Chris Whitman

Alternative Resources for founders, geared for startups with generous free tiers: 1) Papermark - Docsend alternative. 2) Tally - Typeform alternative. 3) Cal.com, Inc. - Calendly alternative. 4) Supabase - Firebase Alternative. 5) Sender.net - Mailchimp Alternative. What else are people using and loving in the founders stack?

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🚀 San Francisco Founders: Your Ultimate Guide to Making the Most of the City 🌉 As a founder in San Francisco, you're no stranger to the city's unique energy and dynamic culture. With so much happening around startups and innovation, finding the right resources and places can make all the difference. Whether you're deep in business planning, product development, or fundraising, here's a quick guide to help you navigate San Francisco efficiently. ⭐ Best Places to Network (Beyond the Typical Mixers): San Francisco is a networking haven. Leverage LinkedIn groups like Founders Network and Bay Area Founders Club for events and webinars. Explore Meetup for diverse networking options and consider attending Founders You Should Know to connect with engineering talent. ⭐ Budget-Friendly Eating Spots: Fuel up without breaking the bank. Blue Bottle Coffee and Equator Coffee offer great spots for a coffee break. For lunch, check out Garaje for varied options, The Bird for chicken sandwiches, and Tú Lan for Vietnamese. Montesacro and Azúcar Lounge are perfect for post-work cravings. ⭐ Ideal Spots for Calls on the Go: No office? No problem! Capital One Café near Union Square provides free wifi and workspaces. Salesforce Park offers a quiet outdoor option. For coworking, WeWork is a classic choice with day passes starting at $29. ⭐ Happy Hours with Actual Deals: End your day on a high note. The Harlequin in SoMa serves $2 oysters and $11 cocktails. La Mar on the Embarcadero offers $5 empanadas and bay views. Check out The San Francisco Standard's guide for more options. ⭐ Relaxation on Your Day Off: San Francisco's parks are perfect for unwinding. Visit Golden Gate Park or tackle trails at Twin Peaks. Explore neighborhoods with San Francisco City Guides' free walking tours, or take a ferry ride for a scenic day trip. Don’t miss free museum days and local Giants games if you’re into baseball. We hope these tips help you make the most of your time in San Francisco, grow your business, and enjoy the city's vibrant culture! 🌟 #SanFrancisco #StartupLife #Founders #Networking #BudgetEats #WorkFromAnywhere #HappyHour #Relaxation

🚀 **Unleashing the Future of Delivery: Nuro's Game-Changing Comeback!** 🚀 Nuro is back in the spotlight! 🌟 With fresh approval from the California DMV, they’re ready to test their advanced R3 autonomous delivery vehicle across four Bay Area cities. This pivotal moment is not just a victory; it’s an invitation to rethink the landscape of autonomous delivery! 🔍 **What does this mean for the industry?** Innovators can take inspiration from Nuro's resilience—facing setbacks and emerging stronger is part of the journey to success. How can YOU apply this tenacity in your own ventures? 🔑 **Key Takeaway:** Embrace challenges, innovate relentlessly, and explore untapped opportunities! 💬 **Thumbs up** if you see the future of delivery driven by autonomy! 👍 Or **thumbs down** if you think traditional methods still hold the edge! 👎 #AutonomousVehicles #Innovation #Nuro #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfWork #DeliverySystems #TechTrends #StartupSuccess #Resilience #GameChanger

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The discussion with Jason Fried, Co-Founder and CEO of 37signals, during a recent ProducTea with Leah episode (#42) was great. A particular one-minute segment (~14:20) really stuck with me. When asked about failures, Jason states: 🗣 “I don’t really think about failure. How does evolution work? Evolution is not sitting there using energy thinking about the wing shape that didn’t work. The wings that worked let’s make them even better...What’s working? Let’s do more of that. Let’s evolve.” This aligns perfectly with the concept of “slightly better problems” from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. It’s a never-ending upward spiral. The key takeaway? Don’t ignore failures, but don’t dwell on them either. Focus on what works, refine it, and evolve. This approach ensures continuous improvement without getting bogged down by setbacks. #ProductManagement #Leadership #ContinuousImprovement

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Talk to Buildstash and Robbie Cargill if you want to manage your game or app binaries.

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How did you meet your co-founder at LendAPI? It’s one of the most frequently asked questions, and I truly believe the stars were aligned at that time. I feel blessed to have Tim as a partner on this journey. Here is the story: https://lnkd.in/gDeFYQG8 #fintech #startup

