Judy's Recent LinkedIn Posts

“Here’s what most startups get wrong: They think the art of people is something soft. Something nice to have. Something you do after you’ve built a great product. Something that’s secondary to execution. Wrong on all counts. The way you treat people is foundational. It determines whether your team works hard for you or does the bare minimum. It determines whether customers refer others to you or complain about you. It determines whether employees stay when times get tough or run for the exits.” Excerpt From “After 20 Years of Watching Startups Win and Fail, 1 Skill Matters More Than All the Others” DAVE KERPEN Inc. https://lnkd.in/geF-Agyz This material may be protected by copyright.

““Large AI platforms may become broad distribution engines for intelligence,” Madrona investors Sabrina Albert and Vivek Ramaswami wrote in a recent analysis of the AI landscape. “But specialized companies will continue to emerge by getting the hard parts right in specific domains.” Jerry Zhou, CEO at Seattle legal tech startup Supio, described vertical AI as “a shift from tools to agents.” Supio’s software helps lawyers quickly sort, search, and organize case-related data. ” Excerpt From “The rise of vertical AI agents — and the startups racing to build them” Taylor Soper GeekWire https://lnkd.in/g53t93_z This material may be protected by copyright.

“The race to back the next generation of billion-dollar startups accelerated last year as the stable of unicorn startups filled up again. A total of 187 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in 2025 — up 61% from the previous year — driven largely by the AI boom. For venture firms, landing early investments in these companies is one of the clearest signals of long-term performance. An analysis of Crunchbase data shows Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz once again dominated the latest unicorn cohort, backing the most deals in companies that reached billion-dollar valuations in 2025.” Excerpt From “The Rising Investors Behind The New Unicorn Class” Crunchbase News https://lnkd.in/gi_S5hbR This material may be protected by copyright.

““When we first started, people were like, ‘We need an advertising budget, we need this, we need that’—and I’m like, ‘No, we sell trust.’ If you save $700 a month on your cancer medication, when you go to the hospital or your doctor, you’re telling them all about Cost Plus Drugs. That’s how we’ve grown to millions of patients. And you know how much we’ve spent on marketing? Zero. “The point is, when you have a great product and people trust you and you can build a community, the community does most of your selling for you.”” Excerpt From “Mark Cuban Shares the 3-Word ‘Trust Formula’ Anyone Can Use to Scale a Business With $0 in Ads” KEVIN HAYNES Inc. https://lnkd.in/g3QcV-kV This material may be protected by copyright.

““[Jobs] had the vision that the collaboration was something that would produce great results,” Cook told CBS correspondent David Pogue during the recent interview. “That one plus one is equal to three, not two. That if you share an idea and debate it, it gets bigger and better. If you care enough that you call somebody at 10 at night because you just had an idea, that incredible things can come out of that.” ” Excerpt From “Steve Jobs Gave Tim Cook One Piece of Advice. It Still Shapes Apple Today” AVA LEVINSON Inc. https://lnkd.in/gQKA8DMY This material may be protected by copyright.

“When revenue is slow, the instinct is to assume the problem is exposure. “If more people knew about this, it would work.” But in many cases, the real issue isn’t awareness. The product, business model, or customer fit simply isn’t ready yet. Growth multiplies whatever already exists in the system. More eyeballs on a broken thing is just a faster path to a bigger broken thing. Quibi raised $1.75 billion and burned through nearly all of it in six months before folding. The problem wasn’t distribution or poor product quality. They just never actually validated that people would be willing to pay to watch premium 10-minute videos on their phones when plenty of free videos were available on other platforms. Pilot, test, and validate before you build and before you scale.” Excerpt From “Many Founders Waste Time and Money Solving the Wrong Problems. Here Are 3 Big Ones” STEPHANIE DAVIS Inc. https://lnkd.in/gqvVkGby This material may be protected by copyright.

“The most popular consulting-related skill at Vercel is labeled "mckinsey-consultant." It was first uploaded on January 25 and is so far averaging 445 installs a week. That's a respectable number, but still leagues from the most popular agents in Vercel's library, which can have hundreds of thousands of installs. It also has 200 stars on GitHub, which means it's pretty popular, and has passed through a couple of security audits — a sign that it's both viable and gaining traction among developers. In short, users are finding it useful. Vercel's library describes the skill as a prompt framework — originally made for Claude — that guides AI through defining problems, generating hypotheses, conducting structured analysis, and creating slides, replicating the classic workflow of a typical McKinsey consultant.” Excerpt From “The rise of the AI knock-off McKinsey consultant” Lakshmi Varanasi Business Insider https://lnkd.in/gWVCJE5V This material may be protected by copyright.

““It took dying from pancreatic cancer for Steve Jobs to embrace being vulnerable,” Mattone said. “You don’t have to wait for that. You can make the decision… ““We have no shortage of intellect in the world,” he said. “There are so many people with high IQs running around, yet we’ve got massive problems everywhere. The heart and soul got lost.”” Excerpt From “The 1 Big Regret Steve Jobs Shared With His Coach Before He Passed” DANIEL ROBBINS Inc. https://lnkd.in/g6m88JQg This material may be protected by copyright.

“According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, legendary investor Warren Buffett is worth about $145 billion (1). However, in a 2019 interview with Yahoo Finance, the Oracle of Omaha said he could live comfortably on much less. In fact, he estimated that he could live well on 99.99% less wealth (2). “If I were retired and I had a $1,000,000 portfolio of stocks paying me $30,000 a year in dividends, my children were grown, and the house was paid off, I wouldn’t worry too much about having a lot of cash around,” he told Yahoo Finance.” Excerpt From “Warren Buffett called this the ‘secret sauce’ to his company’s success. How to use his strategy to grow your wealth” Moneywise Moneywise.com https://lnkd.in/gd7zcqW2 This material may be protected by copyright.

“At a Stanford Graduate School of Business event last month, Fraser recalled Buffett offering what she described as a “really good piece of advice”: “You can always call them an asshole tomorrow,” she said, according to Fortune. The lesson, Fraser explained, was simple. Never respond to an email when you’re angry.” Excerpt From “The Asshole Rule: Warren Buffett’s Surprising Advice to Citi CEO Jane Fraser” LEILA SHERIDAN Inc. https://lnkd.in/gggM4ced This material may be protected by copyright.