start again today no. 94: tulsa
sneakers, surf's up, 🌊, PMF, Perplexity, metrics, puzzles, change
Silhouette’s Sneakers & Art is on N Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last week, founder Venita Cooper sold the business. She’s shifting focus to scale her tech startup Arbit, helping buyers and sellers navigate the secondary sneaker market. They just landed $1m in funding from Lightship & Atento Capital.
The store is just a couple of blocks from Black Wall Street. In 1906, Ottowa W. Gurley purchased 40 acres of land and sold it exclusively to Black settlers. By 1921, there were over 10,000 people and 108 Black-owned businesses in the Greenwood District. On May 31st, it all went up in flames.
The riot drained much of the existing wealth in Tulsa’s Black community and dimmed prospects for the accumulation of wealth over generations.
📚 Black Wall Street, Hannibal B. Johnson
Every business we visited in Tulsa honored the past, while trying to unite the community for a better future. Darrel Frater is connecting and catalyzing early-stage startups through his work at Serac, Techstars Tulsa kicked off Monday, Atento Capital brought portfolio founders and funders together to break bread and share updates.
I stopped by Sillhouette’s before we left. In the Black Wall Street days, it was the location of another Black-owned shoe store. I’m excited to follow Coop as she transitions from small business owner to startup founder, and writes the next chapter for historic Greenwood.
What I read this week
🤖 surf’s up - Rex Woodbury,
There are technology waves and there are behavior waves—changes in the underlying tech and changes in the people who shape and use the tech. We also see societal waves, which often show up in a new generation’s attitudes, behaviors, and worldviews.
💡 predicting market waves in SaaS -
, CEO & Founder, AlloyTiming the market is the highest leverage decision you’ll ever make for your company. No matter how well you build towards PMF, you’re limited to the available surface area within the market you choose.
Finding PMF is like surfing — you can have the right board, the right form, etc but surfing a great wave requires picking the right wave and timing it just right, to catch the force behind you. And of course, just like when you know you’ve caught the wave, you’ll know when you’ve got PMF.
💼 why measuring PMF requires multiple signals - Enzo Avigo, CEO & Founder, June
There are multiple steps that inform PMF. The first happens very early. When you start doing discovery, I think people’s willingness to talk about the problems you’ve identified is a good signal.
🤖 Perplexity: the $11M/year cliff notes for the web growing 4,272% - Jan-Erik Asplund, Co-founder, Sacra
About 94% of all searches on Google today are 1-5 word queries, both basic information requests and high-intent searches like “pizza near me.” Perplexity’s plan to build the single best user experience for search starts with capturing a slice of Google's most complex queries, then leveraging that proprietary user engagement data to build a data flywheel that continually improves their results.
📈 5 must-have views for every SaaS company - Bobby Pinero,
An ARR Build helps tell the story of how ARR came to be between two time periods, retention cohorts allow you to understand the story and health of a specific group of customers longitudinally and give you a framework to compare “cohorts” of customers.
📝 all the pieces must fit together - Fio Dossetto,
That’s what strategy is: taking a problem, discovering what makes it hard, and finding the right way(s) to solve it. The concept is super obvious when applied to a puzzle: you intuitively know that picking random pieces from the pile and expecting them to slot right into place is not a sensible approach.
🌊 change and what we hold onto -
What I heard was that he is slowly becoming himself again. That's a crazy thought: that one could spend years or decades far away from himself. Of course, that's probably more common than not. People can grow and change and become all kinds of things, and yet somewhere, deep inside, there's that kernel of them that was always there.
📊 businesses at work 2024 - Okta
I see you, I love you, start again today,
H
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