Startup Real Talk

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Your company's legal name
Don’t get cute with your company's legal name.
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Waseem Daher
Tips for managing your startup's cash
(I’m experimenting with some shorter-form, more frequent posts, after a fair bit of a hiatus here—let me know if you like the new format more or less…
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Waseem Daher
1

November 2023

When will startups run out of cash?
An analysis of the bank balance of 631 cash-burning starutps
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Waseem Daher

October 2023

Be a rocketship or leave a big crater
Your investors want you to either be massively successful or worthless.
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Waseem Daher
Your back office should be boring
First-principles thinking is always a bad idea when it doesn’t directly relate to your core business.
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Waseem Daher
1

September 2023

Don’t start a tech-enabled service
LLMs are going to enable a whole new crop of tech-enabled services. Here’s what you need to know before starting one. (Hint: it's a slog.)
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Waseem Daher
6
Managing your psychology as a founder
Bad news for startup founders: your job sucks. Here’s how to manage that fact.
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Waseem Daher

August 2023

Avoiding the slow no
There’s nothing worse than the slow no—here’s where you might encounter it, and how to avoid it.
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Waseem Daher
1

July 2023

Structural advantages of startups
Startups must have some fundamental advantages over big companies—if they didn’t, startups simply wouldn’t exist.

June 2023

Delegate, don’t abdicate
Empower your team, but don’t use that as an excuse to check out entirely
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Waseem Daher
You’re going to hire the wrong executive
Executive hiring is hard. You’re going to get it wrong. Here’s why.
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Waseem Daher
1

May 2023

Does the “no” ever get less awkward?
This is my third startup. The “no”s don’t sting any less this time around.
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Waseem Daher
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