#startups
US software businesses were hit by high tax bills in 2023 due to a tax change effective July 2022, which many were unaware of. Changes to S174 mean software engineer labor costs must be amortized over multiple years, altering the calculation of taxable profits.
The IPO market remains shut for the first half of 2024 before reopening with major listings like Stripe & Databricks, while mergers and acquisitions see a surge above $60 billion, fuelled by AI-related deals and lower debt costs for private equity buyers.
Tailor software architecture to the team’s cognitive load capacity, opting for a monolithic structure for single teams and microservices for multiple teams to enable independent work.
The EU is working on rules to make software creators and licensors accountable for harm caused by their software, akin to how manufacturers are liable for faulty products like cars.
Active investors in US venture capital (VC) dropped by 38% in the first three quarters of 2023 compared to the previous year, representing a reduction of 2,725 firms.
How much should competent people, confidently managing their responsibilities, meddle in the affairs of other teams they perceive to be dropping the ball?
SMEs in Australia report that business conditions are decent but not as strong as the previous year, with customers showing increased hesitancy, such as higher cancellation rates and delaying non-urgent services.
First, Big Tech is investing massively in R&D. Amazon’s annual R&D spend, in particular, is staggering:
People hate process, but process is crucial to scaling a businesses. Today, we explore the difference between good and bad processes, and ways to ensure startups can benefit from standardisation, rather than suffer.
The smiling curve represents the variation in value added across different stages in IT-related product development. Those who innovate with R&D capture a lot of value, those who package and sell capture a lot of value.
Many startup leaders shy away from the most painful problems. Whether it’s too hard to build, too hard to sell, or requires massive scale to achieve viable economics, there are many reasons to put opportunities in the too-hard basket. But tackling difficult problems is how we build differentiation in startups.
Talent is the big cost centre in tech. Increasingly, it’s compute.
Every day, a great strategy fails in a startup because a leader underinvested in trust and relationship building or unnecessarily took autonomy away from individuals or a team. This week, we explore how Joseph Nye’s framework for soft and hard power can help startup leaders to motivate their teams and enact change in their organisation.
Personality traits of startup founders are crucial to a startup’s success, and this study examined their traits in relation to firm outcomes.
Firms may acquire startups mainly to prevent rivals from doing so, even if unprofitable.
Many product managers don’t know how to prioritise technical work against new features. This is because they don’t have a deep enough understanding of the value of certain technical work. This week, we explore the ways to unify these often separate work streams.
We’re entering an exhilarating period of technological development, but most of us haven’t noticed. Grim expectations for the future pervade despite our progress towards solving many of our most worrying problems and overwhelming improvements to quality of life.
As startups grow, leaders must decide how to structure their engineering teams. This week, we explore some principles for how to divide product development efforts across multiple engineering teams.
The government has agreed to proposals that would allow Australians to opt out of targeted advertising, require search engines to “de-index” certain information about them, and draw small businesses into Australia’s privacy scheme. See the highlights for my commentary of each of the proposed rules.
A great take from DHH on Musk and the new Musk biography.
Most startups let their organisational structure organically develop as they scale, but organisational design can surprisingly greatly impact outcomes. This week, we explore how org design influences the way leaders and teams solve problems.
Leaders should create a fulfilling, enjoyable, and ergonomic workplace. But over optimising for comfort could lead to mediocre outcomes for your startup.
Validate product-market-channel fit: Before hiring an agency, brands should ensure their products and business models are suitable for platforms like Meta.
New SaaS benchmarks are in from ChartMogul. Most notable this time is time to $1m ARR and $10m ARR.
Ambitious projects need ambitious goals, but bad KPIs can do more harm than good. This week, we look at some principles for defining measurable goals within a startup.