The best startups acquire 70% of their users from just 1-2 growth channels

3 trends in startups/tech/venture

🚀 The best startups acquire 70% of their users from just 1-2 growth channels

• The fastest growing startups reach millions in revenue within months by focusing on acquiring customers through just 1-2 channels. Check out my business partner Sandy's post to learn more.

• Sandy and I just taught founders at Stanford how to leverage what we call “power acquisition channels” (more here) — our course at Stanford is called “Building and Scaling SaaS Startups: For Full-Time and Fractional Founders” (BUS 144). You can read more from our latest course slides here.

🤖 Humans are now managing AI agents

• Human teams are no longer merely using AI to augment their work. They’re now increasingly managing entire teams of AI “agents” who can work 24/7. This trend will change not only our work patterns (by shifting society away from the traditional 9-to-5 workday) but also our resource demands (by disrupting business models that rely on peak demand pricing).

• This impact will be particularly pronounced in professional services (across finance and law), since workers will now be able to do more complex and strategic work earlier in their careers (according to 83% of surveyed executives). This was a prominent theme during my talk at EY’s Disruptive Tech Program just last week.

💰 Acquirers of startups are looking for teams that know how to move fast and hire well

• In an era where AI is making work 100x more efficient, the startups that win are no longer those with a tech moat, but are those with a time moat. Even the best startups only have a 3-6 month edge over their competitors.

• It takes time to hire good people, so companies are increasingly acquiring each other just to poach the talent (as we saw with ServiceNow acquiring Moveworks). I had the opportunity to discuss this trend with Teresa who is on the Board of Directors for ServiceNow (more notes here).

• While it’s now easier than ever before to build a one-person unicorn thanks to AI, the best founders will be the ones that reinvest aggressively into growing faster, which inevitably means hiring more — and hiring the best.

2 theses on what’s next

🤩 Hype crashes are opportunities

• The Gartner Hype Cycle shows how all innovations take the same path—from “initial enthusiasm” (where we see inflated expectations) to “excessive correction” (where we see a trough of disillusionment) to “steady growth” (where we see society come to terms with the true value of a new idea).

• The best time to invest is when an innovation reaches the “excessive correction” stage. In the words of Warren Buffet, “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” We’re near the peak of “initial enthusiasm” for a few technologies, so we’re getting ready to pounce on opportunities.

🌱 The best founders can be found at stage “G” of the “GROW” journey

• Founders follow the "GROW" journey, where they Gather ideas (explore

  problem areas), Reimagine solutions (iterate through solutions), Optimize

  product (test demand and trying to reach PMF - product-market fit), and

  Win users (scale aggressively).

• We work with founders from the earliest "Gather" stage. We find founders well before they've even landed on their final startup idea or submitted their incorporation paperwork.

1 tool I love

🎓 Democratizing higher ed

• Woolf enables students to hyper-customize their own degrees, by turning the courses they’ve taken — even across multiple colleges or workplaces — into accredited degrees (more here). It also enables companies to secure academic accreditation for their corporate learning programs. Woolf’s latest educational partner? Harvard.

• I’ve had the fortune of serving on the Woolf Academic Advisory Council.