Interview
Kat Manalac's Whale AMA
- Most startups in the Winter 17 batch have not announced, though Simple Habit, founded by a female founder, has already been revealed.
- Deborah Cleaver aims to achieve 100% voter turnout.
- The speaker intends to continue purchasing hard copy books occasionally to support bookstores, balancing this with the 90% of books bought on Kindle.
- An internal alumni network remains active, with founders asking questions daily and experts providing advice, connections, or assistance via email.
- Founders are advised to prioritize talking to users over building products in isolation; those who fail to validate their work with real people will not determine if the product retains user interest.
- A forward-thinking methodology is employed to visualize global adoption scales of hundreds of thousands or millions of users and to project a product's trajectory from version 1 to version 5 over 10 years or more.
- There is an expectation and desire to witness more great companies emerging from Australia.
- The speaker holds hypothetical preferences for witnessing the founding of ancient Egypt (excluding its historical treatment of non-white women) and the founding of the United States.
- Co-founder disputes are identified as a primary cause for the failure of the most promising early-stage companies.
- Application evaluation prioritizes whether founders know each other and have previously worked or built projects together.
- A strong co-founder relationship is deemed critical, comparable to a long-term romantic relationship, as founders spend significant time together; while fighting is expected, the ability to handle conflicts constructively is the decisive factor.