The tech industry has evolved immensely in 2023. It’s time Chris and Yaniv answers the burning questions of startup operators in The Startup Podcast community. This Q&A episode they explore: Everyone always talks about how you must continue iterating on a product. Does there ever come a point where there is over iteration? Is there a way of telling when you’ve hit that point where you’ve effectively solved the problems but are now making new problems? Is a problem ever truly solved? Is Web3 ...
Jul 26, 2023•36 min•Season 2Ep. 29
🚨Twitter Rebrands to X 🚨 Elon Musk wants to blow up the Twitter brand & replace it with 'X' - but why? Listen to this bonus episode of The Startup Podcast, hosted by Chris Saad and Yaniv Bernstein to hear their 🌶️🌶️🌶️ takes! The Pact Honour The Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please: Follow, rate, and review us in your listening app Follow us on YouTube Give us a public shout-out on LinkedIn or anywhere you have a social media followin...
Jul 26, 2023•11 min•Season 2Ep. 28
Rules are meant to be broken! You wouldn’t be building startups if you were a complete rule follower. In this episode, Chris Saad and Yaniv Bernstein discuss all the times when you should IGNORE their advice! Together they cover common themes that regularly appear in episodes: Don’t listen to VCs Don’t compromise on your vision Don’t build B2B when you’re trying to build B2C Don’t build a technology-backed services company Along the way they also sprinkle key insights such as “data in context is...
Jul 19, 2023•26 min•Season 2Ep. 27
We have a special episode for you all this week! This week we’re putting our own advice to use! We have repolished one of our most popular episodes with our new style jam-packed with information to get your company off the ground and steer away from small business syndrome. What is the difference between a Silicon Valley-style tech startup and a regular small business? In this episode of The Startup Podcast Chris and Yaniv unpack the many ways people misunderstand what makes startups different t...
Jul 12, 2023•36 min•Season 2Ep. 26
Introducing Mid Capital! This week on The Startup Podcast Chris and Yaniv wanted to switch it up and show how to navigate the fundraising VC discussions via roleplay. That’s right! We think Yaniv has found his calling as an actor as he performs as the VC and Chris is the founder pitching. This episode is jam-packed with ways to respond to questions, read the signs and maintain a level of self-belief and confidence that the right investors are out there for you. Not every VC firm will be investin...
Jul 05, 2023•30 min•Season 2Ep. 25
🚨🚨 TAKEOVER ALERT! 🚨🚨 Today we’re excited to share with you an episode from one of our favourite podcasts - The Sachin and Adam Show. Each episode, Sachin and Adam host a fascinating guest from the tech industry - plenty of podcasts do that! But what separates The Sachin and Adam Show from the rest is the skill of the interviewers blending the professional with the personal in a way that really makes you feel like you’re getting to know everyone of their guests! We chose to share with you Ma...
Jul 03, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 2Ep. 24
Product positioning will make or break your startup. Go toe-to-toe with multinational trillion-dollar behemoths and the likelihood of success is minute. Restructure your approach to target a different group and you could one-day be the industry-leader yourselves. Researched ways on how to develop your product position and still feel stuck? Don’t fret! Yaniv and Chris are back this week with a super special guest - April Dunford, author of “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Cu...
Jun 28, 2023•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 23
Saying NO takes clarity of thinking. It requires personal conviction and above all else, requires courage. For weeks, Chris and Yaniv have discussed solutions to the symptoms of chronically saying yes: lack of polish, growth, self-serve and appropriate prioritisation. They’ve spoken to special guests about the 10 Commandments of Planning, understanding the 7 Deadly Sins of Startups, developing strategies, focus and culture and learning the difference between traction and distraction. But there c...
Jun 21, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 22
Apple on your face, or a big disgrace? 🤔 On the 5th of June, an auditorium sat patiently waiting for Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developer Conference. Rumours had been floating for a while that there was a new product under development. Over the past few years, Apple had been gaining patents, buying companies and hiring people in the augmented reality (AR) space. Much to the wonderment of the crowd, Tim Cook presented the first-look of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s AR product and first major product...
Jun 14, 2023•39 min•Season 2Ep. 21
🚨WARNING: Controversial topic alert!🚨 Historically, startup culture has forced people to create a professional facade. A facade that inhibits the ability to reveal any kind of distraction or humanity that might weaken your position or your professionalism in a corporate setting. Challenging that trend is Amy Sun. Amy is CEO and Founder of Briefly AI and also a new mother. Before running her own startup, Amy has a storied career including such roles as Partner at Sequoia and Product Manager at ...
