Growth Strategy

😳 US pension funds in limbo due to private equity zombie funds 🧟♂️ The Wall Street Journal providing the latest coverage on a sector under siege: "Private-equity (PE) and pension funds seemed like a match made in heaven. Now the honeymoon is over. The payouts have dried up, creating an expensive problem for investment managers overseeing the savings of workers retired from big corporations and state & city governments. To keep benefit checks coming on time, those managers are unloading investments on the cheap or turning to borrowing—costly measures that eat into returns. California’s worker pension, the nation’s largest, will be paying more money into its PE portfolio than it receives from those investments for 8 years in a row. The engine maker Cummins Inc. took a 4.4% loss in its U.K. pension last year, in large part because it sold private assets at a discount. It is the latest cash crunch to befall retirement funds that have piled into hard-to-sell investments in search of high returns, and spotlights the risks as Wall Street is trying to sell those investments to wealthy households. U.S. companies and state & local governments manage around $5 trillion in pension money. Large public pension funds have an average 1️⃣4️⃣% of their assets in PE, while large corporate pensions have almost 1️⃣3️⃣% in PE and other illiquid assets such as private loans & infrastructure, according to data from Boston College and JPMorgan Chase & Co. But as PE has grown, its lead over traditional stocks has narrowed. And during the decade before the investments pay out, it can be hard to trust interim estimates provided by fee-seeking managers. Pensions, sovereign-wealth funds, university endowments & other institutions often promise their money to PE managers for a decade or so. Over that time, the managers draw down the cash and use it to buy companies, then overhaul and sell them. Those sales and the resulting cash distributions to investors have slowed markedly as high interest rates have made buying and owning companies more complicated and expensive. Unable to sell without denting returns, PE managers are keeping workers’ retirement savings locked up for longer—sometimes past the promised maturity date. Nearly half of PE investors surveyed by the investment firm Coller Capital earlier this year said they had money tied up in so-called zombie 🧟♂️ funds—PE funds that didn’t pay out on the expected timetable, leaving investors in limbo. So pension funds are selling PE fund stakes secondhand—often taking a financial hit in the process. Anton Orlich is supervising an expansion of the $502 billion CalPERS PE portfolio to 17%. Orlich told Calpers’s board Monday that the cash demands of the PE portfolio have dwarfed payouts for 4 years and would continue to do so for about another 4 years." (+++Opinions are my own. Not investment advice. Do your own research.+++) Tap the bell 🔔 to subscribe to my profile & you'll be notified when I post. 💸

The Mobile Telco Model Is Broken....And That Might Not Be a Bad Thing I had a good conversation with a senior Telco CEO yesterday. We both agreed: the mobile telecom model isn’t just under pressure... it’s broken. And not recently. It’s been structurally broken for over 15 years. Revenues? Growing at 2% a year globally, below inflation. ROIC? Still under the cost of capital for most operators. NPS? Telcos hover around 20–30 while tech companies push 60+. Opex? In many markets, it eats up 80% of revenue. And price erosion? We’ve normalized losing 30–40% of GB value per year. And what are we still selling? Buckets of data. Now, when something is broken, you need to go to foundational aspects of our business. First, telcos must become digital-first. Customers don’t compare you to other telcos, they compare you to Uber, Amazon, and Apple. That’s the bar. If it takes 12 clicks to activate a line or change a plan, you’ve already lost. Second, you need deep personalization at scale. Spotify knows your mood. Telcos still offer “Youth Plan 3.0.” Microsegments aren’t enough. You need individual-level context. Every offer, touchpoint, and upsell should feel tailor-made. Third, get out of the legacy trap. The OSS/BSS model is dead. Nobody has three years to rebuild a CRM or billing engine. Those projects fail. The only path is cloud-native, agile execution, rapid deployment, fail-fast loops, and zero patience for waterfall digital transformation roadmaps. Amazon Changes 2.5 million prices every day and I can assure you they don't have a group of consultants running a 3 year transformation project to make it happen. Fourth, adopt customer obsession as a core value, not a slide. Amazon isn’t customer-centric because it says so; it’s because the product, support, and incentives are aligned with the user every step of the way. Telcos need to unlearn product-first thinking. Finally, stop thinking of your network as a commodity. It’s not a GB plan. It’s a programmable platform. One that can offer privacy, identity, location, QoS, and trust. If you can expose that as a service, you stop being a utility and start being essential infrastructure again. The model is broken. But that might be the best thing that’s happened to this industry in years.

