mattmickiewicz

[mattmickiewicz]

How to Make Decisions As A CEO

Let me start off with a quick story that might be helpful --

A few years ago, I was fortunate to spend over 2 hours at dinner with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix.

The thing that stuck out to me the most from that conversation is this quote: "My goal as CEO is make zero decisions in any given year".

I thought this was a pretty fantastic mental model, given he has been hyperscaling one of the most successful tech companies for over two decades.

While it's obviously aspirational, it's something very worthy to strive for.

Anytime you have to make a decision, try to dig into the root cause of it:

I didn't empower my managers to make this decision

My managers don't have enough context to make an accurate decision, so I have to make it (internal communication)

The team/company isn't responding quickly enough to changes in the market / they are being too conservative (company values problem)

etc.

The book "Good Profit" talks about pushing down decision making authority to people with the most context. As the company gets bigger, each of us will have less and less context to make small decisions, so we need to delegate to the people in the company with the best chance of making the right call.

Once you get to scale as CEO of a $50m+ revenue company, you should be like teflon - tasks and decisions should roll off you like water and be routed to the most appropriate person. It's less about improving your 50/50 business decision ratio, it's about not making most of those decisions in the first place because you've recruited the right people and set the right goals to incentivize the right behaviours.

There's very little actual "work" you should be doing on a day to day basis other than setting pace & expectations, recruiting, communicating externally (press), communicating goals & values internally on a consistent  basis, and helping remove roadblocks for your direct reports that would prevent them from achieving their personal OKRs.

[mattmickiewicz]

2024 Year In Review!

The numbers tell one story: 37 flights, 6 countries, 32 unique places to rest my head. 

The year included some in-depth explorations of Greece (7 cities), Bali (5 cities) and Australia (6 cities). 

But numbers can't capture the richness of a year spent exploring the world's hidden corners and celebrated landmarks, from the sun-baked streets of Tucson to the ancient stones of Greek monasteries.

January started off with a few nights in Tucson, including a taqueria crawl in search of the best quesabirria tacos & a visit to what is surely one of the most epic aviation museums in the US. Since it was still cold back home, we headed to the sunshine of Palm Springs, a city that I haven’t been to in years (it hasn’t changed much).

By late May, we headed towards Europe starting in what is surely one of the great  museum cities of the world: Vienna. Aside from the epic 1441 room Schonbrunn Palace, we spent days in the Kunsthistorisches, Belvedere, Albertina, Hofburg and Natural History Museums.  As a fan of Bruegel’s paintings, being able to see the world’s biggest collection in person was a real highlight.

After that, it was off to the islands of Greece, starting off with Corfu where one evening we found ourselves in the old castle almost completely alone after hours thanks to a strategic reservation at the Corfu sailing club for dinner. 

The trip included some epic experiences, from creating pottery on Sifnos (and successfully transporting it home to use!), milking a goat and making cheese on a farmstead on Sifnos, to riding through a outdoor restaurant on horseback to take the horse swimming in the Adriatic sea on the island of Hydra (which has stunning sunsets), to visiting Delos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delos) one evening when it was almost empty to dancing the night away at Scorpios and Alemagou. 

I’d also be remiss not to mention visiting the 15th century The Saint Dimitrios Avgou monastery of Didima, which is well off the tourist trail, at an elevation of 850 meters, accessible only via 4x4 or a long hike. A truly special place, with a spectacular view over the valley. 

Tasting the highest polyphenol olive oil in the world at The Governor Mill, fishing in Hydra (and eating it right there on the boat - can’t get any fresher!), visiting the ancient theatre of Epidavros, Citadel of Mycene, and a Nafplio area creamery where we had the world’s best tomato (from the owners neighbours garden) along with the tastiest feta cheese. 

On another night, after climbing up a treacherous cobbled lane at dusk, we found ourselves at the top of the medieval city of Monemvasia alone. The views and silence where simply stunning,

I wish we could have stayed longer but it was getting dark and the path back was anything but safe at night. The “parting of the tourist crowds” repeated itself again in Nafplio castle, where I was able to snap pictures without another person in sight. 