Jun 08, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Have you built products and no matter what you worked on it didn’t matter, the business metrics didn’t improve nor did the user experience? You are not alone! Fortunately, we have special guest Itamar Gilad– Former Product Manager at Google turned startup coach, author and speaker here to help change your product mindset from data-driven to evidence-guided. Like many of you, Itamar developed and launched products that did not impact business metrics. From this, he investigated what makes the dif...
Jun 01, 2023•52 min•Season 2Ep. 19
We’re all storytellers. It’s the way we first begin to learn and it's the way we have communicated important information for thousands of years. However, it is the skill we practice the least. As startup operators, if you were a better storyteller imagine what you could accomplish. You would be able to engross and inspire potential investors and employees in any situation and be able to explain features better to your teams and get more work done. How, you ask? Today we say “F*ck the Slides”...
May 25, 2023•41 min•Season 2Ep. 18
Good plans often make the difference between success and failure. Yet so many organisations are filled with time-consuming, ineffective, demoralising planning processes that have everybody muttering “waste of time” under their breath. Fear not! We have very special guest Oliver Heckmann—Head of Engineering at Silicon Valley darling Coda and former Google VP—to help set you up for good planning! In this episode, Oliver talks through his “Ten Commandments of Good Planning”. These commandments have...
May 18, 2023•47 min•Season 2Ep. 18
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ episode. Yaniv and Chris are fired up about bad VC investors, and they can't hold it in any longer! Good Venture Capitalists help founders make the impossible, possible. They are the fuel that allows rocketships to defy gravity. But bad VC investors will take a founder's dream and grind it into dust. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv share the ways in which bad investors often undermine a founder's ability to pursue their vision. They then share tips how as a founder t...
May 11, 2023•35 min•Season 2Ep. 16
A startup’s most precious and limited resource? No, it’s not money. It’s time. And so many founders and operators allow their precious time to be eaten away by all sorts of distractions. Distraction can and does kill startups. The opposite of distraction is traction, which is what every startup craves and needs. In this episode Chris and Yaniv are rejoined by friend-of-the-pod Nir Eyal (best-selling author of Hooked and Indistractable) to talk about how to apply simple techniques to avoid distra...
May 04, 2023•42 min•Season 2Ep. 17
About The Episode All of a sudden, AI is everywhere. But how do you pick through the hype to understand the real impact? And importantly, as a founder how should you react to the rapid emergence of LLM-based AI? Chris is joined by two leaders in the AI space, AI analyst and prolific investor Jeremiah Owyang and Ben Parr (co-founder Octane AI) to give you actionable insight and advice on how AI affects startups, from the macro-societal level all the way down to the micro. No matter how much you&#...
Apr 27, 2023•51 min•Season 2Ep. 15
About The Episode In this episode, Chris Saad and Jack Bloomfield discuss the pros and cons of moving to the US to accelerate and amplify the success of your startup. They discuss topics like.. Is the US really that great? Isn't moving to a big city pointless after Covid? Isn't it unpatriotic to leave your country for the US? And more... The Pact Honour The Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:*Follow, rate, and review us in your listening ap...
Apr 20, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 14
About The Episode Chris has had to watch from the sidelines for the last four episodes while he rested his voice, and it almost killed him! This week he is BACK and can’t wait to share his spicy takes on everything we discussed during his convalescence. If you ever wondered what Gogglebox crossed with TSP might be like, this one is for you. The Pact Honour The Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:*Follow, rate, and review us in your listening app *Gi...
Apr 13, 2023•29 min•Season 2Ep. 13
We’ve been communicating all our lives, so we’re probably pretty good at it, right? Wrong. Poor communication has arguably been responsible for more startup failures than any other single cause. In this episode, Yaniv is joined by Jenny Rudd, founder of DisputeBuddy , to talk about good communication: what it is, how to do it, and why your startup will die without it. Honour The Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:*Follow, rate, and review us in you...
Apr 06, 2023•43 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Darker times in venture have seen the return of some old investment terms that haven’t had much of an airing lately: warrants, participating liquidation preferences, tranches, and more. These aren’t always bad, but if you’re not careful you can end up with a cap table that makes you uninvestable in future rounds. In this episode, Yaniv is once more joined by Jessy Wu, Investment Principal at Afterwork Ventures, to talk through a rogue’s gallery of investment terms, what they mean, and how to thi...