To be successful in Q1 of 2025, as the Chief Executive focus on the following three key areas: 1. Agility and Adaptability: The market landscape is expected to remain unpredictable, with demand volatility continuing from 2024. CEOs must ensure their teams are equipped to adapt quickly to sudden changes. This involves refining demand generation strategies and building resilience to capture revenue growth opportunities. 2. Accurate Revenue Forecasting: Accurately forecasting revenue is crucial. CEOs should reassess revenue drivers, identify new opportunities, and refine their go-to-market strategies. This will help in setting realistic targets and aligning resources effectively to maximize potential. 3. Leveraging Technology and Innovation: Staying ahead of technological shifts, particularly in AI and digital transformation, is essential. CEOs should foster a culture of innovation, encourage experimentation, and integrate new technologies to stream-line operations and enhance customer experiences. Focusing on these areas will help CEOs navigate the challenges of Q1 and set a strong foundation for the rest of the year. How do you see these strategies fitting into your organization's plans? Ready to dive deeper into any particular step? Let’s discuss! For more posts like this, follow me @ https://lnkd.in/gnrwyZtR

"I'll delegate when I find good people." Translation: "I'll trust them after they prove themselves." Plot twist: They can't prove themselves until you trust them. Break the loop. Delegate to develop. Here's how: 1️⃣ What should you delegate? Everything. Not a joke. You need to design yourself completely out of your old job. Set your sights lower and you'll delegate WAY less than you should. But don't freak out: Responsibly delegating this way will take months. 2️⃣ Set Expectations w/ Your Boss The biggest wild card when delegating: Your boss.  Perfection isn't the target. Command is.  - Must-dos: handled  - Who you're stretching   - Mistakes you anticipate   - How you'll address Remember: You're actually managing your boss. 3️⃣ Set Expectations w/ Yourself  Your team will not do it your way.  So you have a choice: - Waste a ton of time trying to make them you?   - Empower them to creatively do it better?  Remember: 5 people at 80% = 400%. 4️⃣ Triage Your Reality - If you have to hang onto something -> do it.  - If you feel guilty delegating a miserable task -> delete it.  - If you can't delegate them anything -> you have a bigger problem. 5️⃣ Delegate for Your Development  You must create space to grow. Start here:   1) Anything partially delegated -> Completion achieves clarity.  2) Where you add the least value -> Your grind is their growth.  3) The routine -> Ripe for a runbook or automation. 6️⃣ Delegate for Their Development Start with the stretch each employee needs to excel. Easiest place to start: ask them how they want to grow. People usually know. And they'll feel agency over their own mastery. Bonus: Challenge them to find & take that work. Virtuous cycle. 7️⃣ Set Expectations w/ Your Team  Good delegation is more than assigning tasks:  - It's goal-oriented  - It's written down  - It's intentional When you assign "Whys" instead of "Whats", You get Results instead of "Buts". 8️⃣ Climb The Ladder Aim for the step that makes you uncomfortable:     - Steps over Tasks  - Processes over Steps  - Responsibilities over Processes  - Goals over Responsibilities   - Jobs over Goals  Each rung is higher leverage. 9️⃣ Don't Undo Good Work Delegating & walking away - You need to trust. But you also need to verify. - Metrics & surveys are a good starting point. Micromanaging - That's your insecurity, not their effort. - Your new job is to enable, motivate & assess, not step in. ✅ Remember: You're not just delegating tasks. - You're delegating goals. - You're delegating growth. - You're delegating greatness. The best time to start was months ago.  The next best time is today. 🔔 Follow Dave Kline for more posts like this. ♻️ And repost to help those leaders who need to delegate more.

