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- Social Leverage Letter | Issue #57
Social Leverage Letter | Issue #57
Focus on Solutions, Visualizing your End Product, Moonshots, and Becoming Steve Jobs
A weekly newsletter for early-stage seed startups and investors.
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READING
Focus on solutions
Most of us tend to focus on the negatives when analyzing a problem. We put our attention on what isn’t working. We focus on problems only to find more problems. Using a frame-work from The Solutions Focus shows how focusing on what’s working can lead to more solutions.
Visualize your end product
What if you could see into the future by accurately visualizing your end product before launch? You can with what’s called the future press release exercise. Used by Amazon for years, the exercise is a great approach for defining your goals and requirements.
Moonshots
500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches. Participants ran from fintech to sustainability to edtech to developer tools. TechCrunch highlighted several standouts:
LISTENING
For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. In this episode, Podcaster David Senra shares what he learned from rereading Becoming Steve Jobs. Jobs’ was a free thinker whose ideas ran against the conventional wisdom of those industries he operated in. He was a learning machine who refused to quit.
WATCHING
Beginners luck
Harj Taggar, Michael Seibel and Brad Flora discuss the advantages of being a first-time founder and the instances when it pays to have experience founding a startup in the past.
DEAL SPOTLIGHT
HR Startup Employee Cycle Lands $2.5 million Seed Round
Human resources startup Employee Cycle closed a $2.5M seed round earlier this week. The company is focusing on the development and launch of its Employee Data Platform, used for automating HR reporting. Additionally, the proceeds will be used to shore up the sales, marketing, and engineering departments.
The seed round was led by Impellent Ventures with participation from Collab Capital, Converge VC, along with other angel investors.
“We always hear that employees are a company’s greatest asset, but with most organizations having employee data spread across multiple HR systems, they end up knowing very little about the people who work for them. To solve this problem, we’re empowering companies to transform their disconnected employee data into centralized workforce insights, to make smarter and more data-driven workforce decisions,” said Employee Cycle Chief Executive Officer Bruce Marable. “The support from customers, integration partners, and a diverse coalition of investors and industry leaders is validation of our model, and an opportunity to help organizations better anticipate the needs of employees.”
The company’s dashboard integrates nearly three dozen HR software systems allowing intuitive and near-real-time analysis of workforce areas like headcount, recruiting, turnover, retention, and more – marrying disparate data into a user-friendly HR dashboard.
Employee Cycle is a graduate of Comcast NBCUniversal’s Lift Lab Accelerator Powered by Techstars.
WEB3 ROUNDUP
News on blockchain/web3:
Robinhood Releases Beta Version of Web3 Wallet to 10,000 Users
The 7 Biggest Concerns in Creating a Web3 Community
Building a more secure Web3: Q&A with founder and CEO of Silence Laboratories, Jay Prakash
How to Teach Yourself Blockchain: A Guide for Budding Builders
Circle CEO says blockchain industry is transitioning from dial-up to broadband phase
LAUGH OUT LOUD
Wish I had the confidence of a bay leaf, just strolling into every recipe doing absolutely fuck all
— David Callan (@davidxcallan)
12:11 PM • Sep 24, 2022
JOB BOARD
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