Dani Grant is a former product manager turned VC who decided to go back to building products and setting up her own company, Jam. Jam aims to take the pain away from bug reporting, and to deliver Dani's dream of shipping awesome software fast. We spoke about the story behind her company, as well as some hints & tips from her time working with early-stage startups as a VC.
A message from this episode's sponsor - Skiplevel
This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:
Starting a company is a big adventure
Dani went from PM to VC but felt the call of entrepreneurship irresistible. She found a problem that she was passionate about solving and wanted to do something meaningful for herself, her users and her team.
Startups can be force multipliers for people making their own impact in the world
The impact of a startup is felt not only by your users but your users' users. If you can save people time, effort, or both, then you can contribute to changing the world one company at a time.
There's an approach to getting your first funding round
As a founder, you're in the business of delivering a great meeting & making it easy to shine. For early-stage companies, VCs care less about the detail than the team and the vision. They know the execution will change.
"Move fast and break things" is so 10 years ago
First impressions count. If you're building productivity tools, you can't make people's lives harder. You need to ship something that works - moving fast and breaking things was a valid strategy only before people knew better
Every PM & founder's job is to support their teams moving fast & shipping awesome stuff
Devs have a big role here, but the whole company needs to come together around quality, define enough detail up front, and keep the scope small to help deliver a quality product.
Contact Dani
You can catch up with Dani on LinkedIn or on Twitter
You can try out Jam on jam.dev
Here's the VC video that Dani recommended: How to Nail Your Startup Pitch Deck - Rebecca Kaden
One Knight in Product