Top takeaways from my chat with Grant Lee (CEO of Gamma): 1. The first 30 seconds of using your product should be so good it earns the next 30 seconds. When Gamma wasn’t growing, they stopped everything and spent three months perfecting just the first 30 seconds of using their product. They made it so compelling that new users would immediately tell their friends. This single change transformed their growth trajectory. 2. Focus on one simple promise, not many features. Think of it like throwing eggs to someone: they can catch one, but if you throw five at once, they’ll drop them all. Your users are selfish, vain, and lazy—you have 30 seconds to show value before they leave. Gamma focused on “create a slide in seconds” rather than listing 10 features. 3. Don’t spend on ads until over half your growth comes from word of mouth. If you try to buy growth before your product spreads organically, you’re wasting money filling a leaky bucket. 4. Work with hundreds of small creators instead of a few big influencers. Rather than blowing your budget on five or six well-known influencers who treat it like just another ad read, find thousands of micro-influencers whose audiences genuinely care about tools like yours. Teachers sharing with teachers, consultants with consultants—these tight communities create authentic word of mouth that spreads fast. 5. Spend time personally onboarding each early creator like they’re joining your team. Don’t just send influencers a script. Jump on calls, walk them through the product, help them understand what makes it special, and let them tell your story in their own voice. This investment turns them into genuine advocates who post about you repeatedly instead of treating it like any other sponsorship. 6. Hire painfully slowly and only exceptional people. Gamma serves 50 million users with just 50 people and makes a profit. All 10 original employees are still there five years later. They never set headcount goals because that makes you hire to hit a number instead of hiring only when you find someone exceptional. When someone is exceptional, give them more responsibility, not less—top performers want harder challenges. 7. Test prototypes with 20 people on UserTesting before investing in a big project. Use platforms like Voicepanel or UserTesting to watch real people try your prototype. They’ll show you problems you never see because you’re too close to your product. Gamma goes from idea to results in a single day—morning idea, afternoon testing, evening results. This saves months of building things nobody wants. 8. Choose problems you’ll care about for 10 years. Before worrying about technology or tactics, ask if this problem matters enough to you personally that you’d dedicate a decade to solving it. Founders who are missionaries rather than mercenaries build better products because their authentic commitment shows through to customers and attracts people who want to build alongside you for the long term.

Europe has a great opportunity to advance towards a genuinely Single Market. According to a European Parliament study, further integration at the regional level could generate over €2.8 trillion per year by 2032, more than the 'Next Generation EU' recovery package.   For example, completing the Banking and Capital Markets Union would significantly increase Europe's financial firepower and help channel capital into much-needed investment. One possible start would be boosting the EU securitization market and exploring ways to enable banks to free up capital and liquidity to provide additional funding to EU businesses. That was one of the messages from José Antonio Álvarez at last week's #Eurofi high-level conference in Ghent.   Another crucial step would be harmonizing the regulatory framework to take full advantage of economies of scale and unlock new sources of growth -one of Europe's most urgent challenges. As a great champion of the EU, I believe in the need for simple, robust, and fair regulation, but it must strike the right balance between supporting growth and ensuring financial stability while focusing on the challenges of today. We are taking steps in the right direction, but there is still room to do more.

