Agustina Fainguersch

🚀 Lago <> Stripe Integration: Your top questions answered here! 🚀 We often get asked about our native integration with Stripe. Here are the top questions from our open source community: 1. How does Lago integrate with Stripe? 2. Should I define my products, prices, and subscriptions in Stripe if they’re already in Lago? 3. Do I need Stripe Billing if I use Lago Billing? 4. Are payments and refunds triggered automatically? 5. How do you generate checkout URLs? We've got you covered! Find all the answers about our seamless Lago <> Stripe Payments integration right here. 💡

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This part of my conversation with Joao Barbosa, co-founder at the world’s leading wellness platform Gympass (now Wellhub) valued at $2.4 is a testament to the fact that nothing big actually started big 👇 It took Gympass 5 pivots and 2 near death experiences to find the business model that works and is scalable across the globe What I found really interesting is the framework that the team had around pivots - the tripod approach towards creating value. This approach could benefit many founders especially in marketplace kinda businesses Head over to our channels on Spotify, Apple and YouTube to watch / listen to the full conversation link in comment 🔗 The J Curve #thejcurvepodcast #podcastrecommendation #gympass #pivot #entrepreneurship #founder #venturecapital

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Congrats to all the YC S24 companies!! Supporting great founders in their vision to transform global consumer experiences is what we love to do at Goodwater.  Here are a few in particular that caught our eye: DreamRP: AI role-playing for the most talented creators to engage their fans. What we like: Accelerating creator and fan communities with great features and deepening engagement. (https://www.dreamrp.com/) Founders: Phillip Huang & Nina Hu Stack: Open Source User Auth & Management What we like: The democratization of authentication tools, empowering entrepreneurs and small businesses with open source and disrupting a $13B market with a talented leadership team. (https://stack-auth.com/) Founders: Konstantin Wohlwend & Zai Shi Kontigo: USDC neobank for Latam SMBs. What we like: Bringing flexibility and stability to Latam users and their digital assets, with strong early traction with over 10K users. (https://www.kontigo.lat/) Founders: Jesus Ferrer & Gino Guatavita Genie: The friendly AI sidekick for kids. What we like: Creating a safe and engaging AI for young learners in a trusted resource for parents, with over 10k users already and led by the founding team of Brave Care. (https://genie.gg/) Founders: 🤙🏼 Darius Monsef & Asa Miller

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Fresh Carta data shows similar trends - longer fundraising timelines, compressed valuation multiples, and a higher bar to get rounds done. But I believe we’re turning a corner. Seeing many bright spots and plenty of reasons to stay optimistic. I think we’re getting more ‘back to normal’ after some crazy years that skewed data, behavior, and overall expectations. That said, I still believe (with some bias) it’s more important than ever for founders and their investors to find and align with long-term, relationship-focused financing partners. Again, I say this with some bias because I’m committed to and invested in helping founders and their companies with this - primarily by providing hybrid capital solutions (mainly flexible debt/credit investments) as a creative partner and complement or alternative to pure equity. I’m obsessed with this craft because, when done right, it benefits both the founders I want to support for life and their investors (and LPs). I believe this financing approach, especially debt for startups, is still underrated and misunderstood. I will continue working every day to improve as an investor and refine these solutions, which can adapt to the ever-changing market we see today, while also working to shift any negative perceptions so they aren’t overlooked in years to come. See you out there! Note: These views are my own and do not represent those of any company I am a part of.

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Legit quotable and actionable advice: * Power of Threes - 3 mentors, 3 peers, 3 mentees. * If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

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Spending 1 month in the same house with Topo (YC W24) team. Here’s why we made that move: We are working more efficiently, no distraction during the day.  Fully focus on our objectives and teamwork. Last year, we came to SF with the entire team for the YC Winter batch. This year, our objectives are mostly similar to last year.  Except for one thing:  We know precisely where we’re going. Because: - The results with our AI SDR get better every day. - We developed a unique model, in which the human input (ours) is still super important. We continuously adjust our AI to work more efficiently. - Our team is more solid than ever. Also, San Francisco is the place to be if you’re an AI SaaS right now.  We are meeting partners, clients, friends… every night. it's up to us to keep up the pace!

