Newsletter #2: April 26, 2022

Friends and Hard Truths

How do you know if your friends will tell you the hard truths? Publish a newsletter with a broken ‘subscribe’ button.

Glen Lake’s ideation and discovery engine is in full swing. As a reminder, Glen Lake uncovers problems to solve with technology and helps others to commercialize their promising technology. Here’s our progress:

I’ve had a chance to meet with many of you to discuss Glen Lake, validate ideas in the pipeline, and identify opportunities in your industry. I can’t thank you all enough for the time and support as Glen Lake gets underway.

Each month I will include some tidbits in the newsletter (below) that you may find helpful. Industry research, interesting books, and startup insights. I’m always interested in feedback on the content.

What is the value of an idea?

Equity allocation is a hot topic in early company formation. Often, the ‘idea person’ wants to be compensated for the idea that has sparked formation. Does this person deserve additional equity for the idea? The short answer is no. Ideas may be the spark, but execution is the source of all value. To split equity with other founders, consider the relative value that you each bring to execution, instead of who brought the idea.

Unless the idea is for a bar on a barge. That’s still a great idea.

To read more on this, check out Founder’s Equity Splits, part of the Founder’s Pocket Guide series. It’s short, punchy, and action packed with some great frameworks you can take with you.

A few books we like:

Start with Why by Simon Sinek

There are three elements to everything that happens in your business: WHAT, HOW, and WHY. When you set a company mission, manage a team, or sell a product, it is easy to start with the WHAT. In reality, the WHY is what motivates you and your team, sells products to your customers, and motivates you to drive value. Read it!

The Parallel Entrepreneur by Ryan Buckley

Parallel entrepreneurship is the counter-point to serial entrepreneurship. Why build one company (then another) when you can build them in parallel? Companies built in parallel take advantage of economies of scale for core operations, and de-risk the entrepreneurial leap with diversification. Entrepreneurship is hard and companies fail. De-risk like VCs with the volume game.

An industry we like: DevOps

DevOps is second nature to software engineers, yet relatively unknown of by non-technical folks. So lets start from the beginning. What is DevOps?

DevOps is the sub-industry of products that move your code from local editor (on your computer) to your customers. This is a surprisingly complex process that involves development environments, repositories, deployment pipelines, testing, security scans, and more. It is so complex that the industry is growing with an 18.6% CAGR (!!) (Grandview Research). Think about that number: with an expected market value of $12.85B in 2025, the market will be worth $30.15B by 2030. Lots of opportunity here. I expect my NFT collection to perform similarly over that period.

Just kidding. I don’t own NFTs.

A shoutout to Billy Kunz and the team at Headstorm for the introduction to DevOps. Billy is a DevOps expert, and I’m fired up every time he uses the word Kubernetes.

help us Build glen Lake Pioneering

To build a business takes a village. A couple of asks for this group:

  • Do you or a friend work in a niche industry with technology problems to solve? We’d love to talk to you and help you solve them!

  • Do you have early stage technology and you’re not quite sure how to commercialize it, or find yourself in a go-to market rut? We’d love to talk to you!

  • Do you know someone interested to take the entrepreneur’s leap? We’re (slowly) growing the Glen Lake team. Always game to speak with smart people.

Happy allergy season to all who celebrate,