Opinion
DeWahl: Startups must own the full vertical customer experience for operational control
“Oh, I'm a big believer in owning the vertical solution, the end-to-end customer experience, because ultimately you have control that way.”
Insight
DeWahl: Frontline staff, not managers, must create and own operational checklists
“The person doing the checking should be responsible for the creation and the ownership of the checklist. Nobody wants a checklist if it's not actually useful. This is not one of those things where the manager writes it and hands it down to the team. In fact, I…”
Opinion
DeWahl: Skeptical of founders claiming complete automation of operational tasks
“It kind of reminds me of Flexport or something. It's the people who are telling you they're going to automate everything they do. I also am quite Skeptical.”
Insight
DeWahl: Founding teams must possess core competencies required by their business model
“One that stands out and that I find myself thinking about frequently as an investor is people solve problems with the tools that they have. That means that a founding team and their first hires there need to be matched to the core competencies required for tha…”
Insight
DeWahl: Founders should use broad open-ended questions in customer discovery
“I think I always advise that people start with broad open-ended questions. You really can't go wrong there. This allows the customer to actually more proactively Bring up areas of concern or frustration that they have just to share what matters to them. And if…”
Insight
DeWahl: Customers express pain points; product builders must craft the vision
“The customer is not meant to be the one coming up with a vision for your product. So they're there to share their feelings, share their concerns, share their frustrations. And then it's the responsibility of the product builders to synthesize what they've hear…”
Insight
DeWahl: Operational processes require weeks of manual testing before software automation
“Somewhere between a few weeks and a few months is probably around right. When you do something for a week and think it's working, like you probably just haven't hit the edge cases yet.”
Insight
DeWahl: Tasks on operational checklists must have exactly one accountable owner
“Absolutely not. You need to have one person accountable.”
Insight
DeWahl: Founders cannot expect every early employee to scale with startup growth
“I don't think it's reasonable to expect that everyone would scale with a fast growing startup.”
Insight
DeWahl: Founders should inform early employees before layering management above them
“I think it's important to actually bring the person in on the fact that you are going to be hiring someone in above them. Not necessarily to be interviewing them, but to kind of give them a bit of a heads up and to say, hey, this is what we're looking for. So …”
Insight
DeWahl: Startup generalists provide most value in early-stage cross-disciplinary roles
“Generalists can be hugely valuable in those first few years, and they tend to thrive at the intersection of multiple disciplines, whether it's across quantitative and qualitative.”
Insight
DeWahl: Founders of complex startups must be detail-oriented P&L systems thinkers
“As for evaluating founders for these types of businesses, I look for systems thinkers who are detail oriented, but can also think strategically about the structure of their business model. So they're thinking about things like economies of scale over time, whe…”
Insight
DeWahl: Time constraints on market research are angel investing's biggest hurdle
“I think for most people, it's finding the time to get to know others, to be out there in the Twitter sphere or wherever it is where people are talking about ideas. I think finding the time to really get to know the problem space and the team once they've engag…”
Insight
DeWahl: Operating and investing complement each other through distinct operational views
“Operating and investing are incredibly complimentary. Investing encourages you to be up there at that 30,000 foot view, seeing patterns across industries, comparing business models, looking at macro trends to see where those next pockets of opportunity might b…”
Opinion
DeWahl: San Francisco remains the primary hub for tech startup activity
“I'd seen a lot of the most ambitious people I knew moving to San Francisco to start or join startups, and it just felt like this was where the action was. And I continue to think that that's true.”
Insight
DeWahl: Deep customer nuance is unnecessary for generating initial startup ideas
“You actually probably don't need to get to that first kernel of an idea, right? But later on, you sort of hone it, you learn more, you discover who your power users might be.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
DeWahl: Early Opendoor sellers were primarily motivated by buying their next home
“For example, when we were focused on building the seller product in the beginning at Opendoor, we were again, so focused on building a product that was all about selling. But when we went and started asking people to tell us about their experience selling thei…”
Insight
DeWahl: Use customers' exact verbiage in marketing copy
“I always find it's best to use a customer's own words in marketing that's going back out to those same customers.”
Insight
DeWahl: Startups should use lightweight tools before committing processes to code
“I think it's super important to iterate for a while in the most lightweight tools that you can get away with, because inevitably you're going to be changing the way you do things.”
Disclosure
DeWahl: Opendoor prematurely coded unbaked operational processes during its early growth
“A mistake we made a few times early on was to commit to code some processes that just weren't fully baked yet and were continuing to evolve. And then because engineering resources are limited, which they often are, we had to Keep using these outdated systems t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
DeWahl: Opendoor CEO Eric Wu wore target metric on his t-shirt daily
“There was a point where we were working on hitting unit profitability in our core cities, where Eric decided he would show up to work every day wearing this blue t-shirt with the single most important company metric on it, and so everyone at the company knew t…”
What-if
DeWahl: Higher Opendoor home offers boosted conversion but damaged profitability
“So at Open Door, for example, if we raised our offers on people's homes, we'd see a bump in conversion. So yes, we would therefore hit our growth goals, but profitability would have suffered.”
Insight
DeWahl: Paired metrics prevent growth goals from compromising operational quality
“Paired metrics are a great way to try to mitigate some of this. So saying, okay, this is our top line goal, but this other metric can't go below X.”
Julia DeWahl