Whenever someone asks me what product led growth (PLG) is, I like to start by asking them how their company adopted Slack.

I don’t know your company’s story, but I’m guessing this is how it happened: Jane heard about Slack from a friend, so she signed up and started using it with her team. Pretty soon the whole company was on Slack, and no one can remember life before it.
Most software companies dream of seeing people adopt their product like this. But they don’t know how to get there. From the outside, it looks like magic.

According to Andreessen Horowitz, this number is one of the top 16 metrics to measure a SaaS startup by. Well, sorry Andreessen, and sorry Horowitz, but this just isn't right.

It's counterintuitive, but it's a statistical fact: This number actually tells you nothing useful about churn, but really relates to the age of the subscriptions you have. It will in most cases go down on it's own, and, absurdly, the only way to keep it from going down is to have very high growth. So the number will literally only look bad if your business is doing extremely well, and optimizing for it will be directly counter-productive. The error here is a simple statistical mistake that is easy to make, and luckily also easy to understand and avoid.

India has 13M kirana stores in India, that is 1 store for every 100 Indians. The kiranas alone account for 90% sales in the food and grocery segment. 

As the pandemic hit India in 2020, many of us found ourselves rushing back to nearby kirana stores rather than the giant retail stores. We rediscovered solace in the home deliveries on a phone call, settling monthly/weekly bills, and regular greetings from acquaintances at nearby stores behind masks. But apart from us, there are some more parties who have been visiting the Kiranas for some time now - the leading tech firms and startups striving to make their mark in the space. 

Erik Torenberg is hard to put in a box.

When you think of him, what comes to mind first? His investments with Village Global? His time as an operator at Product Hunt? The Venture Stories podcast he hosts? Or the digital university he founded, On Deck?

Often in this newsletter, I write about venture capitalists, creators, and founders: Erik is all of those things, rolled into one. He's one of the hardest-working people in tech, and yet when I spoke with him, I was struck by how low-key he is, how relaxed.

It's perhaps why when I think of Erik — a tech mainstay that moonlights as a freestyle rapper — two words come to mind: hustle and flow. He is someone unafraid to work hard, to take swings, to hustle, but does so in a way that makes you think he barely sweats.