Idea
GitHub for documents: branch, fork, and merge knowledge work
Maples describes his portfolio company Almanac as bringing GitHub-style collaboration to documents. Just as GitHub made code social and Figma did it for design, document tools should let teams branch, fork, merge, and track every version, including when a forked employee handbook gets reused elsewhere.
“Why shouldn't you, just like GitHub, be able to branch and merge and fork documents and be able to, within that one document, know every version of that document that ever existed and everybody's— and if somebody forks it and uses it, let's say it's an employee handbook, if somebody uses it for their next company, why not want to know that as well?”
Steal thisApply the GitHub branch/fork/merge model to a category of knowledge work that still ships static files around.
Framework
The orthogonal attack: beat an incumbent from a different angle
Shaan introduces 'orthogonal' as the way to beat LinkedIn — not by building a better LinkedIn, but by attacking from a different angle, like AngelList pulling startup jobs off LinkedIn or Dribbble/Behance/GitHub owning designers and developers.
“here's a company I invested in that I think has a cool chance of beating LinkedIn. I want to describe their strategy, but I don't want to use the Silicon Valley jargon. You know this word orthogonal? No. Have you heard people say this? It's like, yeah, you have to take an orthogonal angle, or it's an orthogonal—”
Steal thisDon't out-feature an incumbent; attack the job-to-be-done from an orthogonal angle they can't copy.
Story
How a16z bought its way into top deals to build a track record
Shaan recounts a16z's early playbook: hiring a 50-person services/PR/recruiting staff for portfolio companies, and overpaying late-stage to buy into hot deals (GitHub and others) purely to add winning logos to their page.
“We're going to offer top dollar. We're going to buy in kind of late stage if we have to. We're not going to try to be making money on all these deals necessarily. We're doing these to like add the logos to our page. And a lot of investors do this, but they did it at like a pretty big scale.”