Jesse Buckingham

We got quoted for $6.7M for a 30 second Super Bowl ad slot. We said f*!% that and made our own. I present: The Fox of Freight Street. Turning the chaos of your freight brokerage into a money printing machine. Vooma: the ai platform for logistics.

Grateful for the opportunity @GrahamCWeaver and others provided to me!

Huge update from the @create_xyz team

A lot of founders reach out and ask - is @ycombinator worth it? 363 days now from our W23 demo day my confident answer is - yes, it is. In my opinion YC has the best IP in the world on early stage company building. There is no institution that has played a role in helping more teams go from nothing to something. They’ve distilled that experience into concrete, no bullshit, tactical advice that they dish out at scale. The partners are direct and honest, often to an uncomfortable extent. There’s no letting you off the hook. If things aren’t working, they’ll tell you. If you’re focused on things that don’t matter, they’ll tell you. Someone said building a startup is like throwing yourself off a cliff with parts and trying to build the rocket mid flight. Only you can build the rocket ship. But YC tells you timely stories of how the thousands of startups before you either crashed or found flight before hitting ground. Here’s the advice that helped us most: -> Focus on the 90/10 solution. Figure out the key features that can drive the most value. Then build those. Ship it, fast. -> Get real commitments from real customers. Not ‘I’m’ interested’. Not design partnerships with no real skin in the game. -> Focus on early adopters. Even if your idea is good, most companies won’t work with early stage businesses. Find the ones that will. -> Focus on talking to customers, building. Not talking to investors. The best thing for investors is traction - focus there. It’s not just the advice though. There’s no better way to drive urgency and pace of action and decision making than running the gauntlet of YC with other talented founders with the looming threat of demo day lighting a fire under your behind. Should you worry about the dilution? IMO, no. Startups are pretty binary. Either you build a valuable business or you don’t. If you can substantially shift your odds to being something versus nothing, that’s a good trade. And the support from YC didn’t stop at demo day - we still meet every couple months with Gustaf and it’s always impactful time. Big continued thanks to @gustaf, @dflieb (our visiting partner) and all the @ycombinator partners for their support. To the founders in the W24 batch presenting tomorrow - go crush! 💪

Enabled Tesla’s latest Full Self-Driving today. Man, it’s so smooth and confident. Feels very human. Probably smoother than me driving. These imitation models appear to be delivering the goods. With this new approach, data advantage even more critical. Tesla’s vehicle scale is huge advantage here. Does Tesla win full self driving?

Sad to hear of Daniel Kahneman’s passing. Thinking, Fast and Slow was one of the most impactful books in my life when it came out. It helped me to understand the machinery of my brain better so I could notice and adjust for its tricks. I rely on his insights every week. I’m grateful for people like Kahneman who give their lives to improving our understanding of the world and then make it available to everyone for just a few dollars.

A lot of startup advice comes from successful companies looking back on decisions they made that later surfaced issues. “I wish we’d done [x] earlier.” It’s a trap. Many things will break or become screaming problems later that you shouldn’t have addressed at the time.

Is there a greater joy than the sound of a small child giggling?

Many customers say working with Vooma is one of the best experiences they’ve had with a tech vendor. A big reason is that is that they work directly with our engineers. We keep a high technical bar in our engineering org, but we require more than that. Our engineers work on the front lines with customers - understanding their problems directly then designing and building solutions to the problems. It’s true ‘full stack’ engineering. This approach might seem obvious. But this isn’t how it works in many companies. Often customers will speak with a customer success or support person that passes feedback to a product manager who writes requirements and then schedules the work with an engineer. This is too slow. It can take weeks or months to see improvements to the product, and customers feel like they’re yelling into the void. Messages get diluted through telephone tag. Requests are lost in translation. Engineers don’t deeply understand the problem, so don’t have the context to build creative and novel solutions. And it’s less motivating. A lot of development speed is having the ‘doers’ understand and care about the customer instead of just ticking off a ‘to-do list’ built by someone else. On its face you might this means engineers spend less time coding. But really the biggest time suck is building things customers don’t want - overall it’s more efficient. You need to hire unique engineers to make it work - it’s not for everyone. Being strong technically isn’t enough. You must have a product and customer orientation on top of that - not always easy to find. When you get it right, the results are powerful.

Heard from a great investor: You're making excuses if you distinguish between 'uncontrollable' vs 'controllable' churn. If 'the company got acquired' or 'they went out of business', maybe it's not a failing of product or service, but it is a failing of strategy.