We grew Gamma to $50M ARR in under 2 years, profitably. Cost us over $5M to learn these tactics. Here's what actually worked: influencer marketing, performance marketing, user testing, and dogfooding: 1. Go broad with influencer marketing, then double down on what works Most startups get three things wrong: too small a budget, overly selective on creators, and giving up too early. Start with $10-20k/month and commit to 6 months minimum. - List every creator persona with audiences that care about your product - Offer base + viral bonus. For TikTok, have creators start new accounts - Once you have 20-30 winning formats, hire your top creators as consultants to train others Never write scripts. They become ads no one watches. 2. Invest in brand before performance marketing Most startups aren't prepared to scale spend because their brand and creative sucks. We went through an expensive rebrand, but skipping it would have been more expensive. Test creatives relentlessly. Whatever number you're thinking of testing, 10x it. Once you see a use case resonating, build a whole funnel around it with symmetric messaging. Don't confuse visitors by showing them an ad with one value prop and dropping them on a landing page with a different message. 3. Get users to test prototypes before you ship This saves you from the worst startup mistake: misdirected product development. We ran user testing on voicepanel and usertesting: - Recruited random people who make slide decks for work - Showed them prototypes with minimal instructions - Asked them to think out loud. The words they use, where they get confused, is gold Did this for landing pages, onboarding, new features, and moonshot concepts. Ship once you have proof that ordinary people find it easy and useful. 4. Dogfood the hell out of your product Either you build something 100x better than alternatives, or you build something else. Dogfooding makes it painfully obvious if your product isn't 100x better. Use your product daily for real work, not demos. Force yourself to choose it over the alternative. If you keep reaching for the competitor, you don't have PMF yet. When we started Gamma, we had two competing ideas: a virtual office and reimagining PowerPoint. After 6 months of dogfooding both, we had a clear winner. With the virtual office, we kept wanting to just meet in person. With the reimagined PowerPoint, we never wanted to go back. That's the test. If you're not viscerally feeling the 100x difference, your customers won't either. — $0-$10M was nearly 100% word of mouth. $10M-$50M was still over 50% word of mouth, but influencer and referral made up the rest. That foundation let us blaze past $50M. Most startups skip the experimentation. They guess, ship, and hope for the best. We spent $5M learning what works. Now, you don't have to.

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲’𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥&𝗗: 𝗠𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗱 ‼️ Last week the International Monetary Fund published a very interesting and comprehensive paper about the need for more venture capital in Europe to tackle our continents challenges. To name a few: ✔️productivity per hour worked is app 30% lower in 🇪🇺compared to the 🇺🇸 ✔️R&D investments are still way below the target of 3% per annum ✔️Within the top 100 tech companies worldwide merely a handful are European Is it all about 💶 I here you say? No it is about keeping up our welfare for future generations. And about a liveable planet. And increasing our innovation and competitiveness are crucial to do so. Which is also the key message of Mr. Draghi’s report I hope. The IMF report takes a deeper dive into the underlying issues: ✔️ VC investments are only 0,4% of GDP. In the US it is 3x as much ✔️Europeans park their savings in bank accounts. And banks are very risk aversie when it comes to financing hightech startups. ✔️Long term savings go primarily via pension funds, who hardly invest in VC in Europe (despite some positive signs recently) ✔️The EU has fewer and smaller VC funds leading to smaller rounds, less opportunities for scale-up financing and limited exit options ✔️ European scale-ups end up listing in the US instead of Europe itself ✔️ National fragmentation within the EU leads to a lot of barriers for scaling What has to be done? ✅ Increase efforts on a real single European market, for example by consolidating stock market exchanges and diminishing cross border red tape ✅ Make it more attractive for pension funds and insurers to step into VC ✅ Enhance the capacity of European Investment Bank (EIB), European Investment Fund (EIF) and national promotional institutes, like Invest-NL ✅ Implement preferential tax treatments for equity investments in startups and VC funds ✅ Encourage more funds-of-funds And I would like to ad to the findings in the report two things: 1️⃣ We need a cultural mind shift, more urgency and embracing true entrepreneurship 2️⃣ We have to step up our game when it comes to tech transfer. Transforming our high quality academic knowledge into economic and societal impact via startups.

