Iterative Newsletter #2
3 September, 2020
Before we get to this month’s top picks for founders and startups. Iterative held its first live Demo Day with its inaugural 8 company batch. If you missed it and want to see what our companies have been up to for 12-weeks sign up to see the recorded pitches, they are live now.
Following Demo Day, we included YCombinator’s framework to creating a seed pitch deck. We found two great resources for hiring engineers and wrote two pieces on how to build a recruiting engine for your startup. We take a look at one of the most important metrics for any product (retention) and how to increase it. Then we look at the future for artificial general intelligence.
As a reminder, Iterative’s newsletter highlights quality content aimed at building and growing startups in Southeast Asia. On to this month’s picks!
Links
How to build a seed pitch deck
We just went through this exercise with our founders since we're coming up to demo day. Building a seed deck has a ton of nuances that are important to convey your message. The part that founders struggle with the most is usually figuring out what are the MOST important points to get across. The trick is to decrease the number of points to achieve clarity, not increase it. Give this a read to get better at pitching and raising money.
My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Across Three Startups
Startups tend to copy early 2000's tech company interview systems for engineers. However, these rarely work well for startups who have a limited technical pool to choose from and don't have huge HR teams. In this article, Marco goes in-depth into the most common problems startups face when interviewing engineers such as unclear requirements, underemphasized soft skills, and building an interview process.
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2020)
Due to the pandemic and economic struggles of companies around the world, many engineers have been laid off. One Hacker News reader started a thread asking users to put together a short resume if they are looking for work. 500+ candidates later and it has become a great free resource for startups looking to engage engineers at every level. If you're looking to hire and don't want to pay fees to platforms for candidates, take a look.
How to Increase your retention
Product retention is oftentimes one of the hardest things to get right, but critical. You don't want to be spending dollars acquiring customers and then having them almost immediately leave your service. Lenny does a great job of distilling down concrete tactics to fix your retention issues. Take a look, you'll be glad you did.
Last newsletter we included a link on "Why GPT-3 is Overhyped". This week, Alex Irpan takes us through the bull case for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) coming sooner than he originally forecasted based on recent advances including GPT-3. This one's pretty in-depth but if you want to see how an engineer at Google Brain thinks about the future of AI it's an enlightening read.
Iterative
Last night we held Demo Day for our inaugral Summer 2020 batch. Thanks to all the investors who attended and to all of our batch companies for all their hard work over the last 12-weeks. If you missed it or want to see the individual pitches again sign up and we’ll be releasing the individual pitch videos Thursday 9/3 on our website.
How to Build a Recruiting Machine Part 1
Hiring is very different when you're at different stages of the company (2 people, ~8 people, ~30 people, ~100 people, etc). Since we typically work with earlier stage companies, I'm going to try to focus on the earlier stages and give a broad overview of things you need to think about right now versus things that while important, can wait until your company gets bigger. In part 1, we will focus on (1) Why you should care and (2) Tips to draft your first job post.
How to Build a Recruiting Machine Part 2
Once you’ve decided to build your recruiting machine and you’ve drafted your first job post, the next two steps are sourcing candidates and designing your recruiting funnel. We’ll dive into the different channels that have worked in the past and their effectiveness. Then we’ll walk through our recruiting funnel to give you ideas on how to create your own.
About Us
Iterative is an accelerator focused exclusively on Southeast Asia. Founded by the cofounders of Decide.com (acquired by eBay), Iterative's mission is to build the most vibrant, supportive, and intellectually honest community of founders.
You can also reach us directly at hello@iterative.vc and find out more on our website https://iterative.vc.
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