BC STARTUPS
Saved by @Massimokris

.@zapier built a $140M ARR business on $1.4M in VC that has become the logic layer of the no-code industry.

But it has the potential to be something even bigger: the Netflix of productivity.

Our report and a thread 👉

 We believe @seqouia and @steadfast got a good deal buying into Zapier at $5B.

We value Zapier at $7B based on:

- 30-50% YoY growth over the next five years
- Zapier’s monopoly status in the solopreneur/SMB market
- 30-40% YoY growth of no-code TAM
No-code is huge and growing, but as @edavidpeterson has written, no-code is about more than tools: it’s about a philosophy that emphasizes interoperability and customizing your software to your needs.

https://t.co/UJY6BRtXwl
.@zapier enabled interoperability by building a solution to one of the intractable problems in SaaS: APIs that don’t talk to each other.

The product took off and hit $100M ARR in just 9 years, comparable to companies that have raised 100x as much money.

https://t.co/0Thk42eRpJ
Zapier was riding an explosion in APIs that started the same year they were founded—2011.

Suddenly, every SaaS business wanted to offer its users extensibility, but not spend time figuring out what integrations to build or building them.

That’s where Zapier came in handy.
With Zapier, companies could write a few simple integrations and immediately be paired up with hundreds, then thousands of other apps.

For them, integrating with Zapier delivered value to their users, but it also provided a new distribution channel.
There’s a parallel here between how companies thought about Zapier and how studios thought about @netflix.

Studios thought Netflix was just another distribution channel.

All the while, it was becoming a hugely influential platform of its own.
Like Netflix, Zapier built a growth engine based on content—specifically, programmatically generated, SEO-optimized landing pages for each new integration on the platform.

Today, Zapier gets 6M+ site visits per month, more than @Deadspin, @TeenVogue or @Gothamist.
To the chagrin of some of Zapier’s partners, Zapier advertises their competitors on those same pages.

Rather than simply a utility to connect two products, Zapier has become an ecosystem unto itself—a marketplace for applications driving discoverability and setting standards.
One of Zapier's big challenges is the rise of native integrations, with companies bringing their integrations in-house via tools like @trayio and @useparagon to improve the user experience.

(See: studios like @Disney building apps like @disneyplus)
For SaaS companies, sending customers away to Zapier to wire up their own integrations is bad UX.

There’s a world where companies, optimizing for activation, build the handful of native integrations that are most valuable in-house and outsource the rest.
In some verticals, companies are taking on Zapier by building automation solutions that do a better job with the JTBD in a specific market, like @AlloyAutomation or @parabolahq in ecommerce, @LevityAI in machine learning, and other “Zapier for X” companies.
Then there’s @airtable, which announced last year that it was building out its own integration platform in a shot across the bow.

It turns out the whole “AWZ stack” is an unstable triad, with all three players converging on each other, directly or indirectly.
But Zapier has a secret weapon—a huge audience for whom they are the #1 destination not just for finding integrations but for insights into productivity and lists of the best tools.
If Zapier flipped Airtable’s strategy around, and built a Zapier-native data store to eat Airtable, they would have a huge preloaded customer base and the ability to enable far more powerful and robust workflows from right within Zapier.
This would be Zapier’s “Netflix” move.

Netflix changed the content game by modularizing TV and movies and getting closer to viewers, and doing so gave them the data they needed to become an original content powerhouse.
Zapier has commoditized its partners. The data they get from them on how their products are used is without parallel. They've started building their own version of original content in Zapier native actions.
Now, Zapier has the opportunity to not just pipe its customers’ data around, but own it, and become a productivity super aggregator.
We go into far more depth in our full report where we break down Zapier’s growth engine, their bear/base/bull cases and the whole competitive landscape for no-code and automation.

Check it out here 👉 https://t.co/0uYru7oEOS

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Sharath \U0001f4e3
Sharath 📣
@5harath
From day 1, I intended to build @shoutoutso_ in public, and part of it is to be transparent with numbers, talk openly about our highs and lows, and share lessons as we grow!

I have been doing individual posts on numbers every week so wanted to one big thread with all updates 👇🏽

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Eric
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1/ Recently, I learned about the concept of ‘struggle porn’. This refers to the fetish of sacrificing nearly everything (health, relationships, time) for your startup. I fear that this label is creating more harm than good.

2/ @nateliason wrote a fabulous article about this topic, which first introduced me to this concept. Everyone should read it:

3/ @alexisohanian also recently spoke about struggle porn, though referring to it as ‘hustle porn.’ (as the co-founder of @hustlefundvc, obviously I take issue with this pejorative definition of ‘hustle’, but that’s another topic)

4/ Struggling in itself isn’t necessarily bad. Let’s be real here--if you’re going to start a startup, you will struggle. Founders should expect to work harder generally than employees. You will be challenged in many ways and also be super rewarded in others. This is normal.

5/ However, if you are over-indexing on hard work without clear purpose and degrading your mental health/relationships in the process--then this is very bad and we obviously should not celebrate this behavior.
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Marc K\xf6hlbrugge
Marc Köhlbrugge
@marckohlbrugge
💬 I often get Q’s like these:

How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic? Etc.

Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success. I see it everywhere.

I don’t think it works that way and the answers to those questions are mostly useless. 💥

I have built dozens of different products over the last couple of years. The vast majority failed. 😭

Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷‍♀️

So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔

99.9% of the questions I receive are about the products that did well. In a way that makes sense, because we quickly forget about those that didn’t succeed.