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One thing we learned during Y Combinator is that to win, a startup needs to work as closely as possible with its customers. That's a big part of why we took the unconventional path of basing our team in New York. YC's thesis that the bay area adds alpha to a startup's odds of success is spot on. But like all generalized advice, there can be narrow reasons to diverge from the typically wise path. New York is the financial capital of the world. Our thesis at Greenboard is that being as close to our customers as possible will drive even more alpha.

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It was an absolute pleasure to sit down with Joao Barbosa, co-founder at the world's leading corporate wellness platform Gympass(now rebranded to Wellhub) for the most recent episode of The J Curve. Five big ideas from our convo 👇💡 1️⃣ Startup pivot is not an event, it’s a process Base your decision on data, customer feedback and other validated learnings. Establish clear KPIs that will guide decision-making and define what should success look like. Be prepared to test and iterate and test again. Flexibility, adaptability and sensitivity to feedback is key 2️⃣ Building a MOAT, or competitive advantage is essential for a startup to compete and sustain growth In Wellhub case the moat is network effect. It’s difficult and expensive to build (CAC was huge) but at scale it represents a huge barrier to exit for corporate clients 3️⃣ Put a lot of thought into pricing model, especially if you operate in a B2B segment Early-stage founders frequently under-price their offering. Once you land 1-2-year enterprise contracts, changing the price will be problematic 4️⃣ International expansion has to be carefully planned and executed post-product market fit Ideally once you have already significantly penetrated your domestic market and gained a clear understanding of how / why every dollar you spend internationally will deliver you more money than if you were to spend it domestically 5️⃣ Standardized processes are at the core of building teams at scale When you hire 100 people a month it’s not about keeping the bar high but about creating a clear set of rules to evaluate the performance and hire and fire fast You can listen to my full conversation with Joao by searching The J Curve Podcast on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcast For deeper insights into this conversation + some of my favorite listens and reads of this week check out our newsletter link in comment 🔗

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After 4+ years with Le Wagon, helping students and teachers navigate the tech world, I’m taking the next logical step: helping them transform their knowledge into startups as solopreneurs. Since completing my bootcamp in 2019, I’ve built more than 40 Ruby on Rails apps, always starting with the same initial 20 commits: “Add payment gateway,” “Add transactional emails,” “Design yet another landing page,” and so on. To streamline this repetitive process, I created a boilerplate that enables me—and any other #rails developer—to kickstart and launch projects at lightning speed. Meet Lightning Rails Ruby on Rails Starter Kit. If you’re a #rubyonrails developer, you can give it a try here: https://lightningrails.com Special thanks to Marc Lou from Shipfast who inspired me to kickstart this boilerplate—he was not the first to turn commits into a boilerplate, but in my opinion, the one with the best execution and vision for it. If you're a NextJS developer, I highly recommend it 👉 https://shipfa.st/

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I recently talked with Paz Yanover, VP of Product at Amplication, about creating and managing effective docs. Here is his developer docs success formula (check 1st comment): In this interview, Paz shares his formula to creating developer docs that drive product adoption. You'll learn: - The important role docs plays in support and attracting devs - Tips for balancing technical accuracy with user-friendliness in your docs - Strategies for effective collaboration between technical writers and product teams Check the first comment for the full interview. --- Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Derick Ruiz for more.

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Getting into YC changed our company's trajectory I wrote a blog post a few months ago about how YC transformed our trajectory (link: https://lnkd.in/gNuSkYPN) It can't be overstated enough. If you're a pre-product-market-fit company, just filling out the application is a worth its weight in gold If you get an interview.. you get a taste for what each office hours in YC is like And if you get in.. There are 3 surprising benefits to YC: 1. YC helps you create a peer-group of founders in the same position as you, which can be an incredibly motivating force 2. Bookface, YC’s internal social forum, is a trove of high quality discourse, and acts as an implicit source of warm intros to other YC founders 3. YC’s Launch pad is great for getting your product in front of lots of startup-minded people And there are 2 things that ended up mattering a little bit less than I thought: 1. Fundraising — it turns out that building a great product and generating revenue far outweigh YC’s brand when raising money 2. YC’s Brand — while useful as social proof, it doesn’t replace the need to have a great product / solve a real problem

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This interview might give you some ideas about how to think about where technology is going.

