26 August 2019
This week's additions focus on strategy, founder stories, and finance, with new digests from Founders, Y Combinator, and Ahrefs. Highlights include Watson started IBM at 40: broke, convicted criminal, wife pregnant. A little traction is often more dangerous than none at all
Showing 10 digests for 26 August 2019.
Thomas Watson Sr.: How IBM's Founder Built a Business Empire from Ruin
Founders
September 1, 2019
Origin stories
10
Culture building
8
Long-term planning
6
Watson started IBM at 40: broke, convicted criminal, wife pregnant.
Kept factories open and doubled R&D during the Great Depression.
Monopoly, not genius, drove IBM — and Watson confused the two.
When and how to pivot your startup idea
Y Combinator
August 29, 2019
Pivoting
10
Product-market fit
8
A little traction is often more dangerous than none at all
More shots on goal is the most reliable path to product-market fit
Score ideas on market size, founder fit, ease of launch, and early feedback
Building startup culture in the first 20 employees
Y Combinator
August 29, 2019
Culture building
10
Hiring & recruitment
7
Vision & mission
6
Your first 20 employees are your cultural DNA — get them wrong and it compounds.
Values must be outward-facing to give employees real guardrails on hard decisions.
You cannot retrofit diversity or culture at 100 people — the window is now.
Four link building strategies for existing content
Ahrefs
August 28, 2019
Your older pages can earn links without producing new content
Competitor new-backlink reports expose active sites ready for guest posts
Resource pages exist to link out — target broad niches, not exact keywords
How Scent Hound Rebuilt a Pet Business Around a Franchise Growth Model
Bill Gallagher
August 28, 2019
Pivoting
9
Case studies
8
Processes & SOPs
6
Eliminated groomers entirely — targeting the 80% of dogs that need care, not haircuts.
Only 40–45% of franchise leads were ever contacted; speed and channel-matching fix this.
Franchisees need their own brand promise, customer profile, and sandbox before you can scale.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
How magician Simon Coronel designs tricks, seeks brutal feedback, and performs under pressure
How I Work
August 28, 2019
Resilience & grit
8
Iteration & feedback loops
7
Deep work & focus
6
Why paying audiences dollar coins for criticism improves any performance
Smarter people are easier to fool — the brain's lazy evaluation explained
Never feel ready? The quitting-your-job epiphany that actually works
Building an AR startup in an emerging technology market
Y Combinator
August 28, 2019
Niche selection
8
Fundraising & VC
7
Case studies
6
AR is in the installation phase — bet on infrastructure, not apps
Three hardware laws explain why AR's commercial moment is arriving now
Immigrant resilience and independent-thinking investors are the real founder edge
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Bill Gallagher on coaching founders to scale up
Bill Gallagher
August 27, 2019
Identity & self-belief
7
Goal setting
5
Flat growth is a founder problem, not a strategy problem
You have the company you deserve — scaling means changing yourself
A coach surfaces the vision founders are afraid to say out loud
How Google built its mapping monopoly through three small acquisitions
Acquired
August 26, 2019
Case studies
9
Business models
7
Four engineers in Sydney rebuilt a desktop map app for the web in three weeks to win Google's acquisition.
Google spent five years eliminating its dependency on NavTeq and TeleAtlas data entirely.
Apple Maps debacle handed Google a dominant iOS position it could never have bought.
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Raegan Moya-Jones built Aden + Anais from a kitchen table to $100M
How I Built This with Guy Raz
August 26, 2019
Founder interviews
10
Fundraising & VC
6
A product gap spotted in Australia became a $100M US business.
Selling controlling interest to investors cost her the company she built.
Fired founders recover by letting go of anger, not holding onto it.