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brandonb
9,328karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.
Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.
Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)
CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)
Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology
HealthCare.gov rescue team
Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
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I'm the OP -- curious if anybody else here has given personalized feedback to candidates and has positive or negative experiences.
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The other implication is that control will become unbundled from money and advice. An investor who offered money without requiring founders to give up control--board seats, rights to block acquisitio…
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Congrats! This could be really big: one force that pressures B2B startups to get acquired is that huge companies have a big salesforce with existing customers. That makes it more efficient for multipl…
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That's a great heuristic. Reminds me of Keith Rabois's advice: select an early stage startup by evaluating who your manager will be. "If your manager is stellar, at a minimum, you will …
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Thanks for the comments! Yeah, some of the heuristics apply to non-startups, but some of them (like looking at investors in the top quartile) were very particular to the technology startup world. I li…
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I'm the OP. If anybody has questions or other heuristics they use, happy to chat here!
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This post was based on selling products to enterprises. I've never been a consultant, so I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect the rules are a bit different. For example, as a consulta…
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That sounds useful. I'm also a huge fan of Mark Suster's PUKKCA methodology:
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/06/13/why-your-start... …
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For SMB, you might try some of the "New Enterprise" models described at http://brandonb.cc/is-your-b2b-startup-new-enterprise-or-old... . Square is a great model to follow. F…
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Totally depends on the market. For example, most e-commerce companies are very comfortable using SaaS and Javascript snippets nowadays, but if you try to pitch SaaS to a bank, they'll just laugh.…
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Startups definitely go either way. If you're trying to get under the departmental budget line and then up-sell, then you might be what I call a "New Enterprise" startup. If that's …
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I would love to read that blog post too! It's great to understand how the other side thinks about things.
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About two years. Honestly, that was way too late -- if I could do it again, I'd put that person in place about a year into it. As hackers we learned to sell, which gave us valuable insight into t…
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Great points on social proof and profit centers and cost centers. If you're pitching top-line growth, then often you want to start at the top (CxO level if you can). How to run the "air war&…
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I'm the OP -- happy to answer any questions those of you running B2B startups might have!