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Why I am sharing my knowledge from the last decade of working in startups
Over a decade ago, I started working at startups in San Francisco, and at the time, I had no idea the path it would lead me down. In that time, I have been an early employee and operator at four startups, spun out a fifth from inside another, worked at one larger tech company, and moved to Austin. I helped to raise over $200M+ in funding from top VC firms and created multiple marketplaces that reached over $1B GMV, with one that has done more than $2B.
✅ If you haven’t already, please connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter to get more details on my past experience.
From my time in startups, it became abundantly clear that not enough operators and employees shared their experiences, systems, knowledge, and advice after the fact or while doing it. Indeed, you could find founders and VCs opining, but it was rare to find concrete and tactical advice from operators and employees. It’s an unfortunate truth that all this knowledge is sitting in someone’s head, and so many people could benefit.
Why is that?
Well, they are typical and heads down, grinding and building. They are solving their problems and not considering how they might apply to other companies and operators. The only reason I could come up for air was leaving my last role and taking some time off. During that hiatus, I continued to help the companies I had been advising. I kept hearing from everyone that it was hard to find trustworthy advice about building a startup from the point of view of operators and not founders and VCs. This felt wrong to me, and I figured I probably should do something about it.
To test the waters, I started posting on LinkedIn, and it was an immediate hit among founders, operators, and employees. My first actual post was about calculating LTV/CAC, a subject I learned through the school of hard knocks and multiple rounds of fundraising. It is also a subject with extreme conventional wisdom; only VCs know “what good” is, and there are no standard ways to calculate it. There is no GAAP in this instance, and I promise many posts on this subject to help lay the groundwork for companies to use.
With the deluge of questions asked and countless DMs, I received, it was clear I needed to do more of this and do it quickly!
That brings us to today, where I am making the leap to launch a newsletter and podcasting series to help share insights from operators and employees about building and scaling startups. It is important to me that I don’t offer advice on topics with which I am not an expert, and therefore I will do my best to bring in experts at every turn, whether through quotes or actual interviews.
I am an expert and a geek when it comes to marketplaces/platforms and will be writing extensively on them. They have been a thread throughout my career and are now the centerpiece of my livelihood: advising, consulting, and investing in startups. I will tackle subjects where I have shareable experience from my time building or advising and can hopefully weave in a few stories or two to illuminate the learnings.
At first, this will be a newsletter, and I will be layering in a podcast and maybe even some video. The goal is to provide the best possible content I can to help the people building startups do it better. To that end, my inbox, colin@kartalabs.com, is always open, and I want to hear your feedback and any questions.
Best,
Colin
p.s. while you are waiting for the first post to come out, I recommend you read some of my top posts on LinkedIn:
GMV is a vanity metric if you don't have a healthy take rate or massive scale
💡GMV is not a vanity metric. Sometimes... (a post about financial float)
How to avoid the Series B Trap. Or how not to raise a growth round and fail.
If you are interested in angel investing, you can also check out my podcast with
called .