nabeel hyatt

Companies I have served on the board of, along with relevant writing about those startups:

- All Stripes (A community for cures) 

- Capella Space (SAR and the promise of a world of information) & (SAR Deep dive)

- Cruise (Doing the hard things the hard way) & (What happens when self driving happens) - Descript (The power of AI in Creativity)

- Discord 

- Instawork 

- North (Fka Thalmic Labs) (It takes time)

- Postmates (Building a three-sided marketplace)

- Proletariat 

- Sonder (Re-inventing the hotel) 

- Zum 

Other: 

- Hallway Chat podcast w/my partner Bijan

- What happens when self-driving happens 

- Insiders vs Outsiders 

1) Twitter is probably my most frequented spot: I’m @nabeel

2) I will occasionally post longer pieces on Medium (potentially)

3) Hallway chat podcasts are available via Soundcloud and iTunes

And lastly, I post photography of entrepreneurs, landscapes, and my family on Instagram as @nabeelo 

At the age of 13 I was a geeky outsider, and online life (BBSes in that pre-Internet age) allowed me to find the first tribe of people that I really related to. It was that little band of outsiders that got me into coding, hacking, design, and startups. In my first experiences with the online world no one knew your race, age, gender, or really anything except for your ability to make words, code, or art.

Silicon Valley thrives and survives because it is a meritocracy, perhaps the most inclusive place in the world. Years ago Paul Graham wrote a piece on “Cities and Ambition” that still resonates with me. His premise was that every major city has a culture with a prevailing value: Cambridge, MA values how smart you are above all else, LA values fame, NY values money, etc. For me the best version of silicon valley has been the embodiment of that early online community; valuing what you could make above all else.

But that’s not the only silicon valley.

Chamath wrote a provocative piece this week (“Bros Funding Bros”) that underneath its sensationalism resonated strongly. The worst version of silicon valley is a Hollywood-like club of insiders where you are on the career track from Stanford to high-growth-startup-of-the-month to Y-Combinator and beyond. It’s hard not to think of VC dinners I’ve been at where I had the oddest name in the room, and there wasn’t a single woman there.

So now we’ve started trying to measure diversity, to chart it out and rank it. I think it’s valuable in one sense, to illuminate where we are really underrepresented. But I also worry that staring at one or two imprecise KPIs is not going to get us any closer to the world we want. The issue lies much deeper than simply watching a male/female % chart and declaring victory if it ticks up.

For instance in the rankings attached to Chamath’s piece, why do Asians count as an ethnic group but Arabs do not (perhaps surveyors were making the common mistake of confusing ethnicity with race?). Similarly, Erica Joy wrote yesterday about her experience at a Google event on diversity where “there was no mention of any other forms of diversity besides ‘women’”

Once we are talking about women, and African Americans, shouldn’t we also be talking about socio-economic diversity as well? Ultimately, we should also hire more LBGT, Arabs, Turks, Asians, Kenyans, rural Kentuckians, etc.

I have now made some personal rules now about investments I will make, events I am willing to attend or promote, but I want to be able to do more. And in order for us all to do better, we need to enlist one of our best traits, our culture of learning.

We have been teaching each other about the craft of startups every day, from LTV calculations, to K rates, to how to manage people. Now let’s talk through the mechanics of how to build a startup culture that is still a tribe, but one that self-organizes around valuing differing backgrounds.

We should do these things not to make a diversity ranking chart go up, and not even as a moral imperative (although that’s a good enough reason). We should do it because seeking out differing views and maintaining the outsider mentality has allowed so many wonderful things to be created here.

From Apple to eBay, and more recently from Lynda.com to Postmates, there are stories again and again of immigrants and outsiders pushing through and finding a way to make their dent in the world in this town.

It’s why I’m here, to help us all build the largest group of outsiders ever assembled.

—

Thanks to Andrew Parker, Kevin Thau, Lo Toney, Maureen Fan, Sara Mauskopf, and Siqi Chen for reading drafts of this post.

It’s his birthday today, so I wanted to share notes from a 1949 talk he gave at UCLA called “Advice to Students.” It’s masterful, and I think of the last line often.

Make a list of books Develop a curiosity Look at things as though for the first time Think of things in relation to each other Always think of the next larger thing Avoid the “pat” answer — the formula Avoid the preconceived idea Study well objects made past recent and ancient but never without the technological and social conditions responsible Prepare yourself to search out the true need — physical, psychological Prepare yourself to intelligently fill that need The art is not something you apply to your work The art is the way you do your work, a result of your attitude toward it

Design is a full time job It is the way you look at politics, funny papers, listen to music, raise children Art is not a thing in a vacuum — No personal signature Economy of material Avoid the contrived

Apprentice system and why it is impractical for them No office wants to add another prima donna to its staff No office is looking for a great creative genius No office — or at least very few — can train employees from scratch

There is always a need for anyone that can do a simple job thoroughly

There are things you can do to prepare yourself — to be desirable orderly work habits ability to bring any job to a conclusion drawing feasibility lettering a presentation that “reads” well willingness to do outside work and study on a problem…

the primitive spear is not the work of an individual, nor is it a good tool or utensil.

