New year, new Oversubscribed (Oversubscribed Weekly #8)

Hope you’re all having a great start to the new year! Here are some tweets worth reading from this week:

0/ In my experience “Crossing the Chasm” almost never plays out as written. Rather, it seems as if most b2b startups remain in the chasm through liquidity, or hop from one to the next struggling with multiple shifting markets.

— martin_casado (@martin_casado) 27 de diciembre de 2018

We really enjoyed this tweetstorm from Martin Casado about B2B companies’ experience with the concept of “crossing the chasm.” While Crossing the Chasm is a pretty good book as far as business books go, in real life, a product cycle doesn’t always play out as smoothly or as simply as the book’s examples do. A good reminder that all advice is over-simplified, and that the real world is always more complicated.

A two-parter from Paul Graham, reminiscing about PlanGrid‘s successful YC interview. And a good lesson about the back-and-forth nature of the best investor pitches. (Sharp-eyed readers may notice from this screenshot that I don’t follow him anymore. I had to unfollow him once his tweets became 90% parenting advice. Sorry PG.)

An ingenious method for getting people to return your voicemails, according to my Lyft driver: leave your name and number, say “I really need to talk to you about—“ and then hang up.

— Max Nussenbaum (@maxnuss) 21 de diciembre de 2018

Okay, this one is from me, and it’s not technically fundraising advice, but this tip from my Lyft driver was so good I had to include it. We definitely don’t recommend using this technique on investors, as it’ll almost certainly piss them off. But as a trick for people you don’t intend to have an ongoing relationship with, it’s gold. I wish I’d thought of this when I was running my last startup and trying to get random real estate brokers to return my calls.

Enjoy this? Get Oversubscribed in your inbox every Thursday.