🧠 This is known as survivorship bias.

Focusing on what survived, while ignoring what made it survive in the first place.

The real question, what you really want to know, is this:

What makes @WIP, @BetaList, and to some extent @AllStartupJobs succeed where my countless other attempts failed?

What separates a failed product 👎 from a successful product 👍?

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I did.

It’s like Steve Jobs said “I’ll know it when I see it.” 👀

Same is true when we make products. We don’t know upfront what will work. But once we see an inkling of a product that does have potential, it’s not that hard to spot.
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Gagan Biyani
Gagan Biyani
@gaganbiyani
Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.
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Massimo Di Berardino
Massimo Di Berardino
@Massimokris
@_shahedk @buzz_chronicles save as startups

@buzz_chronicles @buzz_chronicles save as startups
STARTUPS , STARTUPS THANKS HTTPSTCOBYLE1EMWXB

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#3/thread on Angkor wat

Christianity and islam may be the largest religion of today’s world but Sanatan dharm has the largest religious monument in the world in the form of Angkor wat. It is situated in combodia and spread across over 400 acres / 1.6 km².


It was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, which encouraged an international effort to save the complex.
It was originally built as a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu. In Khmer, the Cambodian language, Angkor means "city" and Wat means "temple grounds".


So Angkor Wat means "Temple City". Its original name was Vrah Vishnuloka or Parama Vishnuloka, meaning the sacred dwelling of Vishnu in Sanskrit.
But, it gradually turned into a Buddhist temple towards the end of the 12th century & is still used for worship today.


Angkor Wat was initially designed and constructed in the first half of the 12th century, during the reign of Suryavarman II, as the king’s state temple and capital city. It was built without the aid of any machinery, as there was no machinery available at that time.


Evidence for these dates comes in part from inscriptions, which are vague, but also from the architectural design and artistic style of the temple and its associated sculptures.

Another aspect is that the five central towers of Angkor Wat symbolize the peaks of Mount Meru,
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Rudy Havenstein, listening to Nas all day.
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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991." https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.
EPSTEIN NETWORK
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Meet Shah
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@ms89_meet
List of companies with more than 50% Market Share:

1) Maruti Suzuki (passenger cars)
2) APL Apollo (structural & pre galvanized tubes)
3) CDSL (investors accounts)
4) Interglobe Aviation (air traffic passengers)
5) GMM Pfaudler (glass lined equipment)

6) Asian Paints (decorative paints)
7) Colgate (oral care)
8) Symphony (coolers)
9) PGHH (female care & vaporub)
10) La Opala Rg (opalware)
11) HLE Glasscoat (filtration & drying equipment)
12) Delta Corp (online poker games)
13) Bajaj Auto (3W segment)
14) Vinati Organics (IBB)

15) OCCL (insoluble sulphur)
16) LMW (textile machinery)
17) Bajaj Consumer (almond hair oil)
18) Indiamart Intermesh (online B2B Classified space)
19) Vst Tillers (power tillers)
20) Sanghvi Movers (overall domestic crane hiring market)
21) Emami (antiseptic & male grooming)

List of companies with more than 60% Market Share:

1) Concor (domestic container cargo transport)
2) Exide (lead batteries)
3) Naukri (Indian job market space)
4) Praj (ethanol plant installing)
5) ACE (mobile & tower cranes)
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7) Jamna Auto (leaf spring)

8) CAMS (RTA within mutual fund industry)
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Thread: History of Mogadishu and it’s conquest by Imaam Al Yaqubi


One of the First Imaams of the Hiraab Imamate was Mohamed Ibn Imaam Ahmed ibn Imam Ahmed Ibn Imaam Mohamoud Ibn Imaam Cumar Halol Al Yacquubi (Abgaal) during the year 1097 hijri.


After the collapse of the Ajuuran Abgaal nomads from the interior had started moving to take over the strategic port town of Mogadishu which was then under the muzzafar dynasty. By the 1600s Abgaal warriors had captured the city and set up their base in shingaani.


Mogadishu at the time was a large and well known port town. The Abgaal clan taking over control allowed them to obtain political power and world wide recognition.


Under Imaam Yaqubi’s time in power it’s reported that French merchants had arrived at the port in 1701
and stayed for 11 days. They had attempted to take the city but were successfully repulsed.
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
GHATI SUBRAMANYA, DODDABALLAPURA (KAR)
#bharatmandir

One of the most important place for snake worship.
The murtis of Kartikeya and Narasimha are self-manifested.
There is an anthill which is opposite the shrine. Bhaktas pour milk on it as part of rituals.


Here Subramanya performed penance in the form of snake. He sought protection from Narsimha for Nagas from Sri Vishnu’s vehicle Garuda, known for his dislike towards serpents.
The Pushya Suddha Shasti is one of the biggest festivals here believed to be appearance day of Subramanya


It was in this region where Subramanya vanquished Ghatikasura, the demon. Hence called Ghati Subramanya.
Childless couples visit here to seek blessings for getting a child.
The installation of snake murtis near the shrine is believed to be an auspicious act.


The murti of Karthikeya with a seven headed cobra faces eastwards while Narasimha faces westwards.
To ensure that both are visible to bhaktas at the same time, a huge mirror is placed in the rear in the sanctum sanctorum.
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