André Carvalheira

49 founders and senior startup leaders respond to a survey from Sifted on the relationship between founders and VCs. Are expectations off from the start as VCs try too hard to pander to their founders with over promises of "value-add" and extensive platform teams? Do founders need to be reminded of their primary role - execution?

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Ever wonder what Stripe's early journey from $0 to $100M in 7 years looked like? Here's my uncomplicated breakdown. 2010 -2011: We're Starting Something • brothers John and Patrick Collison, probably over a pint, decided that setting up online payments for their first startup was a nightmare, and they wanted to fix it. So they whipped up a few lines of code to fix it, like it was no big deal. • They slide into Y Combinator's DMs and secured just enough seed money to pay for food while they continued building their software. 2012-2013: We're Onto Something • In 2011, they convince some serious investors like Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others to fork over $2M. Safe to say they were pretty good at talking up their idea, which many were skeptical about at first. • Developers learned about and loved Stripe. Staying true to their engineering roots, clear documentation and easy integration made Stripe the hero developers didn't know they needed. • By 2013, they hit their stride. Stripe wasn't just a cool idea, it was a must-have for businesses who accepted transactions online. 2014-2015: We're Growing Up • Stripe started partnering with big names like Lyft and Shopify. It's like being invited to sit at the cool kids table. • They launched Stripe Connect, adding more bells and whistles to keep customers happy and cash flowing in. 2016-2017: Big Money • Stripe expanded internationally. Turns out, other countries like easy payments too. • They brought in specialists and built a proper sales team. No more winging it for the Collisons. • Hackathons, meetups, and developer love kept the buzz going, because let's face it, nerd love is strong. • By the end of 2017, Stripe had reached their first $100M in annual revenue. Not bad for a couple of guys who just wanted to make payments suck less. Want to try this at home, here was Stripe's blueprint for getting from $0 to $100M within 7 years: 1. Solve a real problem: Find something everyone hates dealing with and fix it. Instant market. Businesses were crying out for a solution, and Stripe answered with simple, elegant lines of code that made integrating payment processing as easy as pie. 2. Developer Love: Make developers happy, and they’ll be your best marketing team. Stripe knew their audience well and catered to them with clear documentation, easy integration, and robust support. 3. Get Funded: Convince people with a lot of money that you're onto something big. Only if you're onto something big. (You don't get to determine that, only the market does) 4. Keep Innovating: Listen to your customers, especially those early adopters who took a chance on you. Stripe continuously added new features and refined their product based on feedback, ensuring they stayed ahead of the curve. 5. Go Global: There's a big world out there. Don't limit yourself to just one market. Did I miss anything?

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Is “launch early” bad advice? I always thought it was a cliche VC tagline… but (annoyingly) it actually works. We launched Accend (YC S23) publicly a couple of weeks ago with our press announcement in Axios, and the effects we’ve seen are incredible. More people booking demos, reaching out, wanting to join our team. Of course, it helps to have a product that does what it says and a line up of customers to give us more credibility. The hard part about launching early is learning how to separate the noise from substance. More people are booking calls with me through the link in my bio - but a lot of those conversations don’t go anywhere and aren’t a good fit for Accend. Even though it’s easy to get starry-eyed seeing the metrics go up, more demos doesn’t mean more conversions and more sales. You have to ringfence the core audience you’re trying to serve - for us, that’s fintech platforms and banks struggling with manual KYB - and double click into it. It takes a lot of focus and discipline to avoid getting distracted, but all-in-all it’s been a net-positive throwing ourselves into the spotlight. So even if you don’t feel 100% ready, just launch. You can always course-correct later.

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There has to be a fair and transparent process to any change to taxes and a coherent plan for the future. Unfreezing fuel duty would raise £3bn to absolutely dwarf these taxes on ambition and value creation. And benefit the environment.

