290. The Rise of Low-Code/No-Code, How Tech is Changing Developer Roles, and the Launch of Founder-Led Venture Funds (Brian Luerssen)

Brian Luerssen of Long Jump joins Nick to discuss The Rise of Low-Code/No-Code, How Tech is Changing Developer Roles, and the Launch of Founder-Led Venture Funds. In this episode we cover:

• Walk us through your background and path to Draftbit.
• Tell us about the customer market and who you're targeting with Draftbit.
• Are there good comps or parallels in the non-mobile space?
• Will the user of Draftbit still be a developer, or do you have cases where it's the application product manager or others?
• Is it just web apps and native apps covering the spectrum?
• There's this principled group of developers, that don't want to use App builders. They want to build the ground up themselves. How do you deal with that objection?
• Have you guys achieved product-market fit? Yes or no? 
• What's the biggest challenge to getting product-market fit and hitting huge growth numbers?
• Where do you go now? How do you see the business evolve? What's the end-all large market opportunity for Draftbit?
• Does it stay a platform that you build on and it exports code or does it end up becoming kind of its own place you build within, like a WordPress, or maybe even a Webflow?
• Any thoughts or advice for founders out there that are early-stage builders taking on something ambitious?
• Tell us about the origin story of Long Jump and why was this fund founded?
• So $100k, across the board for all investments is or is there some discretion to move up or down?
• Is this kind of like an application accelerator program?
• What happens if you come upon an opportunity where they're raising an early round. It's coming together quickly. It's something that hits home with one of the GPs. Can you jump into that or does it have to go through your formalized process?
• I imagine a lot of the LPs are founders, former founders that have been through this. Is that a bad assumption?
• Do you have some back office or operations support or somebody that's kind of focused on connecting these dots?
• How have you thought about other established models and kind of taken best practices?
• Why not direct them to an accelerator program?
• How do you handle the criticism from investors that claim you should focus on the business Draftbit and not running a fund?
• What is the future look like for Long Jump?
• YC vs TechStars. Go.
• I'm curious as YC is scaling, I think it's like 700 companies a year now, the density and power of the network, is it the same as it once was? I don't know, does the signal decline or not?
• Have they architected a hub and spoke network or a mesh network? Can the spokes or the nodes get a lot of value out of each other as it expands, or is it overly reliant on the hub for value?
• I'd be curious to get your comparison advantages, disadvantages, to the Bay Area versus a second-tier ecosystem and how you've seen that change over time.
• What do you know, you need to get better at?
• What's the best way for the founders out there to get in touch with Long Jump? What are you looking for? What should they come with to get accepted?

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The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran, General Partner of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in the exceptions.

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