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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read.
Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!
To make things easier, you can use this board deck template that my team and I developed with Questor. Agenda:
1) CEO Update: 30 minutes.
(i) What’s Going Well, What’s Not Going Well: I like seeing this on a single slide, two-column format, using bullet points. Nothing makes me queasier than receiving an all-positive update. This suggests that founders are either not aware enough or not paranoid enough about the real problems.
(ii) Strategic Learnings. The CEO should discuss their strategic learnings from the quarter. I like to think of this as the “diff” on the investor presentation: if you were to write your investor presentation today, how would it be different compared to the last time you wrote it? Don’t be afraid of making changes to the original plan; change indicates learning.
I think this part is really important. The most important focus for me in a board meeting is what are the new strategic learnings you get, how they affect your plan.
KPIs and metrics.
Cohort retention. It’s also important to look at revenue retention by cohort to understand whether your subscriber base is growing or shrinking over time.
Engagement. Traditionally a consumer metric, user engagement also has relevance for bottom-up SaaS companies. The key metrics are DAU/WAU and DAU/MAU.
2) Sales update: 30 minutes.
The previous quarter’s results. What is the new ARR? Which deals closed? Provide color on major deals won or lost
The upcoming quarter’s pipeline. What is the forecast? What changes are needed to hit the number?
Team performance. Rank the performance of sales reps by quota attainment. Who’s hitting or missing plan, and what can we learn from that to make the sale more repeatable? Do we have enough quota capacity to achieve our goals? What is the hiring plan for additional reps?
4) Financials: 10-20 minutes.
As headcount and opex increase, more scenario planning is required in order to help a fast-growing startup avoid running into a wall.
5) Team: 10-20 minutes.
This is an opportunity to discuss hiring needs and/or culture. Similar to strategic learnings, I find it helpful to focus on the “diff.” What does your ideal org chart look like compared to the one you have today?
Sharing your ideal company structure and working backward from the plan is a good tool to know who you want to hire. Your board should be able to support you to define and attract those talents. They can also give you benchmark in other companies of who are excellent at a similar role.
Overall, our board structure at Alan is different from this one, even if we have some similarities. We have a written document as we like prose, and ask the board members to read in depth before so we can focus on the big news on performance if there are any and one or two (max) strategic topics where we want to get the board perspective.
🏯Building a company
👉Zach Perret (Plaid) - The Future of Financial Services (Colossus)
Build a strong relationship with your earliest customers: the Venmo team was still extremely small, 30-ish people, and we could build very direct one-to-one relationships with everyone in the Venmo team. [...] And for me, who at the time I had been effectively fired from our engineering team for very good reason and I had to go figure out how to actually sell things, I was kind of our only person that was out talking to customers. It was great because I could go to the Venmo office just spend a bunch of time with them and build personal relationships with a lot of the people in the team, many of which, by the way, still persist to this day.
And as we think about ourselves as an organization, we also think about this concept of being a spiky organization, where we are amazing at a few things and we really try to capitalize on this few amazing things that we have, and we're okay not being totally well-rounded.
"Snap is a new kind of camera" "communicate through photos and videos" "conveying emotions"
"Stories : it was so new at the beginning, no one used it for months. It was just a total new kind of behaviors".
🗞In the news
📱Technologies
👉 How YouTube failed the 2020 election test (Platformer)
Foreign interference, which all but defined the 2016 US presidential election, played almost no perceptible role in 2020.
The report makes clear that the platforms did not cause these lies to be spread. Nor does it seek to make a case that these lies spread primarily through algorithmic amplification.
🏥 Healthcare
👉 Amazon Care to launch across U.S. this summer, offering millions of individuals and families immediate access to high-quality medical care and advice—24 hours a day, 365 days a year (Amazon)
Companies of all sizes, including Amazon’s own workforce, will be able to access Amazon Care’s on-demand healthcare service, boosting workplace benefits for employees nationwide.
The service enables employees to connect with medical professionals via chat or video conference (typically in less than 60 seconds).
Amazon Care has two components: 1) virtual care, which connects patients to medical professionals via the Amazon Care app (chat live with a nurse or doctor, via in-app messaging or video); 2) in-person care, where Amazon Care can dispatch a medical professional to a patient’s home for additional care, ranging from routine blood draws to listening to a patient’s lungs, and prescription delivery right to a patient’s door.
“Using Amazon Care, we were able to connect with a clinician in under a minute who provided medical advice that helped us get through the night. She also prescribed a medication that was delivered to our doorstep by 9 a.m. the next day. Thanks to Amazon Care, we were able to manage her illness without ever having to leave the house.”
Amazon Care also started helping patients evaluate their work-from-home setups to optimize joint and muscle health, and a separate program was established for people struggling to sleep.
Patients can access preventive care such as annual vaccinations, health screenings, and lifestyle advice. The service also supports patients’ wellness needs, including nutrition, pre-pregnancy planning, sexual health, help to quit smoking, and more. For immediate needs, patients can use Amazon Care to assess and treat illnesses and injuries on demand.
HIPAA-compliant service also allows employees and their dependents to see the same dedicated teams of medical professionals, which creates long-term relationships that benefit overall health.
Patients also have tools to manage their care within the app—including scheduling follow-up visits with their preferred clinician, at their convenience. After visits, patients receive care summaries and follow-up reminders. When using the in-person option, patients also receive live updates on the estimated time of their clinician’s arrival to their home.
💚 Alan
👉 Kickoff of FrenchTech Board Impact (Cédric O’s Tweet 🇫🇷). Last week, Diane Rivière, our Culture & People Lead, took part to the launch of the Board Impact, a committee composed of Next40 and FT120 companies and partner associations tasked with engaging diversity, mixity and sustainability recommendations for the #FrenchTech. We are very proud that Alan is part of it!
👉 Choiseul 2021 Ranking (Le Figaro 🇫🇷). I am very humbled to be selected as part of the classement 2021 des 200 leaders économiques de demain, and very proud to appear alongside great leaders which I admire for their impressive achievements.
📕📺 Books & documentaries
👉 The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman (Amazon). I enjoyed reading the Last Kings of Shanghai, about the Sassoon and Kadoorie families who built their fortunes in SH and Hong Kong. 4 learnings:
1) Education is key: "He came up with the idea of the Sassoon schools. David set up the equivalent of a Sassoon company town, designed to attract Jewish refugees, first from Baghdad and then from across the Ottoman Empire, and turn them into loyal employees."
2) Empowering others: "In what was becoming a familiar strategy, he bought land and built warehouses to house opium bought by other merchants and supplied credit to opium merchants and traders."
3) Owning the supply: "The monopoly chain began in India. Jardine didn’t produce its own opium. The Sassoons decided to go around the agents by negotiating directly with Indian farmers, lending them money to cultivate the opium crop in exchange for the exclusive right"
4) Business is a people game: "Victor kept a careful record of everyone he met so he could charm them later. Victor’s social diaries included a careful color-coded system: he underlined the names of people he knew in blue, the ones he was meeting for the first time in red."
🙍 Featured in this newsletter
David Sacks 🇺🇸Co-founder, Craft Ventures | Twitter | LinkedIn
Jonathan Kaufman 🇺🇸 Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism | Twitter
Zach Perret 🇺🇸Co-founder and CEO, Plaid | Twitter | LinkedIn
Evan Spiegel 🇺🇸Co-founder and CEO, Snap Inc. | Twitter
Casey Newton 🇺🇸 Founder, Platformer News | Twitter | LinkedIn
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