Compensation Tools, AI-Friendly Websites, and Thinking In Bets
Welcome back to Building Giants, the newsletter from Giant Ventures where we hand-select the best resources on building high performance companies.
In this edition: useful compensation tools, how to make your website AI-friendly, how to make decisions, a short framework to decide whether to explore or exploit, and lessons on taking venture capital from a founder...
We also welcome our latest Giant portfolio company, Radiant, who just announced their $165M Series C!
Managing and Retaining Your People
Recommended by Jia Lin Yong, Investor at Giant
"The golden rule is consistency. Imagine that your whole team’s compensation information is leaked internally. If your reaction is, ‘Oh s**t, Person X will find out that they’re earning less than Y,’ then things have gone wrong. You should have a rationale for any compensation differences that you can confidently explain. This might involve seniority, performance, rare skill-sets, location, cash/equity trade-offs, or other relevant factors.”
As a founder, alongside retaining those with high potential and spotting emerging stars, you will need to learn to "manage out" individuals whose performance or values-alignment fall short. If you don’t, this will impact the whole team. From embedding a culture of continuous feedback (if you’re under 50 people), to inputting formal reviews (if you’re over 50), to in-depth support on compensation structures, this section is a great part of Index Ventures' book Scaling Through Chaos.
Is Your Website AI Search-Friendly?
Recommended by Lucy Brady, Head of Product at Giant
“We all know the future of search is AI, but do you know how well your brand is performing?”
It’s becoming more and more important to show up on LLM search engines, and there are lots of good tools that help you figure out how optimised your website is. There are two great ones we recommend. You can get an 'AI Readiness Score' from Salespeak, or from LLM Refs. These websites help you boost your SEO visibility inside ChatGPT, and see which websites ChatGPT and other AI models reference when answering questions about your industry. Use this data to improve your chances of being cited.
Thinking In Bets
Recommended by Georgia Ritter, Head of Marketing at Giant Ventures
“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”
Being a founder is - by its very nature - uncertain. It’s also a job that requires a lot of decision making. Should you focus time on product or sales? Should you hire a marketing person now or wait a bit longer? Should you take this term sheet, or that one? The key to long-term success (and to avoid worrying yourself to death), argues Annie Duke, is to think in bets: how sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? A good read for those paralysed by decision fatigue.
Interesting other things
Explore or exploit? Duolingo Co-founder offers a simple litmus test: “focus is the right strategy when you have relatively high certainty you're doing the right thing. Exploration is the right strategy when you are uncertain about the right thing.”
How did Nasty Gal go from allegedly making the founder ‘richer than Beyonce’…to bankruptcy? Sophia Amoruso joined the Giant Ideas Podcast to share everything: from the dramatic downsides of venture investment, her unusual growth tactics, and how her experiences change her investing style.
Investor Aleks Shamis shares a great hack to founders fundraising - see how VCs are looking at your company. It involves a quick prompt + Deep Research. Check it out.
Tell us what you’ve read!
What have you recently shared with founder friends? Share your must-reads in the comments and we will review for the next edition.