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Last night at ProductTank London we heard from 4 different speakers on the topic of Product Culture. My key takeaway is this... 'Good' product culture lacks definition. You might read about the importance of product culture, or ask about it when interviewing. You may even try to evaluate how good or bad the product culture is at your company. But here's the bottom line: product culture 𝘪𝘴𝘯'𝘵 something that you'll usually find written down, like you would a strategy, a roadmap, or a vision. Hearing someone describe it will inherently be biased. Product culture is the shared values, beliefs, behaviours, and practices that shape a team, org, or company's identity. It changes when you change your beliefs, behaviours, and practices. Not satisfied with the product culture at your company? You're more empowered to change it than you might think. How have you gone about improving product culture at your company?

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75% of femtech startups were refused a bank account. In any other industry, this would be a scandal. For femtech, it's just another day battling systemic bias that's stifling innovation in women's health. I've backed multiple femtech businesses and regularly speak with women in the industry. Their stories are both shocking and depressingly familiar. Despite serving half the world's population and a £22.3 billion market, femtech receives just 1-2% of health tech funding. This disparity isn't just unfair—it's dangerous. An article by The Guardian last week revealed: • 60% of femtech companies had bank accounts closed • 50% faced "excessive scrutiny" from financial institutions • Many spend £100,000 monthly on digital ads, only to face constant bans censHERship's research of 35 femtech companies found 100% experienced similar issues. The result: Two-thirds lost revenue, 54% faced higher costs, 43% delayed launches (credit to Clio Wood for exposing this). My own health tech startup faced weekly campaign suspensions, no-one-to-talk-to appeals, and ‘black box’ algorithms. But my experience isn't unique. Even product descriptions face absurd scrutiny. Béa Fertility couldn't use 'vagina' on Amazon, forced to use 'birth canal' instead. But anything with the word 'semen' in it? No problem at all. Between 2011-2021, only 4% of new drugs for female-specific conditions were approved in the US. We're not just losing products; we're losing progress. This isn't just a women's issue—it's a business, innovation, and human rights issue. Femtech isn't 'niche'. Women are 75% more likely to use digital health tools and spend 29% more on healthcare. The demand and innovation are there. What's missing is equal opportunity. Ironically, the UK has the second-largest share of femtech globally. We have the potential to lead change. Here’s what we can do:  • Follow and amplify femtech voices • Challenge biased policies when you see them • Educate your network about these issues Progress in femtech benefits everyone—women, business, and society. P.S.  Kudos to Farah, Valentina, Alice, Peony Li, and other femtech leaders. Keep fighting the good fight 💪

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The quality of output depends on the quality of the question. In a #healthcare context, you can’t control what questions are asked, even if instructions are for narrow use. Below is why, for my start up, we have not released the chatbot function. #Womenshealth already has too much #misinformation and we cannot be the source of even more.

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Seeing this says to me the Ruroc EOX launch has flopped. If you're asking customers "why didn't you buy" with options of: "Product Design isn't good enough" "I am waiting for a good promotion" ...You have to be deluded if you think you're going to get actionable information from a survey like this. Here's what has gone wrong for Ruroc. Firstly, "EOX" was designed as the 'Finale' of the Atlas line. It should have been positioned as the pinnacle of the range and should have replaced the Atlas 4. Atlas was plagued with issues from v1.0. We rushed, the pandemic hit, suppliers messed us around, we had to build our own factory REMOTELY to keep up with demand. To fix the issue once and for all I hired a specialist product designer who built out the team to deliver the 'perfect product'. It was costly, but it would allow us to reduce our Customer Service costs, return logistics costs, and reduce our in-house QC team from 18 to just 2-3. A huge cost to get a huge saving. Absolutely necessary for Ruroc to stabilise and continue growing at 70-100% YOY. That product, the one that should have been Ruroc's biggest success, is now called "EOX". To sell products online and grow successfully you need: - Scarcity - "I want stuff other people don't have yet, or I don't want to regret not buying when I had the chance." - Innovation - People want the latest greatest and best... if it's not that, why am I giving you my money if my current product does the job? - Social Proof - it's FOMO, who's wearing it, who's buying it, am I going to be the odd one out if I don't buy? - Reciprocity - What's this brand done for me? How have they engaged me? Do I buy into their mission, do I feel obliged to be part of it. - Commitment - OK I've pre-registered, I've followed the page, I've signed up for the newsletter, I'm watching the launch video, I'm going to buy. Not one of these tactics was properly employed during the launch of the "EOX" Further to that, some genius has made the decision to continue with the Atlas 4 and have it run alongside the EOX So now, as a customer of Ruroc, what does this say to me. Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Track - $679.00 (Has no real track certificate) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Carbon - $595.00 Ruroc "EOX" - $559.00 (brand new should be better than Atlas 4) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Street (fibreglass) - $319.00 (Confusingly is lighter than the Track and Carbon Atlas) So if I want the best, I buy the most expensive helmet? I can wear it on the Track right? No, not in USA or MotoGP. I want the lightest, so I buy the cheapest? I want the newest, but is it worse than the old models because it's cheaper? This is beyond confusing for customers. Customers give brands minimal attention. Your messaging is as much in the decisions you make around naming and pricing as it is anything else. Ruroc "Atlas-X" - $659.00 Drop the Atlas 4.0 and discount til it's gone Clear message to consumers - "the new product is better, replace your old helmet now" It's not hard.

