Siim Viidu

Software, Services, Engineering, E-commerce. VP Engineering HiveMQ (ex Twilio, Dixa, Playfish, Electronic Arts, Skype)

[Siim Viidu @siimvd]

Coming up at nearly 30 interviews in 2 weeks for @twilio Flex engineering and product roles across Tallinn, Prague, London and San Francisco. Get in touch now and join us! #TwilioFlex

[Siim Viidu @siimvd]

FUNDRAISE

[Henry Shi @henrythe9ths]

I got rejected by 144 investors before raising $150M for my $200M+ rev/year startup.

After 144 rejections, I started questioning our approach.

Were we solving the right problem?

What were we doing wrong?

Why weren’t investors seeing what we were seeing?

Were we the right team to build this?

We tried everything: different pitch angles, new deck structures, and reframing the problem.

Then came the 145th meeting, where we closed our first growth round.

That yes made everything worth it. But getting there took years of mistakes and hard work.

We went through a lot of trial and error just to figure out what resonates with investors.

We tried dozens of approaches to figure out what made investors engage.

Some landed, most didn't. But each iteration taught us something about what builds conviction versus what just sounds good on paper.

And once we cracked that code, our Series C closed faster than expected.

And today, I see so many founders in the exact same position I was in 10 years ago: grinding through rejections, questioning everything, and trying to figure out what works.

So today I want to give you the resource I wish I had back then:

Something that shows you exactly how to structure these conversations and navigate the entire process

(because the fundraising cycle can be a big distraction and take a toll on you as a founder).

So I've partnered with Notion's Startups Team to create the essential fundraising resource that helps you avoid the mistakes that cost me years.

Here's what you are getting:

• The actual decks I used to raise $150M for Super[.]com (Series B, C)

• 50 real examples from funded startups like Eleven Labs and Artisan AI

• A searchable database of 10,000+ investors - angels, VCs, and accelerators you can reach out to immediately (this alone would take months to build manually)

• An AI-powered fundraising agent built into Notion with step-by-step prompts (no separate ChatGPT needed)

Want access?

• Like and share this post

• Comment "FUNDRAISE"

• Follow me so I can DM you the link

I'll send it over ASAP.

P.S.: If you are serious about fundraising (now or in the future), you should grab it right away.

[Yegor Denisov-Blanch @yegordb]

I’m at Stanford and I research software engineering productivity.

We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies.

Inspired by @deedydas, our research shows:

~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers (0.1x-ers)

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

/r/London is currently love-bombing Angus Steakhouse in the hope that AI google scrapers start recommending it in listicles so influencers and tourists stay away from actual nice places 🤞

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Mario Draghi's new report on EU competitiveness doesn't mince words.

"Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the EU and the US, driven mainly by a more pronounced slowdown in productivity growth in Europe. Europe’s households have paid the price in foregone living standards. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US as in the EU since 2000."

"First – and most importantly – Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines. In fact, there is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period. This lack of dynamism is self-fulfilling."

"There are not enough academic institutions achieving top levels of excellence and the pipeline from innovation into commercialisation is weak. [...] However, while the EU boasts a strong university system on average, not enough universities and research institutions are at the top. Using volume of publications in top academic science journals as an indicative metric, the EU has only three research institutions ranked among the top 50 globally, whereas the US has 21 and China 15."

"Regulatory barriers to scaling up are particularly onerous in the tech sector, especially for young companies. Regulatory barriers constrain growth in several ways. First, complex and costly procedures across fragmented national systems discourage inventors from filing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), hindering young companies from leveraging the Single Market. Second, the EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation: the EU now has around 100 tech-focused laws and over 270 regulators active in digital networks across all Member States. Many EU laws take a precautionary approach, dictating specific business practices ex ante to avert potential risks ex post. For example, the AI Act imposes additional regulatory requirements on general purpose AI models that exceed a pre-defined threshold of computational power – a threshold which some state-of-the-art models already exceed. Third, digital companies are deterred from doing business across the EU via subsidiaries, as they face heterogeneous requirements, a proliferation of regulatory agencies and “gold plating” of EU legislation by national authorities. Fourth, limitations on data storing and processing create high compliance costs and hinder the creation of large, integrated data sets for training AI models. This fragmentation puts EU companies at a disadvantage relative to the US, which relies on the private sector to build vast data sets, and China, which can leverage its central institutions for data aggregation. This problem is compounded by EU competition enforcement possibly inhibiting intra-industry cooperation. Finally, multiple different national rules in public procurement generate high ongoing costs for cloud providers. The net effect of this burden of regulation is that only larger companies – which are often non-EU based – have the financial capacity and incentive to bear the costs of complying. Young innovative tech companies may choose not to operate in the EU at all."