After a few weeks in Europe, sadly it was time to go home but not before a pit-stop in Milan - an Italian city I’ve never visited despite more than a handful of trips to the country. While not my absolute favourite Italian city, seeing the Duomo which took 579 years to build and seeing the largest collection of writings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci (the Codex Atlanticus at the Pinacoteca Museum) certainly made it worthwhile stop. Before heading home, I stopped in Paris for two nights to meet with the Day One Ventures crew, and stock up on chocolate from Patrick Roger.

After coming home and enjoying the summer, it was time for a week in New York of shopping, eating, before coming home and packing for Bali & Australia. Highlights included the purification ceremony at Tirta Empul temple, making silver jewelry for the first time, hand feeding civets (cuteness overload) and learning to cook Balinese dishes. The ATV trip that we did through the jungles and waterfalls was also absolutely epic - driving through a river in a deep gorge, with a waterfall on on side, overlooked by giant ferns was like stepping back in time a million years. 

In Australia, a helicopter took us over the great barrier reef and a visit the 180 million year old Daintree Rainforest & Mossman Gorge where highlights in Port Douglas, in addition to seeing my first ever  Cassowary bird. Hartley’s Crocodile Park was also a fun stop over. 

Shows

Ludacris rolled into the 604 area code, and put on a show in Vancouver that was super fun.

During the year, we saw Jersey Boys in Vancouver this year, while seeing The Magician (Dan White) in New York perform some impressive tricks with audience participation. 

While in NYC, I also stumbled upon the largest immersive theatre experience at Life and Trust and nabbed some last minute tickets. Exploring the for a few hours, and quite a good workout to. I’ll never say no to immersive theatre. 

Restaurants

The Carolina’s had no lack of great food, from Bar167 & Sushi167 in Charleston to Fin & Fino in Charlotte. 

The always-great Leons & Obstinate Daughter also delivered during our road trip. 

I ended up celebrating my birthday at Verso in Milan, but my favourite meals of the year where at local restaurants on Sifnos as well as epic Mexican lunch at Oxomoco in Brooklyn. While in NYC, I also managed to eat a few Omakase’s as well as some terrific Italian at Misi and Lilia in Brooklyn. Francie in NYC, Montalto Winery Restaurant in the Morning Peninsula and the tasting menu at Maha in Melbourne also stood out as meal highlights during the year.

Wine Stuff.

The year's vinous journey spanned continents, each bottle telling its own story of place and time. Greece introduced me to the complexity of Assyrtiko and Xinomavro, with the 2022 Gaia Wild Ferment and 2019 Argyros Evdemon cuvee standing as memorable highlights. These wines, notoriously difficult to find back home, offered a compelling reason to savor each glass.

Australia's Pinot Noirs revealed their cool-climate elegance, particularly in bottles from Tasmania that rarely cross the Pacific. Standouts included the precise 2018 Moorooduc Robinson Vineyard, the elegant 2022 Anim 

Wines "Windrush," the sophisticated 2022 By Farr "Farrside," and the compelling 2022 Stargazer Pinot.

Wine exploration took us through Austria's Wachau Valley, where countless Gruner Vetliners accompanied stunning vineyard views. The Austrian concept of wine taverns - simple, affordable, and deeply authentic - offered a fresh perspective on wine culture. Three days spent exploring the wineries of Australia's Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley added their own chapters to the story.

The year brought numerous memorable bottles: the powerful 2014 and 2015 Bevan Sugarloaf Mountain, an elegant 2018 Mayer Cabernet, a classic 2005 Duhart-Milon, and the expressive 2016 Long Shadow Pedestal Merlot. The 2010 Attilio Ghisolfi Barolo Bricco Visette showed Piedmont at its finest, while the 2013 Checkmate Merlot "End Game" proved Canadian wine's potential. Other standouts included the 2018 Hickinbotham Trueman Cabernet, the refined 2015 Skipstone Oliver's Blend, a memorable 2019 Tignanello, and the traditional 2015 Camerano Cannubi Lorenzo. The 2019 Madson Winery "Ascona" Pinot, 2019 Brittan Gestalt Block Pinot, and the 2021 Carlisle Zinfandel "Carlisle Vineyard" rounded out a year of exceptional wines.