Mar 30, 2023•27 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Communicating with your investors can seem like an annoying chore when you’re grinding away as a founder trying to make something out of nothing. But there are a lot of good reasons why you should keep your investors in the loop. And it doesn’t have to be painful! In this episode, Yaniv is joined by friend-of-the-pod Jessy Wu, Investment Principal at Afterwork Ventures, to talk through her six tips for conducting excellent investor comms that will put you top of every investor’s portfolio. Yaniv...
Mar 23, 2023•33 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Netflix popularised the term “talent density” to describe the key plank of its approach to building a high-performing organisation. But what is it? Why is it important? And of course, how can you ensure your startup possesses high talent density? While Chris rests his voice, Yaniv is joined by Henry Innis, founder of Mutinex, to dive into this topic. They cover the following, while sharing hard-won experiences and anecdotes along the way: * What is talent density? * Why is it important? * Attrac...
Mar 16, 2023•43 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Chris braves his vocal issues to rejoin Yaniv in our latest Listener Q&A episode. Five great questions, lots of great discussion and actionable advice. * How do you break into startups when you only have corporate experience? * What is your take on when startups need legal support, and what should the characteristics of an optimal legal support for startups be? * What's the most common misconception that a non-technical sole founder has in the early stages? * What’s the difference between bu...
Mar 02, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 7
If using your product becomes an ingrained habit for your users, you’re well on your way to massive success. But how do you make your product habit-forming? On this episode of The Startup Podcast Yaniv talks to Nir Eyal, the world’s leading behavioural designer and author of the bestselling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir and Yaniv talk about what types of products can benefit from habit formation (it’s broader than you think!) and how you can implement the four-step “Hooke...
Feb 22, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Without a clear communication path back to leadership, creating autonomous teams doesn’t lead to an empowered organisation… it just leads to chaos. Escalation is that clear communication path. Far from being a minor practice, escalation is the nervous system that allows multiple empowered teams to still act as a single cohesive organisation. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv explain what escalation is, why it’s important, and how to create a culture of effective escalation within your organisatio...
Feb 16, 2023•42 min•Season 2Ep. 5
It is nearly impossible for a startup to succeed if its leaders do not have a clear sense of conviction about the direction they are going. But what is conviction? Why is it so critical? And what are the ingredients that are necessary in building and maintaining that sense of conviction as a leader? In this episode, Chris and Yaniv break down this sometimes murky topic into a clear set of criteria and steps that allow any leader to map out what it takes to build and maintain a sense of convictio...
Feb 09, 2023•44 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Amir Shevat was in charge of Twitter's developer platform, until he was fired (along with his whole team) by Elon Musk. Twitter no longer has a developer platform. In this episode, Amir talks with Chris and Yaniv about Twitter’s deep but troubled history with its developer platform, and what that history teaches us about how and when startups should build a developer platform. And yes, he tells us what he really thinks about Elon Musk and how takeover of Twitter. Amir Shevat has been deeply invo...
Feb 02, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The great disruptors of Silicon Valley are nearly all product led. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv dive deep on how a product-led organisation works, what is necessary for it to be successful, the various responsibilities of Product Managers and their counterparts, and most importantly: what it takes to transform any organisation into one that is truly product-led. It’s not easy, but it is worth it! This episode helps guide the way. This is Part 2 of a 2-part series on transforming into a produ...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 2
The great disruptors of Silicon Valley are nearly all product led. In this episode, Chris and Yaniv explain what a product-led organisation looks like, how it thinks, and why it is the right model for massive disruption at scale. They then discuss common alternative models to being product led, and the risks and dysfunctions of these various alternatives. This is Part 1 of a 2-part series on transforming into a product-led organisation, designed to work as a companion to Chris’s recent presentat...
Jan 19, 2023•44 min•Season 2Ep. 1
All season, Chris and Yaniv have talked about the mindset that is needed to succeed at venture-backed startups. For the final episode of Season 1, we tie it all together with an analogy: tournament poker. It is amazing how many things poker and startups have in common, so in this episode we use the lens of poker to discuss the big picture of how to approach building a successful startup. We dive into each of the following aspects of commonality between poker and startup life: Iterative Cash-burn...
Dec 21, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 45