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Over the past two years, Integral Labs had the privilege of contributing to the creation of the Polkadot Community Foundation. Polkadot has already pioneered one of the most active and robust DAO governance systems to date, including tokenholder management of a nine-figure treasury. As the DAO continues to mature, the need to represent and serve tokenholders’ interests off-chain has become increasingly apparent. That’s where the Polkadot Community Foundation comes in. Designing the corporate structure, governance, and operating model, Integral Labs joined a working group led by our friends at Actum Node with a mission to extend the reach of Polkadot's onchain governance into the offchain world. This project was a first in the industry, with a novel design that stands apart from traditional DAO "wrapper" structures. Unlike foundations that subsume treasury assets and delegate limited powers back to the DAO, the Polkadot Community Foundation works as an optional, unopinionated side-car entity that any DAO member may utilize in their proposals. This ensures the DAO retains full autonomy and control of its treasury while enabling offchain activities such as holding real world assets, entering commercial agreements, making fiat payments, owning IP, and more—all for the benefit of, and under the explicit direction of, the tokenholders. The governing documents and bylaws are open source and available for future use by Polkadot or other DAOs. We hope is that this modular design becomes a blueprint for a future constellation of real-world businesses to permissionlessly cooperate and compete to serve DAOs by extending their existing onchain governance systems. The Polakdot community voted with over 98% support to establish the Polkadot Community Foundation. Now incorporated, community members have begun to publish treasury proposals that utilize the foundation, including the creation of what will be the first mobile app owned by an open community, and increasing accountability for vendors and service providers in the ecosystem. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/ebCJKsjD Integral Labs is proud to have contributed to this project alongside Michael D'Alto of Actum Node, James Hutchings, ACA, CFA, Theo Louw, Michael Preston, and Kevin Foster-Archibald CA(SA) of Autonomous, Edward Noyons of Marfire, Matthew Shaw and Gregory Peacock of Webslinger Advisors, Glenn Kennedy of Leeward Management Limited, Jonathan Bain of Bridgestream, Ignatius N., Jonathan Hernandez, and David Manadom (formerly) of Fenwick & West, Melissa Lim and Justin Wretham of Walkers, Björn Wagner, Raul Ignacio Romanutti, Dieter Fishbein, and the Polkadot community.

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Video put together for Zillow Is AI getting out of hand? Or paying $1,000s for UGC creators + usage rights is out of hand? I think the latter if you want to make videos like this for 2% of the cost Comment UGC and I'll send you the link (must be following)

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Cannabis tech post: The cannabis industry is finally waking up and realizing the value of offering custom solutions over basic, off-the-shelf implementations. This shift is set to boost the experience for customers, patients, and companies alike. At Kief Studio, we've been championing custom solutions since our inception. As the CT🜁O, I've seen firsthand how tailored software can transform businesses. Custom doesn't mean superficial changes like swapping fonts or pictures; it means building a unique experience from the ground up, one that caters to the specific needs of consumers and employees while molding the software to the business, not the other way around. Having been in the tech industry since 2006, I can attest to the long-term benefits of this approach. Many of our clients have been with us since the beginning when we were just freelancers. A testament to the power of custom solutions coupled with exceptional training and support. It's cool to see larger companies in the cannabis space pivoting to offer custom solutions, likely in response to the growing awareness of its importance. While it may require more work upfront, the payoff is undeniable for the customer. As the industry matures, I'm excited to see how this newfound emphasis on custom solutions will improve the cannabis experience for everyone involved. It's time to do things the right way, not just the easy way. As I've said before, do your research when choosing a custom solutions partner, you'll get a good idea if they can pull it off when you ask the right questions. Even if you don't choose us for the job, we're still happy to provide consultation to ensure you get the right solutions for your company. My wife and I are not motivated by money or power, we're motivated by our core mission, we help good people do good things. The plant's ability to help people aligns with our mission. The more the better. #CannabisTech #CustomSolutions #IndustryGrowth #CustomerExperience #KiefStudio

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Last week our team traveled to SF 🌉 for a week-long hackathon. We had one goal: make the Fillout editor "silky smooth". Here’s the result! ↪️ Undo + redo (cmd + Z) in the editor 🚀 Instant publish button 🔀 Easier answer piping and logic We redesigned Fillout’s “reference picker” from the ground up. 👀 Improved accessibility and “esc” to close popups 📄 Improved page navigation bar It’s easier to rename, reorder and add new pages. 🐛 Fixes and improvements - Zapier support for payments + scheduling. - Support for "update" forms with Monday.com integration. - Workspaces load faster on home page. - "Esc" to exit preview mode and close popups. That’s a wrap 🎁 How did we do? What should we improve next? Let me know below 👇

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I chatted with Pawel Grabowski recently about how we (and our customers) are using video to grow their businesses: https://buff.ly/3QJijto Great discussion, and definitely a place I think most founders should lean into. How are you using video to grow your business?