Movies & TV

2024, marked the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm a 12 season show that spanned 24 years (!). One of the truly greats, and it was sad to see it end along with the final season of The Grand Tour on Amazon, though I continue to enjoy watching Jeremy’s Farm.

After being told by everybody and their dog that I have to watch “The Wire”, I finally started and  promptly finished the first three seasons. Nobody Wants This, Brothers Sun, The Diplomat, The Bear, and The Gentlemen rounded out my favourite TV shows for the year.

On the movie side, Inside, Saltburn, Dune 2, Civil War, Raging Grace, Ministry of Ungentlemently Warfare and The Whale stood out. 

Books

I read across the spectrum this year, from food travelogues like “Pasta Pane Vino” and “Grape Olive Pig”, to wine books like Brunello & Montalcino by O’Keefe.

Others included The Gentlemen in Moscow (incredibly well written), The People Smuggler (harrowing) and The Wilderness Family which recounts life in Kruger Park and raising a lion as a family pet. 

I also really enjoyed “A Man for All Markets” by Edward Thorp whose stories and achievements are beyond epic, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (highly recommended), and One Second After which realistically portrays life after an EMP. I even managed to find time to re-read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. 

I’m ending the year with 9 books in my “to read” pile, as well a dozens more on my Amazon wish list. 

Investments

Invested in Starpath Robotics, Wordware, Tivara and Lantern during the course of the year, while watching the progress of A.I. go absolutely vertical. I've been becoming increasingly worried about SaaS software as a category given the progress of coding agents like Replit and Loveable, while seeing headcount & SaaS seat growth being replaced with AI tools instead.

I've witnessed the dramatic efficiency gains first-hand, as I now have multiple companies that are profitable off of their seed or pre-seed rounds which is absolutely stunning to see.

My biggest regret in 2024 was overthinking the purchase of Agent.ai (trying to negotiate the price), thus loosing out the valuable domain name to Dharmesh Shah. Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to over-optimizing....

[mattmickiewicz]

This resonated:

"When I was a CEO, during the dark times I personally felt this as the “clenching feeling of death.” deep in my guts.

Read that all again. Think about your life now. Maybe you’re in a post doc program, or have a nice job at Google or OpenAI with a steady salary, a clear trajectory, and instant street cred.

Do you still want to start a company?

Many first time founders start companies without realizing what it actually takes. Jensen Huang recently said he wouldn’t do it again. Most great founders start a company because they have to do it. Not necessarily because they want to do it. It’s a compulsion, rather than a choice."

[mattmickiewicz]

"AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027."

[mattmickiewicz]

This is a great piece on finding a wedge into a market... - At 99designs we combined a 10X ROI wedge ($300 vs. $10,000 for a logo) with the "underserved needs" wedge (targeting small companies who where afraid or didn't know how to engage with designers or agencies). To top it all off, we offered a 100% money back guarantee allowing people to get hundred's of designs with zero risk. - At Flippa, we applied the repurposed asset wedge to help M&A at price points that were ignored by brokers and investment bankers allowing people to transact templates for a few hundred dollars or micro-businesses in the $50k-$250K range with amazing sell-through rates. - At Hired.com, we utilized the status wedge (only top 5% of developers accepted), with the transparency wedge (get salary information before you interview) with a radical reduction in new customer onboarding friction by utilizing a clickthrough Terms of Service to get agreement to our 15% fee - no sales calls, no demo's, no DocuSign, required in the early days.

[mattmickiewicz]

I love this PG essay.

Find something you're excessively interested in. Luck is involved in stumbling upon the right field, so increase your luck surface area by being curious. Read, ask questions, meet lots of people.

Optimize for things that are interesting to you, band become more interesting the deeper down the rabbit hole you go

Don't lan too much - but be bold. At each stage, do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the most options.

Get to the frontier of knowledge and identify the gaps through deep curiosity. Spend an unreasonable amount of time on a problem as long as you find the work engaging.

Boldly chase outlier ideas, especially if they are being ignored by others. Preserve your childhood nerdiness. Tell others about your ideas, rather than being pessimistic or cynical and critiquing others.

Talking, writing, or working on something that's "slightly too diffucult" is the best way to have original ideas

Good ideas often seem both new and obvious while breaking rules. To others, the new model at least implicitly breaks rules others take for granted.

