Every Sunday, I send a newsletter with ideas on business and life. You can sign up below and read this edition from February 28, 2021.
Hey my friend,
Welcome to The Grind, a newsletter sharing the best ideas and insights on business and life I’ve learned each week.
Let’s dive in.
Ideas and Inspiration
Not investing in community is an expensive habit. Start now.
Greg Isenberg, CEO of Late Checkout, shared some amazing insights on community building for startups. Some of our favorite takeaways:
-Community is a retention machine. It drives human connection.
-Tell a great story. Almost every product sold comes with a story.
-Be emotional. Companies that wear their hearts on their sleeves feel authentic. It cuts the noise—emotional connection sells more than product features.
Looking to improve your articles or other long form content? Check out this super useful writing checklist by Sean Kernan.
“If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality. We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that’s not how the world around us works anymore. The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.”
Thanks to Justin Mikolay for compiling these insights on status, leadership and curiosity, as shared by Naval on Clubhouse this week.
This thread started by Jill Klinvex, VC Principal at Capital Factory, has folks sharing and compiling a list of some of the best “future of work” startups!
Hype doesn’t pay the bills.
Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of Codecademy, offers important lessons learned as his company went from being the center of attention to the brink of bankruptcy—and then survived to thrive.
Investors and VCs take note:
– The small things do matter—run a good process, respond to emails, and ask smart questions.
– A no isn’t forever (and some other great tips from Elizabeth Yin on how Hustle Fund tripled their first VC fund to raise a $33.6M second fund)
Success Shout Out
Michael Seibel of YCombinator shared that in the 6 months since the YC Black Founder Directory went live, these companies have raised nearly $100M!
Opportunities from this week
Are you a VC? Want to be a judge for a global pitch competition for pre-seed & seed stage startups in the future of learning that’s giving away $500,000 in cash prizes? Reach out to Thea Knobel for info!
This Week’s Just Go Grind Episodes
Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
Wisam Dakka is the co-founder of Meemo, an AI-powered social finance app where your digital wallet meets your everyday life. Meemo allows you to send and receive money to friends and family, and is delighting users with automatic rewards based on their recent activity. This includes personalized offers and shopping deals, Weekly Review stories, useful transaction-based notifications, and more. The secure app can also be used to search and sort through accounts and transactions, and enjoy shareable insights uncovered by Meemo’s powerful AI. Wisam Dakka and his co-founder, André Madeira are longtime product developers, coders and engineers who previously worked at Snap and Google.
Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD, is co-founder and CEO of Pendulum Therapeutics, a biotech startup in San Francisco. Colleen stands alone among entrepreneurs: she is a scientist with a doctoral degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, a pioneer in the exploration of the human body’s microbiome, and a challenger of the probiotics industry and its 1970s-era formulas. Prior to Pendulum, Colleen led a team of scientists at Pacific Biosciences, a company famous for its DNA sequencing. Armed with this technology, Pendulum is doing groundbreaking microbiome research by extracting new bacterial strains, studying their impact on chronic conditions, and combining them in never-before-seen formulations. The company’s mission is to create probiotics as effective as prescription drugs, without any side effects. The company’s first offering, Pendulum Glucose Control, is the only probiotic in existence that has lowered blood sugar spikes and A1C levels in a clinical trial – welcome news for the 122 million Americans living with diabetes and prediabetes.
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter and I’ll see you next week Sunday. Have a wonderful day!
Much love,
Justin
P.S. Who am I? I’m the founder of Just Go Grind, host of the Just Go Grind Podcast, and the Director of Marketing & Community at Vitalize Venture Group.
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