More: https://t.co/x1d1ApvG2Z.

[Peer Richelsen @peer_rich]

imagine a country where every government service is open source and can be improved by its citizens

[Russ Cook @hardestgeezer]

345 days
376 marathons
£380,995 raised for charity
Deserts✅
Rainforest✅
Savannahs✅
Mountains✅
Jungle✅

7 days out from being the first person ever to run the entire length of Africa🫡

[Balaji @balajis]

Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake.

They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like.
https://t.co/xdL2s15XeI

[HiveMQ @HiveMQ]

There is still time to register for CONNACK Paris! Immerse yourself in the premier event for MQTT professionals.

📅 Date: Tuesday, March 12, 2024
🕒 Time: 11:30am - 6pm CET

📍 Secure your spot now: https://t.co/fEPXXO4FJv 🐝 #CONNACKParis #MQTT #IIoT #HiveMQ #IoT 🎨🚀

[Al Cook @alcookolic]

The @twilio OG alum party last night reminded me yet again what a truly incredible group of people @jeffiel put together. If you could somehow instantly incorporate the 700 people last night into a company, I would bet every cent I have on it.

[Carl Vellotti 🥞 @carlvellotti]

An epic battle between the Growth PM and Legal

[Sten Tamkivi @seikatsu]

10/ 910 Skype-spawned companies in 50 countries have created 65,000 jobs, and 15 of them have become next unicorns of their own right, per @atomico:

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

2,851 Miles by @bgurley from the @allinsummit

now available in full on @x

(0:00) 2,851 Miles
(24:44) In conversation with @bgurley

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

Apple threatens to shut off FaceTime and iMessage in the UK if the country proceeds with legislative plans to weaken encryption. https://t.co/HXOmMHayBo

[Zach Coelius @zachcoelius]

As I have traveled around the world over the last year a lot of folks from other countries have been asking me what the hell went wrong in San Francisco.

The city so many called their favorite city in the US has become obviously broken.

Here is what I have been telling them:

[Marcin Floryan 🇺🇦❤️, 🌍 🇪🇺🇸🇪🇵🇱🏳️‍🌈 @mfloryan]

"If the train leaves every 5 minutes you don't care about a timetable. If it leaves every 2 days you want to know *exactly* when it leaves"
Great analogy from @hamrin reflecting on planning, estimating and software delivery.

[Siim Viidu @siimvd]

@Simonkhalaf Congrats Simon!

[Eric Seufert @eric_seufert]

The EDPB, the EU's privacy watchdog that was established to ensure compliance with GDPR, determined that WhatsApp may not use a contractual basis (ToS) to process user data "for the purposes of service improvement and security." It contends that this usage requires consent. (1/X)

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Before you get sick of OpenAI tricks, one fun one.

You & an android are in front of a judge. The judge tells each of you to say one word. They will then kill whoever they think is the AI based on that.

An MIT paper calls this the "minimum Turing test." What do you say? 1/

[Siim Viidu @siimvd]

@narendra_shetty @twilio @ShopifyEng @shop Congrats @narendra_shetty!!!

[Invest in Estonia @EstoniaInvest]

“Per capita, #Estonia always wins,” American entrepreneur @ross says. Once again, @dealroomco’s latest report proves it by highlighting Estonia as the most successful country in #Europe in #VCinvestments per capita.
👉 https://t.co/Z0HNHSiqql