Dave Saunders

De Novo cleared surgical robot founder | Prototype to market for MedTech founders | Fractional CTO / CPO / CMO | 40+ products from Bell Labs to surgical robots

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

Get Founders Who Finish at https://t.co/ofiI4uvdkM

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@agazdecki Pre-revenue!

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@icanvardar ISO 8601 would disagree.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

More for founders → https://t.co/BsCjaff4I7 (via First Round Review, Tyler Gaffney)

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

You're almost certainly pricing too low.

Founders rarely overprice. They guess a safe number, then fear raising it.

The fix isn't a pricing study — it's a conversation. Find the ceiling and the anchor in the call. Qualify before you quantify.

#founders #pricing

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

Defense keeps asking for untethered, narrow systems that run on edge compute without a network. General-purpose is a fundraising story. Narrow and producible is a delivery story.

Full Field Note: https://t.co/gPygwhU2yk

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

Nvidia and Unitree just put a 75-DOF humanoid on sale, and Jensen Huang calls it a multitrillion-dollar opportunity.

I don't doubt the demo. I doubt the form factor. The hardest buyer in hardware wants the opposite shape.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

Building something well and building something people want are different skills. More on that trap in the book: https://t.co/hcBLGwhpp4

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

I once built a product nobody wanted. Slick Mac apps that turned a Mac into a server. Real CDs, glossy boxes, a manual I wrote myself. The people who needed servers already knew Unix and didn't trust a Mac to do the job. The product was great. The market didn't care.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@pmitu Noooooo we design the logo and tshirt first!

Or tech bro vest (more modern)

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

More on finishing what you start: https://t.co/EasSyRO917

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

The most dangerous startup isn't the one failing. It's the one coasting.

1 in 6 tech ventures becomes a zombie: some revenue, no growth, no exit.

Fast failure gives your time back. Stagnation just takes it.

Pick one metric. Set a date. Cut it if it misses.

#startups #founders

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

More in my book Founders Who Finish: https://t.co/ofiI4uvdkM

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

She built a $1.6B company before writing a line of code.

Christina Cacioppo's test at Vanta: keep talking to customers until you can predict 75% of what they'll say before they say it.

Then prove demand with manual spreadsheets. Only then write code.

#founders

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

The companies that win aren't the best funded. They're the ones willing to act on the signal everyone else explains away. More in the book: https://t.co/hHc1LediTH

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

Lucent spun out of AT&T calling itself a "billion-dollar startup." It had 170,000 employees. The industry skipped a fiber generation. Lucent acted like it didn't apply to them. Inventory piled up. The richest player in the room lost to a signal it refused to read.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@zhoro_x Fallout

The Expanse

Good Omens

Invincible

You'd have to be a moron to consider those slop

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@travisakers I miss that and my mini displayer. I used to travel a lot and had a stack of little tiny discs. They kept me sane on 18 hour flights.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@holisticgrenade Hilariously and ignorantly wrong.

But I understand a lot of people are fed this kind of crap at those MLM opportunity meetings by wellness experts with "secrets" that "they" don't want you to know about.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

They used to say something like this about Andy Warhol, like how could he be an artist if all he's doing is duplicating pictures of Marilyn Monroe or soup cans? And then decades later, there were the same kind of people who would say that if you were using Instagram or a phone camera, there was no way you could ever call yourself a photographer. There will always be gatekeepers who think that the mechanism actually is the deciding factor.

[Dave Saunders @davesaunders]

@ThePeterMick Yes, but I keep it in the paper journal. There's enough digital noise as it is.