🤝 This week’s edition is sponsored by Mappa

The wrong hire costs more than the search did.

Every resume in your inbox looks qualified. That is the problem. By the time you learn someone is not a fit, you are two quarters and a full salary deep.

Companies like Renault (the car company) have made more than 35 hires through Mappa and reduced turnover from 29% to 2%.

Startups love Mappa too. Why?

Mappa reads behavioral signals in a candidate's voice and pairs them with skills and experience, so you know who will perform on your team before you make the offer.

📰 Today's topic: The shape of the line matters more than the end of it

Eric's kid pulled up a chart of Netflix movie viewership, and one film was breaking a pattern every other film followed. That pattern is the same one you should be looking for when a founder puts a growth chart in front of you.

Views on the Y axis. Time on the X axis. Every movie on the chart makes the same shape: steep, then bending, then flat.

Except one.

When that chart came up last summer, K-Pop Demon Hunters had just passed 236 million views and taken the all-time Netflix movie record. That's the headline. It isn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is that it hadn't flattened yet.

Every other film on the chart, including the previous record holder, had already asymptoted. Curved over and settled down. This one was still climbing, which broke Eric's sense of what viewership is supposed to do over time.

He pulled up the actual chart later and walked it back slightly. It's not a dramatic hockey stick. But you can see the curve, and more to the point, you can see the logarithmic flattening on every other title.

He was right, by the way. It's north of 640 million views now and still hasn't rolled over. The shape was the tell, not the record.

Now put a founder's deck in front of yourself

New angels read the end of the line. Revenue is $30k a month, they have 70 customers, cool.

The number tells you where the company is right now. The shape tells you what's actually happening.

Three shapes worth learning:

• Bending. Growth decelerating. Totally normal at pre-seed, and not a reason to pass. Just know it's the baseline, not a signal.

• Flat with a step in it. One enterprise deal, one launch, one press hit. That's an event, not a curve.

• Still steep at the right edge. Rare. Worth another call before you decide.

Check what got left out of the comparison

When that Netflix chart came up, somebody asked where Tiger King was. Answer: the chart isolated movies and excluded series, so the comparison set was narrower than it first looked.

Same trick shows up in pitch decks constantly. A founder shows you growth against a set of comparables, and the interesting question is what didn't make the cut.

Ask it out loud. Most founders will tell you.

The part that stuck with me

Not one adult in that meeting found this movie on their own.

Eric's daughter came home and said all her friends were talking about it. Elizabeth's kids watched it three times before she knew what it was. I'd only heard about it the weekend before, and then suddenly it seemed like everyone already knew.

For a $5k check into anything consumer, that's a real signal. The people who see it first are usually fourteen and not on your feed.

You can't fix that by reading more tech news. You fix it by asking a teenager what they're into, which costs nothing and is occasionally humbling.– Brian from Angel Squad

📕 Startup term you should know

Ever heard of Qualified small business stock (QSBS)?

Stock that meets certain rules letting investors skip or defer federal capital gains tax when they sell. VCs usually want the startups they back to qualify.

My insider scoop: Thanks to the 2025 tax law changes, the deal is now tiered. Hold qualifying stock for 3 years and you can exclude 50% of the gain, 4 years gets you 75%, and 5+ years still gets you the full 100% (that's $0 in federal tax on the sale). The company has to be a US C Corp worth under $75m in gross assets when the shares are issued. Note: these new terms apply to stock issued after July 4, 2025. Older shares are stuck with the previous rules ($50m cap, full 5-year hold for any exclusion). Still a great gift for founders, early employees, and investors who catch a rocketship.

Overheard in SF…probably

“Churn is at zero percent. We have one customer. He is my roommate and he hasn’t canceled yet.”