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Interesting concept from Brian Chesky summarized by Paul Graham…Founder Mode vs Manager Mode. In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.” Check it out👇🏼 https://lnkd.in/gJ4ByyKC

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Biggest mistake a healthtech startup can make? (Not talking to their end users) So many fixate on whether or not they could, They don't stop to think if they should. 𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲. But it is madness to build a solution first, And look for a problem to solve later. 🛑 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞: An innovator spends months of runway, Building endless features for their product. Demos it to a bunch of clinicians and patients,  Only for no one to be interested at all. It is not just startups that are fallible, Many established companies do this too. They add countless features that nobody uses, Leading to excessive software bloat. And wonder why it takes clinicians 30 minutes to do a simple admin task. __________________________________ 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. It starts with speaking to decision makers, To those who will be using your innovations. It starts by painstakingly finding out: - Where the problem points are. - The inner workings of the current system. - The barriers that can block a new solution. - Is this a widespread issue or just a local problem. - Is this something people care enough to change. Only then, can meaningful innovation take place. 𝐖𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞. Stop building things that nobody needs, Start talking to patients and clinicians. 𝐏𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞? 👇 Have you experienced something similar before? 🤔 What advice would you give? Sarah Jane O Dwyer | Sarah Hughes Hon. A/Prof | Laura Johnson | Kevin McDonnell | Isabelle Ugochukwu | Clive Flashman 💙

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Three lessons from building and launching a P2P payments app without doing the proper customer validation first (despite knowing better): 1) Building something you need is a great starting point - but not enough to validate an idea. As someone drawn to building solutions, I’m an early tech adopter. This led me to overestimate consumers’ willingness to onboard, especially with a P2P payments app that requires KYC/KYB compliance and relies on a network effect to be useful. 2) Manual solutions are often best to start with It’s good business to be in business - transitioning from ideating to operating as early as possible is the BEST way to learn effectively. While the move fast and break things mindset has attracted well-deserved skepticism, getting stuck in a multi-year build trap distracted me from critical real-world validation. 3) Consumer appetite shifts quickly In my case, the proliferation of free and instant P2P payment options like Zelle added additional pricing pressure that I couldn’t compete with. This disincentivized the consumer event/payment collection market, turning my bottom-up go-to-market strategy upside down. Pitch (https://www.pitch.fun) is currently on the back burner as I’ve begun building custom solutions in various industries to sharpen my skills, solve specific problems, gain a hands-on understanding of operations, pain points, and workflows, and build a network of experts to lean on as I keep my eyes peeled for high-impact opportunities.