🚨 US Tariff Shock: Time for India to Diversify Agri Exports!! From today (August 27, 2025), the United States will impose an additional 25% tariff taking total tariff to a steep 50% on nearly all of Indian agricultural exports. This punitive move, linked to India’s energy ties with Russia, puts at risk nearly $5.7 billion in agri-food exports—11% of India’s total agricultural export basket. 🩹The expected damage? A 30% drop in exports to the US—especially in marine products ($2.71B), rice ($380M), cashews ($356M), spices, tea, and coffee ($434M), fresh and processed fruits and vegetables ($891M), and food ingredients and plant extracts ($306M). This is a wake-up call. India cannot afford to be overly dependent on a single export destination. 👉 Diversification is now a strategic imperative, not a choice. Africa, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East present huge untapped demand for Indian food and agri-products. From Indian mangoes to basmati rice, from turmeric to tea—these markets crave quality, reliability, and value that India can deliver. 🛡️ APEDA's Crucial Role APEDA has been instrumental in propelling Indian agri-exports from $23.2 billion in 2014-15 to $53.1 billion in 2024-25, nearly doubling in a decade. However, this progress is under threat. Unless we rapidly recalibrate our market strategies and explore new geographies, the great gains of the last 10 years could be undone. Under the able leadership of Abhishek Dev, Chairman and Dr. Sudhanshu, Secretary, for The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) the way forward is clear. 📌 Action Plan Forward is to create a task force of experts to: ⚡Rapidly map affected commodities and match with alternative markets ⚡Fast-track bilateral discussions with ASEAN, Europe, Africa & Latin America ⚡Promote ‘Brand India’ in high-potential markets ⚡Enable product-specific export missions for perishables, spices, seafood ⚡Enhance trade intelligence and buyer-seller linkages ⚡De-risk MSMEs and cooperatives from geopolitical trade shocks ⚡Resolve regulatory bottlenecks to resolve SPS/TBT issues ⚡Streamline certifications, quality standards, and port access for new markets ⚡Build localized playbooks for 10–12 new priority countries Let’s not let a single decision in another capital dismantle a decade of India’s hard work in agri exports. Let’s respond not with panic, but with purpose. 🌍 The world is wide—and Indian agriculture deserves a global footprint beyond one country.

One thing I push early-stage B2B founders to do (and it’s harder than it sounds) is to really understand — and quantify — the value you deliver to customers. Very few can put a dollar number on it.💡 Try to estimate the value your product creates for a customer in real dollars ($Z) 💰 Once you do that, , you can ask a few important questions to qualify how robust and urgent the value proposition really is: ▪️ Is $Z actually meaningful in the context of the customer’s business? (If it’s a rounding error for them, say <2% of top line, selling will be painful 😬) ▪️ Can you show or prove $Z quickly, or are you asking the customer to take a leap of faith? Quantifying value proposition also helps with 💵 pricing and 📐market size, which many founders struggle with early on. Example 1: cost / time savings ⏱️ - Say you’re selling software that saves a RevOps team ~5 hours per week. - Fully loaded cost is ~$80/hour → ~$20k/year in savings. That’s your $Z. - If you’re saving time or money, customers will often pay ~10–20% of that value. So a ~$2–4k ACV is a reasonable first pricing hypothesis 🎯 Example 2: revenue generation 📈 - Now say your product helps a sales team close 2 extra deals per quarter. - Each deal is worth ~$50k → ~$400k/year in incremental revenue. That’s $Z. - When you’re directly helping customers generate revenue, they’re often willing to pay more — say ~20–30% of the value. That points to an $80–120k ACV range (assuming you can prove the value). More importantly you can use $Z to estimate market size.  📐 Start bottoms up. Market = X customers × $Y ACV = market size Where: ▪️ $Y ≈ 10–20% × $Z (for cost/time savings) ▪️ $Y ≈ 20–30% × $Z (for revenue generation) Finally, pressure-test the assumptions: ▪️ Are we being precise about who “X customers” actually are? Do I need to sell a story where I start with a small #X and then expand? ▪️ Does $Y line up with real budgets and comparable spend? ▪️ Can we acquire customers for less than ~$Y/3? ▪️ Do we need more product to credibly charge $Y? You don’t need perfect answers early but a strawman that allows YOU to understand why you are willing to spend the next 10 years of your life working on something. 🚩