost every other way. It has grown slowly, not just relying on building local city-by-city network effects like an Uber or Postmates, but building neighborhood-by-neighborhood network effects.

It’s essentially vying to be another great social network, while Twitter and Pinterest struggle to grow, LinkedIn has already sold, and even Faceb...

Millennials enter the workforce with limitless dreams but limited options for high-paying jobs. Their median household income is about 20 percent less than Baby Boomers earned at a similar stage in their lives, and many Millennials wrestle with staggering student loan debt and skyrocketing healthcare costs.

As dispiriting as this situation might sound, Millennials can kick open the doors of professional opportunity thanks to fast-moving technology advancements that have created countless side hustles. About one-third of workers have a side hustle, according to a CareerBuilder survey of 3,200 private sector workers. Millennials are particularly active in the growing trend, with 44 percent of 25- to 34-year olds and 39 percent of 18- to 24-ye...

Founders don't get lucky — that's how lottery winners make their money.

From the outside, though, it often looks the same. People read about a company going public or hear about some Founder they know getting their startup acquired and think "Wow, what good luck they've had!"

They view our windfall as some stroke of luck, and as importantly they view our proceeds as something that should be doled out to everyone. In the worst case, they may even try to make us feel guilty about such great fortune — if we haven't already done that to ourselves.

It wasn't "Good Luck" it was "Good Fortune"

In order for a Founder to exit they couldn't rely on luck. Luck is what happens when we're at the blackjack table and you get dealt an ace and a king. Luck is w...

Earlier this week we had one of our partners publicly share some news that we’re equally excited about: We’ve raised a round of venture financing that includes Slack and their investment vehicle, The Slack Fund.

And as they so thoughtfully put it, it’s a “two way street” as they are betting on us and we are definitely betting on them. You can read their full announcement here as well as a companion Forbes piece sharing the news as well.

Although this is exciting news all the way around we have been somewhat coy about going public with any venture financing news. Part of this has to do with the fact that many people wrongly believe that raising a round of venture is, in an of itself, a “big deal” — it’s just not true.

Or rather, people mist...

Continuing in Phase Three of a four-part Funding Series:

Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise

Phase Two - Investor Selection

Phase Three - The Pitch

• Part 1 - Anatomy of a Pitch

• Part 2 - Market Size

• Part 3 - Revenue Model

• Part 4 - Operating Model ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

• Part 5 - Customer Definition

• Part 6 - Customer Acquisition

• Part 7 - Funding

• Part 8 - Key Pitch Assets

• Part 9 - Traction

Phase Four - Investor Outreach

Let’s dive in!

What is an operating model?

If the Revenue Model is all about the clever ways you’re going to make money, the Operating Model is all about the clever ways you’re going to manage costs and efficiencies to earn it.

Operating Models Shouldn't Be Afterthoughts

Often the Operating Model gets the least amount of love. That’s because ...

Very few entrepreneurs have been are able to successfully create a viral, cult-like following around something as random as workplace collaboration software. But, if anyone could — it would be Stewart Butterfield, a two-time failed gaming entrepreneur.

When headlines circulated that Amazon was looking to spend some $9 billion to purchase Slack, it was another sign that this hot app wasn’t some overblown unicorn flash in the pan.

While Slack has a high valuation, it stands out from the current startup landscape. In a world of 24/7, party all night brogrammers, Butterfield says his offices are empty at 6:30 every night, and people work ~45 hours a week. He’s designed the company for people who have already lived the insanity of a boom and bus...