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If you are interested in levelling up in Product, why not check out Reforge. Reforge provides content from people working at LinkedIn, Lyft, Dropbox, Uber, Netflix, Meta, SurveyMonkey, Google ..... Their free content is superb but I've also heard very good things from students of their paid courses. On the 25th June they are also running a half day event on ✨ AI ✨. You can register here https://lnkd.in/efrdK5R2 #product #productmanagement #productdesign #ux #learn

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As Head of People in multiple early-stage startups, I got tired of laying people off because the org's growth strategy prioritised headcount and geographic expansion over commercial traction. And it seems like I wasn't the only one. Over the last year and a half, I've seen a significant shift: #founders who are prioritising staying #lean and more people who used to be full-time employees working fractionally and/or freelancing. #Fractional work isn't the answer for every role in every organisation. But, for early-stage startups it's an incredibly smart way to get access to the expertise you need to move forward, without killing your runway to do it. #startups #hiring #innovation #freelance #earlystage

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Flo Health became the first women’s health tech unicorn this week. There’s just one problem… It’s: -> Male-founded -> Male-backed -> Male-led So the first fem-tech unicorn is essentially…male? This is ironic at best and sad at worst. If this doesn’t show you the dire need for female funding, I don’t know what will. The odds are stacked against women at every step of the way. 98% of capital in the UK goes to backing male-led companies. Yet, female-powered businesses generate 35% higher returns for investors. From starting a business, to scaling it, to watching it succeed… Female entrepreneurs are constantly undervalued and underbacked. If you want to be a part of the solution, reach out to the Invest in Women Taskforce.

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I don't go in for 'building in public' in general, but every now and then I think it's worth sharing what I'm seeing in the market. The below graph shows the average time to close a deal over time at EmergeOne and you can see that this has been creeping up since last year (adjusted for seasonality) and is currently close to 3 months to close a deal. So what's happening? Well, I was recently at an CFO event where we got a bit of a data driven view into the state of private markets. Some key points that came out: 🏷️ Median post money at Series A has dropped from 80m USD in 21/22 to 65m USD in 2024. This is still up from 40m from circa 2020. ％ Top quartile is significantly over at 107m. 📈 Series B median post money is $137m, top quartile $287m USD, but bottom quartile significantly struggling. 🚀 Deal velocity has slowed but started recovering. 💰 Lots of deals are happening but not priced - bridges abound. So how does this therefore relate to what we're seeing in terms of time to close? Firstly, we are a consultancy providing fractional CFO support to venture backed tech startups typically post Seed and pre Series A so this data reflects what we are generally seeing in the market as well. But the two main issues that are seemingly impacting our numbers are around deal velocity and bridge financing. There are simply fewer deals being done and they are taking longer to close, so the volume of potential clients we can target has dropped significantly. This does, however, mean that the quality of deals we're working on is significantly higher this year. Secondly, as companies struggle to raise priced rounds, they are raising lower amounts of capital on convertibles. This impacts us as CFOs are only truly valuable when there is a significant balance sheet to manage, less capital = less need for CFOs and hence the decision as to when to bring us in gets pushed out. But equally, that insecurity over funds means that founders are much more hesitant to make significant hiring decisions, prioritising hires that can directly influence revenue / traction in the near term. But they also know that they need the support so are often waiting for the 'magic moment' where they hit an inflection point that gives them confidence to pull the trigger. Outside of the deal data, we are also seeing venture indexing towards more R&D heavy businesses (life science, hardware etc.) and these sort of companies are often not commercialising for several years. They have security over spend and regard finance as a future problem. We are seeing a lot of companies approaching Series B without anyone in finance, deferring that decision till they close. But we are also seeing leads come through from a multitude of sources proving there is appetite for strong commercially minded CFOs to support and grow these scaling businesses. So as the market stabilises, I would expect to see these numbers come back. Business wouldn't be any fun if it was all easy, would it?!

