👩🏾💻changing the narrative one thought at a time. investing in the next decade | solo GP at Dria (https://teapawt.net/t.co/X0XLWlSGr1) | prev @generalcatalyst | @morganstanley
New York, NY
Joined September 2017
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Megan Maloney retweeted
Instinct is now worth half of Delta Airlines
Megan Maloney retweeted
super important honest advice to founders. if you are working on a dead end, get out. you don’t owe that to anyone, including investors (who regularly forgive and experience failure, and ideally care more about you doing your life’s work than a subpar outcome)
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Megan Maloney retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component
The thing about VC is it’s not rocket science…you just have to stay in the game long enough to meet rocket scientists
Megan Maloney retweeted
When you talk to successful founders, they always wish they'd hired fewer top managers from outside. I don't think I've ever met a founder who wished he or she had promoted fewer people from within.
Megan Maloney retweeted
in the first chapter of healthcare AI, the battleground was access to longitudinal clinical data.
in this next phase, it will be access to biological specimens: tissue, blood, synovial fluid, and other samples containing 1,000× more information, linked to clinical context and longitudinal outcomes.
the winners will be those who can access, assay, and interpret these specimens at the lowest cost and highest resolution.
Megan Maloney retweeted
A 30-second cold blast at the end of your shower cuts sick days by 29 percent. A 2016 trial of 3,018 adults in the Netherlands is the largest cold-shower study ever done.
Geert Buijze at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam split participants into four groups: 30, 60, or 90 seconds of cold water at the end of a shower, or no cold water. They did this for 30 days straight. All three cold groups had 29 percent fewer sick days. The length did not matter. Thirty seconds worked as well as ninety.
The mechanism is thought to involve the immune system. Brief cold exposure triggers a spike in white blood cell count and an increase in metabolic rate, both of which are part of the body's response to what it perceives as a physical threat. Over time, repeated cold exposure appears to train the immune system to respond faster and more efficiently to infections.
The study also found that 91 percent of participants in the cold-water group said they would continue the practice after the trial ended, even though most of them described the experience as unpleasant. They reported feeling more energetic, and the energy boost was the reason they kept going.
Thirty seconds. At the end of the shower you were already taking. The water does not have to be ice cold. It has to be cold enough to make you gasp, and you have to stay in it for a count of thirty. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2763…
Megan Maloney retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Megan Maloney retweeted
Want to work with me every day? I’m hiring a team member to sit next to me here in the office of the CEO in @flexport San Francisco’s HQ.
Only apply if you are incredibly smart, a great communicator, fun to be around, and think you can outwork me.
job-boards.greenhouse.io/fle…
Megan Maloney retweeted
An email I sent to the summer 2007 YC batch to encourage them before Demo Day. It's all still true today.
Megan Maloney retweeted
If I had to restart @ElevenLabs GTM from scratch, these are the things that I would change 🖊️
- Hire quicker. I was alone selling for the first 9 months because I believed we didn't have PMF. Main reasons: the AI tourist external mantra of 2023, and the uphill battle convincing everyone to hire more GTM (Sales development, Sales, Customer Success) because we were still mostly PLG / self-service. The hiring constraint lasted until earlier this year when we boosted our team to meet demand.
- Build an enablement team earlier. Sales enablement has such an important role in an org, and we mostly think about it when we hire a lot of people. The reality is that we need Enablement earlier due to the speed of product iteration.
- Open more markets. The results from Uber v Lyft operating models played a key role in deciding to open markets early, but I would triple down on it if we were to start over.
- Have more big bets. Similar to VCs, you only need 1 big bet to work in order to generate Alpha. We could have executed more big bets if we had had a single person owning & iterating on them. Former successful founder profile with drive and speed.
- Be more vocal about product ROI & our success. People buy from people, and companies buy based on success & ROI. In AI, we've all been slow showing ROI. This should be the key number when you start a conversation.
- Hire senior sellers. In startups, we've been told that culture is everything and someone with +25y experience may struggle to fit in. This is bullshit. The experience, connections and drive +25y sellers bring is crazy. We have a bunch today, but I would hire many more earlier.
- Reduce cash commissions and replace them with more equity. Cash is king, but Equity is queen. Queens also rule countries, so why not make Equity the dominant one in GTM?
- Open more offices. We are a remote-first company, but our customers are everywhere, and employees want to meet each other. I would open more offices to be embedded in markets quicker.
- Fun brand. Brand perception is 33% of the work. Building a fun brand adds quickly.
- Outbounds outbounds outbounds. We waited too long to migrate to an Outbound organisation. I would do it from day 1 now.
- Pipeline construction with more whales. The ideal pipeline needs to have a combo of segments to reduce risk, improve results and provide liquidity. We waited too long to pitch & bring whales.
- Not all deals are good deals. We, sellers, want to close a lot of ARR, but it is important to split early on between good vs bad deals.
Thank you to Tomasz Gmur for asking how I would do GTM again!
this also applies to finding your first 20 customers
The most repeated fundraising advice on this app is "just send more cold emails to investors." I think it's actively bad advice for 90% of pre-seed founders. Thread:
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Cold outreach to VCs converts at roughly 5-15% reply rate when it's targeted. Untargeted blasts (wrong stage, wrong check size, wrong thesis) run closer to 95% non-reply. That's not a pitch problem. That's a targeting problem.
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I watch founders send 150 emails to "anyone who invests in software" and get 2 replies. Then I watch a founder send 25 emails to a list filtered on stage + check size + actual thesis match, and get 6 real conversations.
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Same effort. 6x the outcome. The difference was 20 minutes of research before the first email, not a better subject line.
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The volume-first advice persists because it's easy to give and easy to follow. "Send more" requires no judgment. "Send fewer, better-targeted" requires you to actually study who you're emailing.
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If you're fundraising right now: before you send email #50, go back and cut your list to the 20 investors who've actually written checks in your stage and sector in the last 12 months. You'll get more replies from fewer sends.
Megan Maloney retweeted
“Human wants and needs are endless.”—Milton Friedman
Megan Maloney retweeted
Paradigm’s 4th fund
$1.2B to invest and build in crypto, AI, robotics, and other areas of the technical frontier
Megan Maloney retweeted
The A.I. company Anthropic is expanding in New York City, with plans to lease a 16-story building in Lower Manhattan. nyti.ms/44BFLQ9