Carrying around unanswered questions increases the odds of you noticing a solution. Pay attention to things that seem wrong or missing when you're learning about something for the first time.

Take as much risk as possible. Fail occasionally.

[mattmickiewicz]

A Post-Mortem.

What might happen if Uber tried to transition to a SaaS business? A fictional story. 

Imagine a transactional business, like the Uber we know today, going through the transition, and what might happen along the way. 

Uber starts off as a beautifully simple business. People pay per ride. Friction to becoming a customer is low. The unit economics are relatively fixed, since the revenue per ride is predictable. The growth is tremendous, and the media is raving. 

Within 30 months of launching, a massive acquisition offer comes in the door. The company has raised very little money at this point, and the payouts to shareholders would be massive. G650’s for everybody! 

The board decides that now is the time for “professional management” to replace the Founder. There’s too much money at stake. A CEO is brought in, perhaps someone with an MBA or a law degree. He’s great at PowerPoint. 

Everything with the merger is looking swimmingly. The press release is drafted and the announcement to employees is about to be made. We’re right at the finish line. There’s just one last thing: the new CEO has a lot of freshly minted stock options that came with the promotion & which are unvested. It’s time for the Chairman of the Board to send an email to the acquirer, asking them to be accelerated. The email is drafted, a prestigious investment bank (MS) signs off on the move and the Chairman hits “send”. The acquirer panics, and within hours the deal collapses leaving the company with a 7-figure legal bill and no deal. So close! 

Perhaps it’s time to shift strategy. While transactional pricing was great and led to the massive acquisition offer, SaaS is more predictable. And it gets a higher revenue multiple. The urge is irresistible. So Uber starts to transition, asking customers to commit to an annual, pre-paid fee for unlimited rides. 

You can imagine that going from paying $15 per ride to paying $1200 or more for an annual subscription would reduce the number of customers. Perhaps as much as 80%. That’s a lot of purchase friction to overcome, necessitating the investment in a sales team for the very first time.

And sales teams are expensive, particularly when a decision is made to hire mostly in San Francisco. As the company lights cash on fire, the new CEO seeks to meet operating expense goals to save face in front of the board of directors. There’s only one place to look: driver marketing costs. So they cut, and cut and cut and cut. Every quarter. 

Slowly, the culture inside the company starts to shift. The values that drove the early success of the business erode, as the new CEO brings in a new suite of VPs to run the company and indoctrinates them around the SaaS story. Talk about “ride quality”, and “pick-up times” fade away in favor of bookings, ARR and quotas. 

A board director recommends a strategy consultant who is quickly hired. At a very hefty price, demanding half a million dollars in a suitcase and millions in equity. After doing what consultants do for a few weeks, they present their PowerPoint. Uber is no longer a ride sharing marketplace. It’s a “Ride Opportunity Network”. They tell management to stop launching new markets and focus on the core. That means the disappearance of one of the biggest growth drivers for the business: new market launches.

Meanwhile, topline revenue flatlines. But by downplaying and eventually killing the transactional business, ARR grows quickly. It should after all - the starting point is $0, and there’s plenty of transactional customers to draw upon. Even if only 15-20% commit to an annual subscription, ARR will grow quickly during the first 24 months. 

But there’s an unintended consequence. All of a sudden the revenue per ride is all over the map. Some heavy users, at the end of a year, have paid just $5 per ride. Others have paid $100 per trip. It’s easy to predict who will churn, and who will not. When this is pointed out in a board meeting, company management replies that people pay for opportunities to ride, and not just ride themselves, and name-checks a customer who ‘overpaid’ at the end of a one-year contract and still renewed. Issue addressed.

Despite unlimited pricing, the volume of rides goes from doubling or tripling every year to growing low single digits. Part of that is because 80% of customers have been pushed out due to upfront pricing, and part because drivers just aren’t available a lot of the time when riders open the app, due to driver marketing budget cuts. Even with unlimited pricing, customers can’t catch a ride when none is available. This exacerbates the multi-tenanting challenges, as customers install 2 or 3 ride sharing apps, in case a car isn’t available. The network effects flywheel has developed a serious kink. 

