Many smart, successful people half-ass their creative projects - Twitter, podcasts, courses.

The more successful they are, the harder it is to have a beginner’s mindset.

To succeed, they need to take it seriously, hustle, and have a learning mindset.

Hard, but it works.

Who would you rather learn from?

(A) Someone who has spent 30 years reading and writing books about the course content
OR
(B) Someone who has spent 30 years working in the field the course is about

Amazed by what Erik Torenberg has been building with Turpentine. We had a great conversation about startup ideation that I was quite proud of. Check it here...

Lot of people think I'm throwing shade at Duolingo.

But the reality is we at Udemy also made the same choice as Duolingo!

My intent was the show respect with a bit of jest: the Duolingo team made the hard and smart decision to focus on growth over effectiveness, thereby

David literally interviewed 3 of our top choice product/eng cofounders and his input was critical in shreyans bhansali joining Maven!

Congrats on the new gig! David Lieb

Duolingo is a fascinating study in consumer 'education.'

The app is fairly useless for language learning* but is wildly popular.

88.4M Monthly Active Users
6.6M Paid Subscribers
$530M in FY 2023 Revenue
$93.7M in FY 2023 EBITDA

The kicker? $8.4B market cap.
2x bigger than

The world is slow and inefficient. I believe in startups and technology as a force to improve that.

Anytime someone takes an existing system and improves it, the world wins.

Mercury has done that with Personal Banking. My wife and I didn't want to use it at first because we

Powerful to see Marc Andreessen, Cyan Banister, et al publicly admit regret about not being *more* supportive of former colleagues.

How many people even admit privately when they did something actively wrong?

Inspirational.

Reading books is the only way to get out of the news cycle. Getting out of the news cycle is the only way to acquire real knowledge.

Few firms understand PMF like First Round. Few firms actually invest before PMF like First Round.

Now you can learn directly from them and their founders via the PMF Method program. Great opportunity for early-stage founders!

Our car window was smashed in last night. Right outside our house. Texted a group thread with 5 Oakland friends.

4 have been victims of car vandalism in the last 2 years. None had anything stolen.

Genuine question: where can I find more info on the crime epidemic in Oakland?

My favorite video games as a kid were:
- Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
- Pokemon
- Mario
- Microsoft Encarta
- Oregon Trail

So many of them were both educational and entertaining. Love that a16z is investing more in helping makers build games we love.

The idea of 'learning styles' is ridiculous. In fact, learning can't always be personal - instead it should be multimodal.

The best learners I know don't say: 'I'm an auditory learner' and eschew all written or video-based learning methods. They don't say 'I'm a kinesthetic

How to make $1M, $5M, or $10M+ in Silicon Valley.

I've seen many friends 'make it' in Silicon Valley over the last 15 years. None got top tier jobs out of college, so they usually started at mediocre Seed or Series A companies with OK founders and OK investors. From there, they

Nearly every month someone asks me what I think of their new food delivery idea.

If you are making the food, you have no chance as a VC-backed business.

As a bootstrapped restaurant business, you can do it. You may even make a few million dollars if you grow slow, focus on

We launched AI on Maven 1 yr ago and now its our best category, 20% of enrollments.

To our surprise, technical courses were the most popular (engineering, data, product).

Launching a bunch more technical AI courses soon.

What topics should we absolutely include? By who?

Proud to share some *insane* data: Maven courses have 14x more retention than video-based courses (aka 'MOOCs') from companies like Coursera and Udemy.

From enrolled to Week 1, Maven courses have a 93% activation rate. MOOCs have a 39% activation rate. That's a 2.5x difference.