🏆 How Canva wins SEO, ☕ Starbucks with Schultz, 🤝 Building extraordinary teams

Hey Founders 👋 

Here’s today’s edition of Founder’s Foresight - a newsletter where I comb through news, strategy resources and more and share them to help busy founders like you make the most of information online

💪 Daily Motivation

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing” - Walt Disney

🗞️ Founder News

Blackrock has slashed its stake in Indian edtech giant Byju’s to zero. The edtech startup was once valued at $22 billion and is backed by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Sequoia Capital, and Tencent, among others.

Startups taking on Nvidia face an uphill battle, but the dominant AI chipmaker faces another real threat. Optimistic founders are trying to carve a niche out of the AI market, where even a fraction of the $3 trillion business - which is Nvidia’s market cap - is a lot of money. However, the chipmaker faces more of a threat from the Justice Department on whether it has violated antitrust laws.

With €50 million to invest, Italian Founders Fund looks for entrepreneurs with global ambitions. Currently Italy ranks 8th in Europe in terms of VC investments. Newly founded Italian Founders Fund hopes to help Italy climb up the ladder with a moneybag of €50 million to invest into 25 companies irrespective of the sector.

🛠️ Tools

Vanilla is a suite of basic products, all within 1 account, to help founders and startups run their companies affordably. Inbox by Vanilla is an all-in-one messaging tool which is perfect for customer support and sales. CRM, Wikis, Subscription Analytics and other tools are in the pipeline and will be added soon.

Rivit is a AI powered platform for small businesses that helps automate conversations, manage tickets, collect feedback, identify trends, and increase your customer satisfaction.

📈 Strategy and Tactics

The Acquired Podcast on Starbucks (with Howard Schultz): This podcast episode features an interview with Howard Schultz, the former CEO and founder of Starbucks. The episode dives into how Schultz transformed Starbucks from a small coffee bean retailer into a global coffee house chain, focusing on creating a unique customer experience and fostering a strong company culture.

How Canva wins SEO: Canva is a simple design tool created for non-designers. Since its inception in 2013, it has quickly grown to 60 million monthly users - all thanks to its brilliant marketing and SEO strategy. This articles takes a deep dive into search intent and how Canva helped ‘make stuff people search for’.

Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business: This article discusses the journey of Guillermo Rauch, the founder of Vercel, a frontend cloud service behind the open-source development framework Next.js. The article highlights Rauch's approach to building software that customers are obsessed with, including

• lessons such as focusing on iteration velocity rather than just speed

• the importance of integrations

• the need to make messaging relatable when a product is new

🙌 Leadership

Integrity Is Often Reflected by What You Say No To: The article discusses how integrity is often reflected by what a person says "no" to, rather than just what they say "yes" to. It suggests that leaders who want to assess integrity should investigate when others have declined or said no to seemingly auspicious proposals and understand the reasons behind it.

Building Extraordinary Teams of Ordinary People: The article discusses the idea of building extraordinary teams from ordinary people, rather than trying to assemble a team of extraordinary individuals.

❓Trivia

This is a word coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of this word as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with". Which word used in the context of AI is this?

Hint: Think Elon

Know the answer? Reply to this email and I’ll feature one person who got it correct in the next email