“Supply Drives Demand” - CEO of Fiverr https://www.nfx.com/post/fiverr-road-to-growth/

Churn ends up very high, perhaps as much as 50%, as it turns out that many of the old “pay per ride” customers who were sold into a subscription would have been better under the old plan. They were always going to be occasional users and they leave after their annual contract is up. It’s cheaper just to call the occasional taxi when needed.

Topline revenue remains flat for another year. But because the most profitable customers leave, while the ones generating the heaviest losses stay, the red ink continues to add up. Once again, the company responds by further decreasing driver marketing, exasperating pick-up times issues and service levels. It’s the only way to keep expenses under control without resorting to layoffs, but it just makes an already bad problem even worse. The companies executive team starts hiring private chauffeurs, as driver inventory on the marketplace dwindles.

But then the M&A gods look down in favour at the company, as another interested buyer walks in the door and presents an offer. It’s lower, a lot lower than when this was a 100% transactional business. So much for the SaaS premium. But it was an offer nonetheless, and one that would provide cash to shareholders of common stock. However, there’s just one problem - it generates 0% IRR for the most recent investor, who quickly asks that his financing documents be revised to guarantee a return. Despite months of effort, the deal falls apart and another competitor is acquired instead. 

Escalation of Commitment into a Failing Strategy.

Meanwhile, cash is quickly running out. Traditional growth equity investors seeing the high churn, flat revenue, and continued losses bow out. But the charismatic CEO manages to convince some unconventional investors - maybe pension funds or family offices - to write big checks instead to continue to fund the operation. But even they are not stupid, demanding punitive liquidation preferences in exchange for a flat-valuation allowing management to “save face”. Common shareholders get pushed punished by the punitive terms. 

But despite the cash infusion, the high churn makes it nearly impossible to grow the business. The most profitable customers, those who use the service occasionally, continue to leave in droves. After a while, all the easy pickings are exhausted by the sales team. All the transactional customers that could be talked into an annual subscription have been converted. Quotas start to get missed. Closed-won numbers plummet. A parade of C-Level and VP-level executives, seeing the writing on the wall, start leaving. 67 in all. It’s easy to imagine that the year finishes with a 50% miss on board goal. 

The board meetings increasingly become all about “keeping up appearances”. Entire days are blocked off to tightly orchestrate and rehearse the performance prior to investors entering the board room. Almost no time is left for debate or questioning. Rather than finding the right answers, the 4-hour marathons devolve into an extended pitch session where the quarter’s numbers, whatever they happen to be, are ��sold”. When quarter over quarter comparisons go bad, year-over-year charts are brought out. And when those don’t work, there’s always 3-Year CAGR numbers to boast about. Over time, board meeting dates start slipping, and numbers aren’t reported until months after the close of the quarter.

What happens at the board meetings is also reflected downward. The CEO tightens control of information, including the hefty liquidation preferences of the last round, for fear of demotivating his direct reports. With the team only getting a partial picture of the company’s health, they are powerless to take the dramatic actions needed to turn the ship around. As long as the message from the top remains that everything is going great, and that more investor money is incoming, there’s no need to change. The lack of transparency is stifling. 

Another consequence of moving from transactional to SaaS model is that there’s just fewer customers, which means much lower driver utilization. That wasn’t supposed to be the case! Whereby in the good old days, drivers would spend 90% of their time with passengers, now 40% of the time they are signing on and not getting a single ride request! This is not great for driver NPS scores, which are quickly shuffled out of the board deck. Best not to shine a light into those dark corners.  

The product roadmap changes as well. Uber is no longer just about getting people from Point A to Point B. It’s now a SaaS platform company. Surely, the CEO posits, a few extra features will reduce churn and boost net dollar retention, which sadly sits in the bottom quartertile. The teams get busy, and soon riders can access analytics that show them their average moving speed during travel and how it compares against others, while a nifty AR overlay highlights interesting facts about landmarks as they drive past them. Yet churn remains stubbornly high. Perhaps it’s time for an acquisition? 