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How do we design funding mechanisms that are regenerative and built to last? In the latest Rehash episode, Sophia Dew from Celo Foundation joins me to talk about what blockchain enables for public goods funding, frameworks for designing regenerative onchain funding apps, and what it takes to build and maintain a layer 2 blockchain. Tune into our full conversation at the links below:

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Small Business Owners, Founders and Entrepreneurs - Join us at the ⁦‪⁦‪@oGoing‬⁩ September Business Growth Roundtable | GenAI Marketing today evening at 6 pm at The Duck Club in Irvine. It’s going to be lot of fun to connect and learn new ways of marketing! #businessnetworking #businessgrowth #smallbusiness #marketingtips

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We recently shared with California Business Journal the key insights into Fintech philosophy. 🧐 As we pondered its meaning, we couldn't help but notice that there are very few industries left that haven't adopted "Tech" in their services – from MilTech and EdTech to HealthTech, SpaceTech, AgroTech, and beyond. You name it! 🚀 #Fintech #TechInnovation #IndustryTrends #FutureOfTech #BusinessDevelopment #TechServices #Innovation #TechRevolution

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Many of today’s startups are making the exact same messaging mistake I made a few years ago. Here’s the messaging test that failed to attract developers and (hopefully) you can learn from. At ScraperAPI we had messaging centered around managing proxies and CAPTCHAs. But that wasn’t what people were buying our product for. What they were buying was the major pain point ScraperAPI solved - being able to scrape any page with a simple API call. This is the exact same mistake AI startups are making today with talking too much about LLMs and not enough about the things customers actually care about. tl;dr: Messaging should focus on the benefits, not the implementation or features.

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🚀 It’s a big day at Hoop! We’re excited to share we’ve raised $5m led by Index Ventures with participation from Origin Ventures, Chingona Ventures, Divergent Capital, and an inspiring group of angel investors. Two years ago, Justin, Brian, and I got together and started brainstorming. We had worked together as early executives at Trello for 7.5 years! We wanted to recreate the magic of the early days of Trello and respond to the epidemic of distraction we were seeing in the workplace. When I left Atlassian, I was in back-to-back meetings most days. Slack was constantly buzzing. My whole day was spent going between apps and praying I wouldn’t miss something important. I would wake up in the middle of the night remembering that DM I forgot to respond to. In an age of AI, this kind of mental fatigue across tools drains humans of our energy to do the work that really matters: the focused and creative work that comes when we can feel secure that we’re on top of all important work. Hoop is the product I wish I had. It connects to Zoom, Google Meet, Slack and email and automatically captures tasks for me using AI. It then centralizes everything in one spot so I never miss a task. Our vision is to rethink task management with an AI first principles mindset. There’s so much we can do now that we couldn’t have imagined back when we were building Trello. It’s an exciting time to be building in the space, and we’ve got a world class team taking on this challenge. Now’s the time to try Hoop out and let us know what you think! We couldn’t be more grateful for all the amazing support from our community, investors, and friends. Let’s go team! 👏🏼 Special thanks to our investors for all their belief and support - Damir Becirovic Neil Rimer Katie Shea Samara Mejia Hernandez Jason Heltzer Andy Dunn Wade Foster Linda Lian Michael Pryor Kristen Habacht Elizabeth Hall Barry Clark Nikita Miller Mihika Kapoor Jiaona Zhang (JZ) Maggie Adhami-Boynton Sonia Sahney Nagar Sean Harper Darren Murph Mike Arauz Job van der Voort Annie Duke Jay Simons Maria Christopoulos Katris Ezra Galston Sheel Mohnot Ilya Fushman #futureofwork #ai #startups #fundraising

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🚰 VODA.ai is building software to make one of our scarcest, most important resources safer and more cost effective to manage🚰 It's W13 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got VODA.ai, an AI startup helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country. Co-Founder & CEO George Demosthenous was working in product management at a utility technology vendor that builds metering & network infrastructure for utilities. George consistently heard that while the technology Mueller was selling was effective, the external pipe detection equipment and sensors they were purchasing didn’t necessarily stop leaks. There are 2.2M miles of drinking water pipes across the U.S. In Jackson, MS more than 65% of their processed water does not make it to end customers. In Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood an estimated 70% of water is lost from 120 year old pipes. Imagine if Apple shipped 100M iPhones stateside and 50M were littered across the Pacific Ocean floor on their way over from Asia. Crazy, right? VODA.ai is building a software company that uses existing data to assess the condition of pipes that cannot be seen and determine which ones will have the highest likelihood of an event, like a leak or a break. VODA.ai created an AI engine dubbed “daVinciTM” here in Boston that uses pattern recognition in the way that LLMs probabilistically identify the next word in a sentence. daVinciTM has been tested head-to-head with other alternative models and has always outperformed! No pressure.. Since COVID they have grown both revenue & customer count by 200%+ y/y, continuing to leverage AI with both their product & team. AI’s emergence has helped VODA.ai’s sales cycle fall from a full year to three months as utilities broadly want to leverage best in class AI software. This Seed-stage startup has already analyzed over 1M miles of pipe (almost 50% of America!) and over 2M miles of service lines with customers from Boston to San Jose, CA. They are planning to more than 2x revenue in 2024, becoming the go to decision support platform for water utilities across the country in the next five years. VODA.ai is backed by local Boston investors Innospark Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. MassCEC has named VODA.ai a top carbon reduction emission leader, the team has twice been voted (by water utilities!) the Best Smart Water Solution at the Smart Water Summit, and VODA.ai plans to continue to grow their team in Boston in the quarters ahead. Operators to Know: -Kyra Dubinsky, Chief of Staff -Cory Sides, SVP Sales -Dan Hack, EVP of Operations and International Sales -Lowell Rust, MBA PMP, VP of Customer Success If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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