Shirin Krall

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

Today I’m joining @Bitpanda_global to lead Growth.

With so much of the conversation focused on AI, this was a deliberate choice. Crypto is cyclical, but each cycle leaves behind more adoption and a more mature market. For Bitpanda, it is only the starting point.

Let’s do this. 🐼

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

[Konstantine Buhler @Konstantine]

Should you chase hype or ignore it? The tech industry has been debating this for decades. So at @Sequoia, we dug into 20 years of hype data.

This summer, I worked with Sequoia intern @ochonaut to measure hype over the past 2 decades. The chart below ranks the most hyped topics on Hacker News for every year since 2007. Under each year sits the most valuable company founded that year.

Here are a few observations:
1/ The top company founded in a given year is rarely related to the hype of that period. Airbnb was founded in 2008, when the top topic was Google. Uber arrived in 2009, while the conversation revolved around low-level programming. Anthropic came in 2021, while the internet was consumed by crypto. Chasing hype rarely leads to enduring outcomes. The top companies of recent years have yet to be decided.

2/ New trends announce themselves five to six years early. LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and took until 2022 to hit #1. AI coding entered at #12 in 2021 and tops the list in 2026. Crypto entered in 2011 before 2017 and 2021 peaks. “New” trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and internet subcommunities are often the first to know where the puck is headed.

3/ Long-term “hype” is a durable signal. The “Musk-Verse” has been a top 15 topic for every one of the past 14 years. Sustained attention on the internet is rare and tends to mark something real.

Next up, we want to run the same analysis with sources like X and LinkedIn. If that's of interest, give us some encouragement and we'll share the results.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Robinhood now makes more transaction revenue from prediction markets than from either stock or crypto trading... Prediction market take rates are massive, 170x higher than stocks per $1 traded

For every $1,000 traded, Robinhood generates roughly:

Stocks: $0.13
Options: $1.47
Crypto: $2.50
Prediction markets: $23.00

Prediction markets currently monetize about 16× better than options, 9× better than crypto, and 170× better than stocks.

These are assumptions for Options and Prediction markets, but I think they are conservative.

Options assumes an average premium of $300 per contract. Prediction markets assume an average trading price of 50¢ per contract.

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

@alanchanguk Being an operator is actually crazy. It’s the investor equivalent of betting the entire fund on one company.

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

@FerdiDabitz Super exciting @FerdiDabitz 🚀 Congrats

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

@alanchanguk ⚡️

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

@GoldilocksOrbit That’s what self-serve means btw :)

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

AI startups are hiring Heads of Growth earlier because category leadership is no longer just a product problem. It is a distribution problem.

In early AI categories, you can have a genuinely strong technical product and still need to build the category around it.

People are not searching for it because they do not know what to search for.

And they do not yet know why they should care.

That is why self-serve growth is not just about self-serve revenue.

It is how builders, creators and early adopters discover the product, try it, understand the category, and start associating the company with the problem.

That matters even if enterprise is where most of the revenue comes from later.

@ElevenLabs seems to have done this well and invested in it early on.

The growth motion for their self-serve product helped make ElevenLabs the default name people associatewith voice AI.

And once you become the default in the category, enterprise gets a lot easier too.

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

I’ve never seen so many VCs switch to operating.

FOMO to build is at an all-time high.

[michael hess @mchlhess]

the underrated thing about building in sf is that ambition is the default assumption. you say something insane at dinner and the table's first instinct is to figure out how it could work, not talk you out of it. every other city i've lived in, the burden of proof runs the other way

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

I used to think posting on LinkedIn and X was cringe, but I’ve recently changed my mind on this.

I spent the first decade of my career in pretty stealth environments.

At @McKinsey, client confidentiality meant we couldn’t really speak publicly about the work we were doing.

At @Revolut, the focus was entirely on building the best product, not PR or personal brand building.

When I started building my own company, I took that mindset with me.

We were not building in public.

Looking back, I think that was a mistake.

Having a media presence, even a small one, can be valuable for your business and your career.

It helps you find like-minded people.

It helps you refine your own thinking.

And it makes you more visible to customers, investors, hires, and people you otherwise might never have met.

You don’t have to reach a lot of people, just the right people.

And the LinkedIn and X algos are actually pretty good at surfacing your content to those people.

So I’ve decided I’m going to post more regularly.

You can follow me here for my unfiltered thoughts on tech, company building, and growth marketing.

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

@HarryStebbings 🥲

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

Everyone is obsessed with the @Revolut growth engine right now.

But the reality is, it probably wouldn’t work if you applied it one-for-one.

You still have to think from first principles about how that growth playbook applies to your specific product, customer and market.

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

“Luck plays a big role in finding PMF…but luck is irrelevant when pursuing operational excellence.”

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck https://t.co/5sf5bVbWGn

[ABC News @ABC]

JUST IN: After two people climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a banner on top of its spire Wednesday afternoon, one of the climbers appeared to propose to the other. https://t.co/ngG3jOeTBU

[Shirin Krall @shirinsakura]

Find work that doesn't feel like work.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

"it takes hard work to achieve anything great" is a dangerous lie. great output comes from finding an activity that feels as natural as breathing or walking and great work becomes the very substance of your existence. if it feels like a grind you've found the wrong expression