With all these customers on subscription contracts, surely there must be something else that Uber can sell them. And what do all riders have in common? They have mouths. So a meal kit delivery company is bought, at a 40X multiple. Spreadsheets are drawn up justifying the acquisition. We have people. People eat. If we can upsell only 10% of our customers into buying a meal kit subscription, this acquisition will quickly pay for itself. After all, the new class of preferred stock created to pay for the acquisition sits below investors money and they can easily defer the cash payments to the acquired company into the future. The acquisition is quickly approved. Only one board member votes against the deal (cough, cough). 

Sadly, like 90% of acquisitions, this one too fails to deliver on its promises. 

Maybe a party to rally the troops will turn things around? A fancy resort is rented, perhaps somewhere in Napa. People are flown in from all over the world. Presentations are rehearsed, PowerPoint decks are buffed, photographers and videographers are hired and buses booked. The CEO gives an inspiring presentation. Investors & board members get up on stage talking about how amazing the company is, hoping that by inciting the right combination of words will result in revenue doubling over the upcoming year. Alcohol flows freely. 

But alas, it is not to be. No amount of motivational speeches or employee training can overcome bad strategy and leadership. The next few quarters remain as flat as a pancake. A saviour is needed! Perhaps a new $50,000 per month Chief Revenue Officer. But he’s demanding, only business class flights for him! Expenses pile up. New sales leadership fails to solve the structural problem. After telling the SaaS story so often, and to so many people, it’s hard to backpedal. So the CEO does the only thing he can: try to raise more money. But he knows he can’t do it alone this time. 

Expensive bankers are hired to try to find additional sources of capital or find a soft landing as the entire story falls apart in slow motion. But even with very significant revenue, everybody sees right through the SaaS story: flat revenue, high losses, high churn. After a few months of trying, even the investment banker can see where this is going. They demand an increase in their fees and a massive guaranteed payout to continue doing the work. The board approves the new terms.

Then news emerges out of Wuhan China. Some novel coronavirus. Reports leak out about the entire city shutting down and entire hospitals being built in days. This must be serious. As the stock market plunges, uncertainty, fear and doubt reign supreme. Fewer people are taking Uber rides. And certainly no one whose subscription comes up for renewal does so. Who wants to pay $1200 upfront, if all bars might close next weekend?  

Predictably, while revenue and renewals plummet, the rides drop much less so. It turns out that transactional pricing would have been much more resilient in a situation like this. But because Uber is now a SaaS business, revenue drops faster than ride volume. With cash dwindling, the board scrambles to raise an insider round to meet payroll, while conducting layoffs and sacrificing Cronuts and Avocado Toast at the altar of SaaS in hopes the investment bankers can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Within months though, the fresh capital too is gone and it’s time for PPP. 

As it becomes increasingly obvious that any exit won’t clear the hefty and brutal preference stack, board members start resigning. Even the CEO & his enabler, the Chairman, quit the board as risks of insolvency and lawsuits mount. The situation is getting desperate. One of the board members reaches out to the founders - “Won’t you please come back?”. But it’s too late. 

With just weeks of cash left, a messy cap table loaded with preferences, and a list of 75+ buyers who passed on making an offer at any price, it’s too far gone. The only option is a full-on recapitalization. But due diligence turns up tens of millions of dollars in long-term liabilities, including debt, a $3m/year lease with 5 years left on it, the multi-million cash liability for the  acquisition that didn’t meet expectations and investment bankers who feel they are owed $3m, even for a recap. The only option? Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors.

And that CEO? He's now a driver.

[mattmickiewicz]

This is a 2007 classic by Marc Andreesen on how to hire, manage and ultimately fire executives for your startup.

[mattmickiewicz]

More people should read this 2016 vintage Paul Graham essay on income and wealth inequality:

"You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups.

So let's be clear about that. Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups. And that doesn't seem a wise move. Especially since it would only mean you eliminated startups in your own country."

[mattmickiewicz]

Many entrepreneurs have never read this Bill Gurley classic, it's worth re-reading. I've been sharing it around the last month again, and gotten positive feedback from people who've never seen it.

Also, found an interesting analysis that shows that out of all software companies to reach $1 billion in revenue (there's only 115 of them!), the majority did so with LESS than $50m in capital.

Burning $3 to make $1 after a Series A raise is not sustainable, especially when the terminal value of most enterprise companies is likely to be 6-8X ARR for high quality revenue.

