Walter Thompson

There’s no textbook-approved technique for building a startup engineering team: in the early days, everyone wears several hats. But when a company enters its growth phase, the recruiting process is systematized, new hires are sorted into discrete units, and a thin layer of management is applied to keep everything...

In a previous era, startups that gained influence with CIOs could skate through the procurement process and start planning seminars for new customers as soon as contracts were finalized. Today, a decade or more into the End User Era, consumers have become the tail that wags the dog. Product-led growth...

As an investor and a recent product manager, I have encountered many companies that failed and some that succeeded at their product-led growth (PLG) efforts. The PLG journey is never easy, but it can be a powerful path to enduring success. I have distilled my experience into a short but...

At the end of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), the human protagonist realizes that the alien world he crash-landed upon is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. For many first-time founders in fundraising mode, the current market correction for publicly-traded tech companies has been similarly jarring. Once investors started shaving value from high-flying...

“Where’s my flying car?” is a staple of Gen X humor, since it reaffirms the cynical viewpoint that technology frequently fails to deliver on its lofty promises. Until recently, electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles were largely consigned to our imaginations. I can name more movies that feature flying...

Fundraising is a highly specialized skill: unless you’ve started a business, worked in a non-profit, or perhaps defrauded someone, you won’t have much practical experience when it comes to convincing strangers to give you their money. But startup-land is different: before a founding team can breathe life into their...

For many first-time founders, determining the size of the market in which they hope to compete is one of their biggest challenges. I haven’t launched a successful startup, but I have helped write several pitch decks. Each time, the team’s collective anxiety increased when we needed to calculate TAM. It...

Swedish fintech giant Klarna was doing well before the pandemic, but today, it’s a mega-unicorn: In June 2021, it reached a $45.6 billion valuation after raising $639 million. Much of this growth was fueled by U.S. consumers, which makes sense, considering that most of us still can’t cover a...

You are more likely to close a sale if you have actionable insights into your prospective customer’s needs. But for enterprise software startups, this presents a special problem. Unless you’re a former CIO who already has a clear understanding of the decision-making process, you can only fall back on...

CTO and founder of Reposify, Yaron Tal is a tech entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert with nearly two decades of experience developing cybersecurity software solutions. In unprecedented times, even government bureaucracy moves quickly. As a result of the heightened likelihood of cyberthreat from Russian malactor groups, the U.S. Cybersecurity and...