The power of influence 💪

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Dec 7 2020

The power of influence 💪

#138:

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It isn't news to you and me that people get influenced by movies (and a lot of other things too but yeah). Most times they get influenced by the actors and want to be like them, and sometimes they get influenced by the story behind it. I personally fall into the latter category.

Now let's take an example of my recent favorite show "The Queens Gambit"I hadn't played chess in the longest time, probably 15 years. but after watching that show I downloaded an app to play it. But it wasn't only me. Chess.com saw 100,000 downloads every day after the release of the show. eBay saw a 3x spike in the search for chess boards. Clearly, the influence of the story or the role of the character has made an impact here.

So, if we were to draw a parallel to the startup ecosystem, there are two ways you can influence your customers or/and investors

1. Influence by your skills; be it your product, education, experience, learnings

2. Influence by your story; how and why you ended up building your startup

In case, you have an interesting story behind your startup and how you ended up starting it, feel free to write in, and I'll share it across :)

PS: I feel Let's Build a Company: A Start-up Story Minus the Bullshit by Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal should be converted into a movie, maybe it might influence more people in India to build great companies

ज्ञान

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Instacart is having one heck of a year. The company spent $27 million on efforts to help secure the recent victory of Proposition 22 in California, which will shift labor laws that benefit gig economy-driven startups. But prior to their success at the ballot box, the company was already stacking up one achievement after another this year.

In April 2020, Instacart had its first profitable month of operation, an increasingly rare find in Silicon Valley. And successful strategic partnerships continue to emerge; in Q3, the delivery app added retail giants Sephora and Bed Bath & Beyond to its options.

💸 From first call to first close — VC raise!

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At the outset, I recognize that most of you have got ‘VC gyaan’ from someone on LinkedIn or Twitter. This post is slightly different — my observations as a 1st time founder.

🙇🏻 I sold Baremetrics - Baremetrics

2020 has turned in to one of the most unusual years of my life, for both the obvious reasons but also for reasons I definitely wasn’t expecting at the start of the year. After 7 years of work building this little company, Baremetrics has a new home.
I won’t bury the lede here. In our usual transparent fashion, I’ll lay out all the top-level bits everyone’s interested in, then I’ll dive in to how we got here! A year and a half ago, I started entertaining offers. We had a buyer who, long story short, didn’t work out. That was an incredibly draining six months and I was ready to get back to work.

💰 The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in Supporting Female Entrepreneurs

There is much discussion and debate about how to support female entrepreneurs — and rightly so. Currently, women-led businesses are less likely to survive, despite evidence that their startups are often highly successful. New analysis by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that if women and men around the world participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could ultimately rise by approximately 3% to 6%, boosting the global economy by $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion.

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