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Nov 12, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
When Alex Ratner joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) as a PhD student in 2014, he planned on spending most of his time researching better machine learning modeling techniques and algorithms. This, after all, was the main thrust of AI development at the time. But not long after starting in the lab, a variety of people from across the Stanford campus began coming to him with unusual requests.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
greylock.com
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Jason Risch
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
Several years ago, Adam Turner, CEO of the text messaging marketing company Postscript, set out to address a surprising phenomenon among consumers who had signed up to receive marketing messages. Just one-quarter of those who signed up for the texts Postscript was sending on behalf of its ecommerce customers actually made purchases. Adam decided to find out why. He tasked several employees with asking consumers, via text, what was holding them back, yielding a wide variety of explanations.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
At some point in their careers, most entrepreneurs face pivotal decisions that go on to define the direction of their lives. For Martin Mao, one of these came in 2013, when he was writing web applications for mining companies and large banks in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. At 25, he was running his own software development firm and earning a comfortable living. The work was 9 to 5 and relatively easy, leaving Mao with a great work-life balance.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
A few minutes into his first customer meeting as a security industry entrepreneur, Abnormal Security co-founder Evan Reiser knew he had a problem. “This person kept mentioning socks and I had no idea what he was talking about,” says Reiser, who had spent his entire career until then in online advertising. “It turns out he was talking about SOCs, as in the security operations center, which is like the most frequently used acronym in security.” Not surprisingly, the meeting didn’t last long.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
Over the last dozen years, Dylan Field has built Figma into an iconic company by delivering on its vision to “make design accessible to all.” But long ago — before Dylan started brainstorming ideas for a company with fellow Brown University student Evan Wallace; before Dylan famously dropped out of college to take a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship that got Figma rolling; before he and Evan proved skeptics wrong by showing that a collaborative, web-based design platform was not only viable, but also...
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
No matter the stage, sector, or size of a company, many struggle with their GTM strategy due to the same fundamental mistake: trying to do too much at the same time. “When you try to do everything at once, what ends up happening is you actually drive standards down over time.” says veteran GTM advisor and strategist Tom Levey.
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May 16, 2024 | 
greylock.com
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
greylock.com | Greylock Partners
For more than two decades, Shlomo Kramer has been the face of his native Israel’s thriving startup scene after the first one he co-founded, Check Point Software, became one of the nation’s most valuable companies. But success, Kramer says, comes with burdens. People start to see you not as a person, but as a persona — the entrepreneur with the golden touch. “If you’re lucky to have been successful, you have to make sure you are not frozen in that persona,” he says.