Many of you read the Roddenberry Prize application, so you may want to look at our 5-year financial projection, which tells that story in numbers. Whichever way you look at it, it’s huge. 🤞 ✊
For folks who haven’t spent much time looking at financials, you may want to start with this primer on projections, this about financial statement basics, or this one about the difference between a forecast vs projection (our operating model in Causal is a forecast and our financial projections for VCs is a projection) – these are the best I could find with a quick google. Oh, and income statement and P&L are the same thing.
Finally, I’m going to continue to write these on Fridays or over the weekend, but I’ll post them on Mondays, in response to Jeremy’s comment last week :)
Unique Buildings: 5,210 ←- Thanks for running this from vacation François
Annual Run Rate: $1.3M
Monthly net burn: $53k ←- June books are closed and missing expenses are in!
2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,017.34 👀
Outstanding invoices as of today: $100,565
Congrats on Release 69! If I’m up-to-date on what went in, then this was an important one for the team’s ability to move faster for GP: it upgraded a whole bunch of out of date packages (other people’s software that we rely on). These kinds of upgrades are a time-consuming PITA because things that were working fine with an older version can suddenly misbehave. Kudos to Jeff, Chuck, and Luke on getting over this hump, and thanks Jeremy on the midwifery!
Adding capacity to Prod team: Before François took OVDs, he set up interviews for Dave Brandt, a PHP programmer w. 15 years of experience, largely in e-commerce. Rather than putting him through hours of technical interviews, we decided it would be better to have him join us on a trial basis for 2 weeks, so he will be starting on Monday! Dave will focus on two things: 1) taking care of any prod bugs that crop up; and 2) fixing bugs in advanced search. Dave’s onboarding guide is Jeremy, and his internal client/consent stakeholder is Jeff.
Opportunities keep coming: Melissa and I had a call today with the Partnership for New York City, a non-profit that brings together resources of the largest corporations in NYC to support NYC government and policy. They are running a tech competition (ask Melissa about those under the last admin!) where DOB is the customer. We have ideas!
Did I miss any highlights? Pls share in comments below.
Tech Recruiting: We have an overwhelmingly white male Prod team right now and while I appreciate each and every one of you, this pattern needs to be broken. When we raise the Seed, we’ll be doubling the size of the Prod team, and if we let status quo unfold, we’ll just have an even more difficult-to-solve diversity problem in a year. So, what I am doing is joining social networks for diverse coders out in markets where we might want to recruit, like Atlanta; and following as many female senior software engineers and I can find on LinkedIn and commenting on their posts when I can. I would love for all the mechies and techies to consider doing the same. Here’s an new slack channel you can join me on: #ops_diverse-talent and a new proposed handbook page.
Cash. Still working on the mid-year re-forecast of the budget. We need a comb-through of why we are spending more than budgeted on consultants!
Meeting CPC’s needs. I saw Danielle in person this week and a) she is happy; and b) she’d be even happier if we could give her improvements on a regular basis!
Dev pipeline: Getting ever closer to GP! Love the new system of little pushes multiple times week! Looking forward to seeing how that works out!
Partnerships: Accelerator, GGRF. Many, many conversations. This week, we decided to start talking to people in Atlanta!
Onboarding: Melissa will be doing some on-boarding reference checks, a new thing we’re trying out.
Metrics: Not actively working out new metrics, but something to keep on the board.
Don’t be a series of small businesses: ~Marc and I are shopping for some founder coaching to make sure we’re staying on a venture-scale path~. We put this on the back burner. We don’t have time to engage right now.
Monday: Welcoming Dave Brandt! Hop on for a quick hello so he can get used to our awkward silences right from the get-go!
Tuesday: It’s already time for Paul’s midpoint meeting!
Wednesday: My first 360! I’m looking forward to getting feedback! Please review my Work Plan revision and then respond to the survey, and thank you, if you have already!
Thursday: Horizontal practices meeting! What do folks want to talk about? How about horizontal in growing our team?
Continuing to meet with investors: this week, check-ins with Renewal Funds and Silence VC
And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?
Big thanks to the folks who dropped a note last week! 🎉 🤝
Please note your reaction to this update below. It helps me to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!
Did I miss a highlight?
Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist?
Something else you want to react to?
| Name | Comment / Question / Request etc | |
|---|---|---|
| Jason | I am so happy that Danielle is happy! That was my read as well, but I’m glad to have it confirmed! I would love to get her more frequent, if smaller, wins as well.I really appreciated the financial primer videos–I didn’t know there was a meaningful difference between forecast and projection.I’m very curious about that Partnership for NYC / DOB thing and would love to hear more as it develops. Would this be another type of customer–a regulatory agency?I don’t think your radar screen for this week was updated, unless I’m missing something. | |
| Chuck | Bomee and I had a conversation which lead to the tech team change the way we develop software. Instead of building components and wiring them up at a later date, we moved to a cycle where we divided the software into rooms so that we can visually determine what has been done and what needs to be fixed. This way our stakeholders can track the progress. I think this is a big win.BJ: I’m glad of this! But a clarification: this means you’re delivering user-testable software in small chunks, not just visually showing progress?Absolutely! The work is behind a feature flag but it is included in every push. | |
| Jeremy | I need to educate myself about how to interpret financials, but i don’t want to take away from time spent learning coding stuff. I’ll put these on the backburner for now and revisit when I have a bit of dead time.I’m pleased we’re officially doing a more iterative software development process. I hope we can get to a point where we make something usable as quickly as possible, so we can start getting real world user feedback as we go! I realize that can slow down development on a day by day basis, but it can avoid spending weeks or months building things that aren’t important, or that are based on wrong assumptions about the user. 👍 | |
| Naina | Appreciate the links for learning more about how the financials work - like we talked about last week Bomee, I have 0 experience with any of this so trying to get as much info on every part of this business as I can. Also very interested in the whole diversity in tech recruiting thing. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed, and that I’ve talked about with friends specifically in CS. I think that even beyond just senior software engineers it’s great to bring female tech people up, e.g. other interns and things like that. Although I’m not sure what capacity there is for that or if that’s even a useful thing for the prod team.BJ: I don’t mean recruiting women just for sr software engineer roles (if that’s what you mean, Naina) – I am following them on LinkedIn to try to broaden my shallow network. Trying to bring in a diverse group of interns is good as well and the point would be to help them get their footing to launch into their career; but it doesn’t do very much for culture more broadly because the power dynamics are against them taking an active culture-shaping role (it is the RARE intern who will give constructive feedback to someone more senior on the team, for example–nor should it be their job to try. The company should set the table and interns should just come partake and walk away full). | |
| Erika | I’m commenting after we had our horizontal meeting around tech diversity recruiting but I appreciate that our team is open to discussing and engaging on action-oriented solutions. After your 360, I’m curious if anyone had a chance to watch and what their takeaways were and if there are other thoughts on how we engage with the work plan movign forward. I think it would be helpful if we all shared all the things on our plates (and not just the goals) so there is better insight into how to support, prioritize or reassign. Last - it’s great to hear that CPC is happy! |