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Every day is a reminder that startups are unpredictable as hell. As alums of YCombinator's Summer 12 batch, we've long taken pride in being "the batch that broke YC" - as PG calls us. So it tickles me to no end to see this in the 2024 YC Top Companies list: "The S12 batch is the best represented, with 5 companies on the list: Benchling, Coinbase, Instacart, SmartAsset and Zapier" 🤣💪 #ycombinator #ycs12 #startups https://lnkd.in/gNDewZfn

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Third and last part of my post with some insights from the #fundraising of our latest fund. Some of the tools we used and how we managed to get the finish line successfully!

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See you in an enlightening seminar next month!

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Raising VC money is Hell on Earth. We've raised 3 VC rounds ($22M) with Raffi Sarkissian, for Lago, including 2 last year. In 2023, aka worst year to raise, for a 'non GenAI company'. Here's how to prevent yourself from burning out: ~Before the fundraise~ 1. Don’t listen to the crowd This was a tip from Y Combinator: don’t ‘average’ advice. Pick 1 or 2 people (founders/VCs) who know what they're talking about and listen to them. Don't flood your brain with too many cooks in the kitchen. 2. Anticipate rejection. Protect your enthusiasm at all costs. You will get lots of no's. ‘You only need one ‘yes’, is a very common mantra. Make sure you have a buffer between each meeting: a quick walk, coffee, breathing exercise, etc. Get outside help if needed. 3. Prep your personal life and company to function without you Prep the fam, bf/gf, and obvi your team. You won’t be fully present until you close the round, whether you want it or not. Make this very clear and you'll feel less guilt about being MIA. ~Once you receive your first term sheet~ 4. Get to closing ASAP Term sheets can get pulled. So get to closing (money hits bank) ASAP. - Leverage FOMO. - Keep momentum at high. - Drink coffee and prep for late nights. Close the deal ASAP. Our team was only 'ProdEng' at the time, therefore as a CEO didn't have support on the 'business side of things' (meaning sales, marketing, legal, finance, hr, anything that isn't building a product basically - including 'finding a new office'...). If you're raising with US and European investors, this means their legal team will be on various timezones (in our case: West Coast, East Coast, Europe) and if you want to close fast, you'd better be up to answer every question that comes up, at any time of the night... and try to be relatively 'fresh' for your team, at normal business hours the day after. 5. Stick to your guns Resist pressure from new investors with new incentives. You're making decisions that will last 10+ years. Keep time for you and your co-founder. Sleep on decisions. ~After the raise~ 6. Take a break It's tempting to jump back in ASAP. But there's no better time to relax and think deeply about next steps. Hard work deserves hard rest. If your company survived 3 months of you fundraising 24/7, it'll survive 1 week of you relaxing. 7. Bolster your team You've got the money, now hire people who will help support your team. Ex. Hire a Head of Talent if you're hiring > 10 team members. We took our time before choosing someone and now couldn't be happier to have Alison Eastaway by our side for this. Hire people who will help give you time/space to think strategically. That's your main job as a founder. -- Thanks Amy Lewin for letting me share my thoughts to a broader audience in Sifted once again. 🙏

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We are excited to lead the $12.3m Seed round for StackGen, a leader in the infrastructure-from-code space. When I speak with practitioners, the pain point instantly resonates and it is being solved by a uniquely gifted team of entrepreneurs Sachin Aggarwal, Asif Awan and Arshad Sayyad. If you're dealing with outdated Terraform scripts or cloud deployment challenges, I highly recommend exploring StackGen. Umesh and I are excited to partner with StackGen on their journey to simplify and modernize cloud infrastructure management. #cloud #genAI #infrastructure

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