Jeremy King

🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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In case you missed it... My latest #TechTidesTuesday op-ed entitled, "What good navigation looks like: no machine sails itself" is well worth taking in given Amazon's ongoing AI agent reckoning. 👉🏾 https://lnkd.in/ddn3cR_J

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Venture funding isn't success of course, but it's nearly impossible to win big markets without it. Unlike the AI hype, Ando is very, very real. And unlike others, Ando is here to make lives genuinely better for everyone. (*) #proudinvestor #micdrop #oversubscribed Big thx to Bradford Oberwager and James Kairos, Ben Metcalfe, Andy Mutz, Joseph Chittenden-Veal, Scott Sanders, Massy Ghausi, John Lyman, Thomas Wesley, John Holder… and of course Phoenix Toews and Paul Wellons (to name a few) — (*) Yeah yeah, some pencil-pusher will use AI to over-optimize profits over people, but as American Airlines is learning the hard way (WSJ: https://lnkd.in/ePz_QNzt ), net of competition, "people businesses" don't work that way. You HAVE to care for people or you lose. Ando plays a beautiful collaborative role in that dialogue, helping profit-focused management more clearly see the effects of a motivated labor force. That's why I'm truly #proudinvestor --- Posts co-authored with my LinkedIn secret weapon Dennis Buckley

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"Shoppers are strategically shifting toward more gift card purchases to maintain holiday gifting traditions amid economic pressures, according to new research from Blackhawk Network (BHN), a leading global provider of branded payment solutions. BHN's annual holiday forecast, which surveyed over 2,100 U.S. consumers, reveals that while 13% are purchasing gifts for fewer people due to financial constraints, overall holiday gift spending continues to rise and gift cards will represent 39% of total holiday budgets—a 12% increase over last year." https://lnkd.in/gQxrpy35

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I wrote about how product managers should deliberately decide which features should be built to an A grade and which ones should be built to a B or even only a C grade. Making the resource tradeoffs to optimize business outcomes is a core job of product management, and building every capability to an A grade is a poor use of scarce resources. https://lnkd.in/gTXBfNYE

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We at Foundation Capital been closely tracking the shift from software-as-a-service to services-as-software for over a year. In my latest with Jaya Gupta, we distill a year of learnings into three high-level trends: ➡️ Features aren’t your moat anymore - differentiation comes from how deeply and effecitvely you integrate your product into the customer’s world. ➡️ The traditional pre-sales vs. post-sales divide is gone - customers expect a working solution during the sales process. Selling and implementation have fused into a single, continuous effort. ➡️ Pay for outcomes, not seats - pricing is moving from per-seat or per-API charges toward alignment with business outcomes (you pay when the AI actually delivers value). There's lots of complexity in pulling this off, but it's where the strongest AI startups are heading. Why do these shifts matter? Because beyond the $200B SaaS market lies a $4.6T pool of spending on labor and services that this wave of AI companies is poised to absorb. Our full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gyBKXcit

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Where will AI inference live? In The Tech Capital’s latest feature, CEO Ryan Mallory shares how Flexential is approaching this next phase of AI infrastructure. Read the full story by Jack Haddon: https://ow.ly/CjGt30sQJIz #FlexAnywhere #AIInfrastructure #DataCenters #EdgeComputing #DigitalInfrastructure

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In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.

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