[mattmickiewicz]

A 2002 Classic from Howard Marks.

[mattmickiewicz]

2023 Recap - A Year of Travel, Reading and Investing.

After COVID and two years of caring for a dog with heart failure which limited our travel, 2023 really amped it up.

In 2023, I visited 7 countries, across 4 continents, staying at 31 different camps, lodges, hotels, resorts, villas, boats and apartments.

Highlights included an epic Safari to Zambia where I celebrated my 40th birthday at Old Mondoro, learned to play the board game Nsolo, and a month spent touring (and eating) through Spain in September which turned out to be a great month to visit - but it was still very busy. During the grand tour of Spain across more than a dozen cities, we got to paint with Paco Broca in his studio in Seville, spend a day visiting the Roman ruins in Merida Spain, and eating countless tapas.

This year, I also finally got to spend a significant chunk of time in Argentina for the very first time, spending a month between Buenos Aires, Salta and Mendoza. Salta was simply breathtaking and BA surpassed expectations. A visit to the very private & exclusive James Tyrell museum at Colome was a highlight. Definitely want to go back to Argentina soon and visit Patagonia on the next trip.

Along the way, I managed to eat 17 different Michelin starred restaurants (mostly in NYC, London & Spain) while also visiting the #1 bar in the world after waiting in line for an hour before opening.

Dining highlights included Mantua in Jerez and Atrio in Caceres, though the Kochi, Al Coro (pasta tasting), Muse by Tom Aiken and Nakazawa where all excellent as well.

I also finally got to see Agatha Christie's Mousetrap in London, in addition to Burnt City and Funny Girl (on broadway). A visit to Las Vegas for the When We Were Younger music festival also allowed me to pop into the infamous Omega Mart for some nut-free peanuts, dehydrated water and tattoo chicken. A complete meal, if there ever was one.

Media

Along the way, I managed to read over twenty books with stand outs including Atomic Habits, Die with Zero, Power of Now, Turth: A Brief History of Bull*, Pompeii, The Second Sleep, Dark Star Safari, An Elephant in My Kitchen, The Black Nile and Am I Being Too Subtle . It was nice to devote so much reading time to topics that aren't directly business or investing related, and to read for the sheer joy of it. Favorite podcasts in 2023 included "The Explorers" (interview with Matt is amazing), and Fall of Civilizations.

On the streaming side, The Bear, Beef, Dave and White Lotus Season 2 stood out, alongside the final season of Succession and the first season of Silo and Last of Us on AppleTV+.

Investing

Over the course of the year, I also met with hundreds of amazing entrepreneurs and founders this past year, and ended up investing in a handful of really interesting companies in legal AI, spacetech, and SaaS. To my surprise, prices for early stage deals remained stubbornly high for most of 2023 as late-stage investors moved down market, causing me to pass on some great ideas and teams. Of my existing ~60 angel investments, one startup investment in LATAM shut down and returned some cash to shareholders, while several more did recaps and down rounds. I expect to see more in 2024 as the goal posts for a Series A have moved substantially and many companies that raised in 2021 won't be able to live up to their last round valuations given public market comps.

Final note

Lastly, to end on a sad note, my father passed away in June of this year from progressive supernuclear palsy at the age of 66. Watching his dramatic decline in the last year of his life was beyond brutal, and I hope he rests in peace. Having lost both parents and both my dogs in the span of just 6 years serves a a stark reminder that our time here is finite, and we should make the most of every day and not defer experiences, friendships, and goals.

[mattmickiewicz]

I went on a 14 night Safari to South Luangwa, Lower Zambezi and Kafue in Zambia for my 40th birthday this June... a few select photos.

[mattmickiewicz]

Great list of business book summaries: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/

[mattmickiewicz]

The best article I've seen on optimizing "above the fold" on your landing pages:

[mattmickiewicz]

Classic HBR article on accumulating advantage to breakout winners in the “Casino of Technology”. 

The art of playing the tables in the Casino of Technology is primarily a psychological one. What counts to some degree—but only to some degree—is technical expertise, deep pockets, will, and courage. Above all, the rewards go to the players who are first to make sense of the new games looming out of the technological fog, to see their shape, to cognize them.

[mattmickiewicz]

There’s more to success than network effects.