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Two companies with combined £3.8bn revenue are ending bureaucracy for product teams. Here’s how: Anyone who's worked in product teams in the corporate world will at some point have:   - Wondered whether senior management have any idea what your team does, or indeed cares - Doubted if what you are doing is fully aligned with the company strategy - Been frustrated by complex top-down bureaucratic planning and prioritisation     In the last few years, I have seen 2 companies simplify planning by closing the gap between senior management and product teams.   Not only did this make teams more effective, but it provided a huge motivational boost that ultimately made them more productive too.   Here's how they did it:   𝟏) 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐤   Monzo Bank eliminated the middle layers of bureaucracy between product teams and management.   Every quarter, the executive committee would talk directly to the product teams and set the top 4 quarterly priorities.   For example:   - Improving customer experience for service W - Improving X part of platform - Expansion to country Y - Cost reduction for area Z   Product teams focused solely on these 4 priorities for the next quarter.   And that was it.   I remember someone from Monza saying “if a team wasn’t focused on at least one of those priorities they would look pretty stupid, and because it was so simple, it worked”.   𝟐) 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫   My favourite example is a UK Investment Manager, partly because it had the challenge of a 10k employee hierarchical organisation embedded with very traditional ways of working.   They introduced a new quarterly planning process – a single day bringing all product teams physically or virtually together.   First, each product team would:   - List their top 3 achievements from the past quarter - List their top 3 priorities for the next quarter   Then the genius part. The CEO, CFO and CTO would physically (or virtually) walk from team to team. It was the first time most people had seen the CEO in real life, let alone have the chance to talk with them.   The exec team would:   - Review each team's past quarter achievements - Assess next quarter's priorities - Ask questions, re-order if needed, then confirm alignment with company strategy   I watched one of these in practice. It sounds simple but do not underestimate the motivational power of receiving recognition and ratification, right from the top.   From what I have seen it is the minority of mid to large size organisations where something like this is actually happening (if you’ve seen it then I’d be interested to know)   —   Closing the gap between senior management and teams can have a huge impact on their motivation and ultimately productivity.

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Most companies struggle with Product Discovery. When we ask a given PM about their company’s approach, it’s far more common to receive blank stares than a detailed, comprehensive, intentional approach. Frankly, it’s the very success of that company that most often leads it to struggle with developing new products. The typical progression looks something like the following: • A startup runs scrappy, chaotic, mostly unstructured discovery until they nail product market fit. • At this point, they flip from explore to exploit and fully structure the growing company around maximizing value capture from the initial product - the right approach! • These systems do their job - the company continues to grow, with more personnel, more specialization, more structure accruing. • Now it’s time to launch a new product! Exciting times, and since we’ve already done this once, surely we can do it even better this time. • Remember how chaotic it was the first time around? How much flailing and uncertainty and rapid pivoting we had to do? Well we have systems and expectations and polish, let’s just apply this well-oiled approach and our new product will be even more successful! So the company decides to build the new product because it knows with high confidence what its users want. And it builds the full roadmap. And commits a whole army of resources to start building immediately, typically in two-week increments, because productive companies ship. And after six or twelve months the product is completed, the company hands it to the market and the response is...underwhelming. Where are the celebratory trumpets? Why didn’t this work as we planned when we’re so smart and have already been successful?! THE TRAP The secret that every great entrepreneur knows and promptly forgets once successful is that Product Discovery and Scaling are not only dissimilar but orthogonal. The Scaling phase values certainty and predictability and clear plans and ruthless execution. Discovery cares for none of these values - it is chaotic and unforgiving and creative.   The very strengths that make a company great at scaling most often make it ill-equipped to return to the foggy wasteland of Discovery. These are relatively distinct phases requiring differentiated tools, systems, and most importantly, MINDSETS. Product Discovery ultimately requires a deep understanding of PROBLEMS, not solutions; of PEOPLE, not technology; and most of all, of OUTCOMES over outputs. Can a company run its top-down “scaling playbook” and successfully launch new products? Yes, of course. But is this the best way to innovate? Is this the highest probability approach? Absolutely not.

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Should you drop everything & get onto Gen AI? Most founders I speak with are in this dilemma Platform shifts can be a tricky time Here is how founders can think & navigate the GenAI hype 1) Companies are throwing money at the problem - Companies are throwing Innovation budgets - But these are 1 time things - Most AI projects are not successful yet 2) Don’t re-dress your SaaS & call it AI - Tiny AI inside your large SaaS is still SaaS - Result: You don't deliver dramatically more value to your customer 3) Can you change customer behavior? - Customer behavior has to change for your AI solution to work - FACT: Customers don’t/won’t change their behavior easily - This doesn’t work if no change in behavior 4) What should your approach be? - Find areas where clients are ready to change - Aim for 80% success rate at selling with AI - SaaS STAT: 0.1% success rate in SaaS 5) Goal: Make your customer life much much better - Don’t make it another tool they’ve to adopt - If their life is the same, you aren't adding value

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