Today Postmates announced a long term exclusive partnership with Starbucks. It’s a big milestone on its own, but it also represents another major step in the transition of Postmates from restaurant delivery service to on-demand logistics network.

The very first meeting I had with Bastian, the Co-Founder and CEO of Postmates, was in their old dingy office in the Mission. It was a multi-hour deep dive into the business, on everything from pricing models, to courier earnings, to user experience. But the moment that has stuck out the most since then was when I asked why Postmates was focused on food.

Postmates since the very beginning has described themselves not just as a food delivery business, but a logistics platform. When I asked Bastian “why food as a focus then?” he immediately got animated, in that way he often does, and started talking a lot about liquidity.

He drew on the whiteboard an x/y graph that charted out everything that Postmates could possibly deliver. It was a pretty exhaustive list. On the Y axis he put the size of each market, and then quite insightfully on the X axis he put frequency of use.

His assertion was that you were teaching consumers a new behavior: that you could get anything from your city to your door in minutes. If he converted a single person to love the service, he wanted to focus on a category that would be purchased frequently, so that merchants and couriers (Postmates) could see the most benefit from one converted customer.

Of course he wanted to be a logistics platform eventually, but restaurants were the thing in that upper right quadrant, the only thing that consumers would buy multiple times a week. Basically, what Beanie Babies and other collectibles were to eBay, restaurants were going to be for Postmates. Only in this case the frequency was even more important because unlike eBay, Uber, and other two-sided marketplaces he was building a three sided marketplace: between couriers, merchants and consumers. 

That bet paid off. A focus on local merchant food delivery allowed Postmates to build the largest on-demand delivery network, with nearly 10k Postmates. They built a network large enough that by late last year they were ready to roll out their logistics platform and API. And after a few months beta period, today they announced their first major partnership with Starbucks.

Obviously Starbucks is a pretty amazing partnership on its own. They have over 21,500 locations across the country, and are the #1 mobile commerce app in the U.S. That will of course mean higher growth for the company, but as with any marketplace it’s also a big benefit for the other participants, namely for a Postmate delivering goods, and for a merchant listing their goods on the service.

Higher volumes will allow a Postmate to do more deliveries per hour, increasing their earnings. That will in turn cause the network of Postmates to grow even faster. More Postmates doing deliveries will mean faster service for consumers. And more consumers and Postmates will create a better experience for local merchants trying to compete with the big guys.

Apple execs seemed pretty excited about the new Apple Watch, but there are still plenty of people that think that consumer electronics companies obsession with watches is akin to 3D TVs — chasing innovation for innovations sake. They are likely wrong.

Back at Ambient Devices in 2001 as we were thinking about the future of our products & glanceable computing we used to have a chart that had “real-time need” on one axis and “glanceablility” on the other axis. I thought of that graph today as Apple announced their watch.

It catches many founders by surprise, but one of the hardest pitches to a venture capital firm is actually the pitch to your current investors. My friend Rob Go wrote about this not long ago, but it comes up regularly so I wanted to tackle some successful strategies I’ve seen.

The most common reason founders end up presenting to their current VCs is when raising a new round of capital and looking for pro-rata support. Or perhaps everyone is contemplating an inside round. Other times it is just an update because it has been a while and the business has materially changed.

There are two dynamics at play that cause these conversations to be awkward. 

I was chatting with Jonathan Wegener, CEO of Timehop, last week. Timehop is a product that has always enjoyed almost unbelievably high retention and engagement, but previously struggled to hit hyper growth. After a ton of iteration over the last year suddenly they have started to grow quite quickly - breaking the top 50 in the US iOS Appstore, and the top 10 free overall in the UK. 

Jonathan and his team have steered the product very well, so you can imagine there were a few congratulations in order. But, partly as a testament to the way Jonathan thinks, we spent a lot less time talking about how good growth is and a lot more about the right way to push going forward.

Sam Altman wrote a great piece a few days ago on founder equity. He has some excellent points around exercising options and tax treatment structure that deserve more discussion, but I want to talk about the percentage of a company that goes to non-founders. 

Specifically, non-founders should be getting more equity. As Fred said, perhaps the market will slowly adjust to this. But if I were starting a company today, I would use my option pool as a competitive weapon. 

I was sitting at The Creamery coffee shop a couple months ago with a friend, who without much segueway started raving about a local company called The Juice Shop. “Have you tried their A+ Deep Green juice? Life changing!” I was of course open to try it but their nearest location was in Cow Hollow, and so I resigned myself to likely forgetting this recommendation by the next time I was in the neighborhood.

Not to be deterred, my friend whipped out his phone and 10 minutes later a Postmate walked into the coffee shop where we sat and delivered our juices. I’ve been a regular of The Juice Shop since then.