Inside Coatue’s Empire, Logan Murdock on Steph Curry, and Getting Amped up with Frank Slootman
Stretch Four Insights Volume 16
Happy Saturday.
Hope you all had a great week and are enjoying your weekend. I feel like we have reached the post-COVID era, and I for one am happy to see the world back to its normal extremities.
This week we are keeping it short and sweet as I get back to my roots of sharing my favorite article of the week, one startup insight, an NBA story that caught my eye, an excerpt from one of the books I am reading, and what I am working on next at ModernTax and Stretch Four
In this weeks newsletter I highlight:
A long-form piece on Coatue a leading new age investment firm
A startup insight on building great prototypes versus doing things that don’t scale
Logan Murdock’s latest piece on Steph Curry
An excerpt Amp It Up by Frank Slootman
What next at ModernTax & Stretch Four
With that said, let's get into it. And if you want to hear more or spread the word, subscribe and tell your friends!
Let’s dive in.
One long-form read
Coatue: An Agile Colossus | The Generalist
The Generalist is my favorite long-form media outpost on the internet right now. I digest most of what Mario creates via audio or the old fashion way, I read it. This week he did an amazing deep dive on Coatue Management one of the most important crossover investors in the past ten years. I thoroughly enjoyed his breakdown of their in-house tool, Mosaic, which purchases alternative data sets like expense account data and uses it to piece together customer lists for its prospects and portfolio companies. Additionally, the founder Phillippe LaFonte was described as being a guy who remembers every number you give him. Mario also explained how Coatue carefully analyzes how department budgets spend money to decide if the total addressable market of a prospective startup is big enough for an investment.
One startup insight & one counter insight
The sharp balance between solving a problem and shipping products fast!
I was intrigued by the above tweet on my timeline for a few reasons. On one hand, as a startup founder, you need to be able to create a culture of shipping code and features fast. Early on when pitching investors being able to show that you can prototype, run demos, and keep adding new features is crucial. In the high-stakes game of startup pitching, particularly in the Zoom/hybrid world, your first impression is more important than ever and your product needs to look amazing to get a second call with most top-tier investors.
A Secret from Waseem Daher, Founder & CEO at Pilot.com
This LinkedIn post from a friend and fellow founder, Waseem Daher, shows the other side of the coin where it is possible to fake it until you make or as Paul Graham says, “do things that don’t scale.” Sometimes, I think all you want as an early-stage startup founder is one paying customer and most importantly to be solving a problem. In many cases, you may not even need to build a product or write any code to do this. This perspective is interesting because Waseem and his team at Pilot had already started and successfully sold a previous startup, so they could have hired a team of engineers from day one out of their own pocket but they chose to do it the old school way. First to understand what the technology needed to do and then went on to reach a $1 billion valuation shortly thereafter.
One NBA piece of content
Curry, Calm and Collected | Logan Murdock
I grew up in the Charlotte, North Carolina area from the time I was 14 until I went to college and ironically graduated from a Christian high school similar to Steph and within the same years. Despite this, my wife still gives me the “he don’t know you” line any time I tell her I know Steph. *Wife edit: just because you’ve met him doesn’t mean you know him ;)
That aside, it’s been even more interesting being in the Bay Area for nearly 5 years to see the type of legacy he has been building for the past 13 years. Logan Murdock did a great piece on Steph that highlights how much Steph has prioritized building his legacy here in the Bay and his deep ties to Oakland. He also touches on the darker side of the past few years with the Warriors, his parent's divorce, and how all of the weight is something Steph’s been built to endure as he seeks to leave his final stamp on the Warriors as both a player and a local legend.
One book excerpt
If you don’t know how to execute, every strategy will fail, even the most promising ones. As one of my former bosses observed, “No strategy is better than execution.” - Frank Slootman, Amp It Up
Frant Slootman’s second book is about what would happen if motivation from David Goggins and management advice from Ray Dalio had a baby. In other words, Slootman is big on execution, making no excuses, and managing people at all costs. I will say this book is designed more for an executive at a public or later-stage company than an early-stage startup founder like myself, but this excerpt hit me hard as I recently was writing out my mission and vision for ModernTax. The next thing I had planned to write was my strategy and then I read Slootman’s take and felt compelled to do a bit more executing first. After all, business is all about execution!
What’s Next
ModernTax
At MT, I am focused on moving faster, hiring, and selling. On the moving fast side of things, we are trying to ship more and more features and updates ahead of onboarding new customers in March. This means writing out all the features, fixes, and integration we want to build and prioritizing which are most important. On the hiring front, we are hiring as many as three new engineers in the next few weeks to be able to do the moving fast part well. As for selling, I am looking to close two more deals this month and three more for next month. Once we hit 10, the plan is to hire our first salesperson.
Stretch Four
With Stretch Four, I am working on my second Long Four post and I plan to start experimenting with some video and podcasting.
Your feedback means the world to me so drop me an email at matt@stretchfour.co on what you would like coverage of, provide me with feedback on my format, and what you think is the best day of the week you would like to hear from me.
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Back to the trenches.
Best,