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Published a new essay: The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in your startup’s metrics – 80 slide deck included!

This was a deck that I created on my (longish) interview process with @a16z. It was a long path, starting with meeting folks at the firm 10 years ago. But the purpose of the deck was to explain how I would use my superpower in an investing context

Here's what I explain in the deck. As investors (whether angel or VC) we're often confronted with an up-and-to-the-right graph. Is it going to go up? Or down?

One solution to forecast these growth curves is the Growth Accounting Framework, where you add up New+Reactivated and subtract churned users. In each time period that gives you the difference in monthly actives.

The problem with this is that it's a lagging metric, not a leading one. We need to go one level deeper and look at the underlying loops that drive these numbers, to understand the quality.

THE UNTOLD TALE OF THE LESSER KNOWN WARRIORS:JOGRAJ GURJAR & RAMPYARI GURJAR AND HOW DID THEY DEFEAT THE CRUELEST ISLAMIC INVADER, TIMUR LANG.

Timur Lang, was the founder of Timurid Empire. He was born in April 1336 CE, somewhere in central asia.

During his reign, he conquered Persia, Egypt, Central Asia and emerged as the most powerful and heinous ruler. He was a religious fanatic like the rest of the Islamic invaders who tried to invade India.

Timur Lang decided to invade India in 1398 as he heard about India's splendid wealth and had a desire to conquer India which his ancestor Genghis Khan couldn't do.

After Firoz Shah's demise in1388, Delhi Sultanate was in a state of political turmoil.During this time, Timur sent his grandson Pir Mohammad to attack Indian front. He invaded Multan&was able to defeat Iqbal Khan's brother but when he met with resistance,he asked help from Timur.

Iqbal Khan secured his hold on Delhi under Muhammad Tughluq after Firoz Shah died.
Timur provided the required back-up to his grandson with 100000 men approx. Timur sacked and plundered all the cities coming in his way &later in October 1398 reunited with his grandson.

Some quick thoughts on Sam Gyimah's resignation after conversations with various Conservative MPs: 1) the chances of a second referendum are a lot higher than I thought:

2) At this point, if you are a young and ambitious Tory MP it is now so overwhelmingly in your interest to vote against the withdrawal agreement. V v hard to see how Julian Smith can cap rebellion at under 100:

3) Really just to reiterate 1) Gyimah is the kind of "No, never gonna rebel" vaguely pro-EU Tory you'd need to get on side to outweigh Labour Leavers and Real Concerners.