“When I was at Harvard…” “While working at McKinsey..” “After Goldman…” If you live in NYC, you’ve probably met folks who work this into the first 5 minutes of their conversation with you. It is credentialing at its finest. It is intended to make you think “Holy shit – you went to Harvard. You must…

We changed up the format for today’s newsletter for 4 reasons. We asked for feedback from readers and got some great responses.  My favorite was the following: New format feels too much like ‘The Skimm‘. This was a nice compliment. And the kind of feedback we love to get.

Halloween was always my favorite holiday. It still is, but it’s become more stressful since becoming the dad of a little girl and choosing a costume for her. My daughter’s choice for a costume changes daily from ninja turtle to princess to spiderman to batgirl. I don’t mind she changes her mind daily as she…

This is an email I sent to our team about a marketing workshop I recently attended. Hi team, I applied to an “invite only” marketing seminar hosted by Noah Kagan last Wed and got accepted so was 1 of 12 or so folks in a session with him. As those of you who’ve been here a while…

We’ve been exploring how to become better at online marketing and looked for someone to head up our efforts here. I think in retrospect, we were looking for too much. Someone who can handle paid acquisition, brand awareness, lead nurturing, education, community, content marketing, etc is a unicorn I suspect. Online marketing sounds like a…

I love when Quora gets discussed on HN like it did yesterday. I find Quora to be a useful service and while I’m not sure it’s the next big thing, I’ve found it entertaining and occasionally useful. But the HN crowd hates because they

I went to dinner last night with some good Penn friends – 2 VC guys, one private equity guy, one hedge fund guy and 1 full time poker player. The conversation veered from buying distressed real estate from US municipalities to Argentinian bond prices to how we could setup a network to beat FanDuel (the…

Came across this gem on Hacker News.  Emphasis in red bold is mine. vidarh 13 hours ago | link | parent | flagI do “use” LinkedIn to get queries regarding opportunities and to keep in touch, but I’m not a frequent user.However my most interesting recent usage of LinkedIn was signing up to pay for Inmail in order to be able…

When I meet with other entrepreneurs and they learn CB Insights is bootstrapped (or more appropriately ‘revenue-funded) and going to be 30 or so folks in the near future, the reaction is generally “that is awesome” or folks will say stuff like “no investors to deal with must be nice”. I think like many things…

I’m very proud of our work on the content front.  We’ve been digging into the data behind our content to understand what works and what doesn’t so we can double down on the best content.  Essentially, we’re building an algorithm to tell us what kind of content we should do. Our post on the content marketing…

Mark Vadon of Zulily which is worth $4.5 billion and which has made him a billionaire talked about being a low profile company.  In a recent interview, he says fast growing startups should avoid the limelight. Per Vadon, there’s no point in creating a lot of fanfare and attracting competitors if you are killing it. Just…

Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital has a fantastic post about the five ways to build a $100 million company.  If you’re in SaaS, you should read this.  His point on the prosumer market was particularly good I thought.  We started off in this world thinking it would be a big market but Christoph’s post puts into…

Someone took the hard work of our team who put this post on startup failure post-mortems together and turned it into a book.  It got onto Hacker News.  But as it looked to be a reuse of our compilation and because, it more egregiously, it used other people’s writings without their permission, it was taken down pretty quickly.…

I was laughing with friends this past weekend about how our initial business was called ChubbyBrain and what an actually great name it was (it’s memorable) but how stupid the initial business idea it was. Think Yelp for startups.  I’m not sure the idea was all that bad actually in retrospect as ProductHunt is sort of the same thing.…

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I take pride in CB Insights being bootstrapped. And so I also love reading about and learning more about bootstrapped companies. 37 Signals and Mailchimp are two of my favorite examples. Today, I came across ScheduleFly. They help restaurants with staff scheduling. They charge $30-$60/month and have…