Joshua Ogundu Rocket Ship Talk Deck from the UXDC Meetup!

1. WHY TO JOIN A ROCKET SHIP
By Joshua Ogundu

2. GOAL OF PRESENTATION
Be able to identify a rocket ship in either the
business to consumer space or the business to
business space
Knowing the best time to join a rocket ship
The advantages and disadvantages of joining a
rocket ship depending on the stage of company
The key roles in B2B or B2C companies
Resources to help identify rocket ship companies
and opportunities

3. WHAT IS A ROCKET SHIP?
A rocket ship is a company that is seeing hockey
stick growth year over year in revenue, users, clients
or mind share
Rocket ships are not exclusively tech startups they
can be any company that is growing really fast
My following examples will be Slack, Snapchat, Uber
and Meridian Health Plan

4. SLACK
• Founded by Stewart Butterfield
• Founding Year: 2009 (Slack incubated and launched March
2013)
• Story: Started as a video game company but then pivoted
to a team based communication platform because they
were going to run out of money before they could create
the game
• Location: San Francisco
• Total Funding: 540M
• Valuation: 3.8B

5. SLACK GROWTH CHART

6. SNAP INC (SNAPCHAT)
• Founded by Evan Spiegel & Bobby Murphy
• Founding Year: July 2011
• Location: Venice, CA
• Total Funding: 3.4B
• Market Cap: 32B
• Industry: Consumer Software

7. SNAPCHAT GROWTH CHART

8. UBER
• Founded by Travis Kalanick & Garrett Camp
• Founding Year: March 2009
• Location: San Francisco
• Total Funding: 8.8B
• Valuation: 62.5B
• Industry: Public Transportation

9. UBER GROWTH CHART

10. MERIDIAN HEALTH PLAN
• Founded by David Cotton
• Founding Year: 1997
• Location: Detroit, MI
• Total Funding: N/A
• Valuation: N/A
• Industry: Healthcare

11. MERIDIAN HEALTH PLAN GROWTH

12. BEST TIME TO JOIN A ROCKET SHIP

13. EARLY STAGE (SEED/SERIES A)
• Early Stage(Seed/Series A):
• Positives: Lots of room to touch a lot of different
functions, you can see the work you are doing come to
life and impact the company at its most vulnerable stage
of growth social capital gain of being part of the founding
team
• Negatives: Low Salary, so for those who are carrying
heavy debt loads (outside of student loans) that need to
be attended to this stage of company may not work for
your life, Still possible for the company to fail as they are
still trying to reach key milestones for follow on funding

14. MID-STAGE (SERIES B/SERIES C)
• Mid Stage (Series B/Series C)
• Positives: This is the growth stage of startups so you
will have lots of room to tackle new opportunities,
fast track to leadership, social capital gain for joining
the company pre acquisition or pre IPO
• Negatives: Options are worth less due to more
capital being infused and shares being bought

15. LATE STAGE (SERIES D+)
• Late Stage(Series D+)
• Positives: Market Salary, Stable so you do not have
to worry about the company failing, Name
Recognition
• Negatives : Not a lot of chance to touch a lot of
functions since processes have been put in place
and the company is prepping for acquisition or IPO

16. SEATS IN THE SHIP: B2B COMPANY
• Product
• Engineering
• Design
• Sales
• Account Management

17. SEATS IN THE SHIP: B2C COMPANY
• Product
• Engineering
• Design
• User Acquisition/Growth
• Marketing

18. ITS ALL ABOUT LOCATION

19. RESOURCES TO LEARN ABOUT
ROCKET SHIPS

20. RESOURCES TO SPOT A ROCKETSHIP
• Crunchbase- Use for recent funding rounds and
valuations and team information
• Mattermark- Use to learn about macro trends driving
the tech industry
• Glassdoor- Salary Information
• Angelist- Hiring Platform for startup jobs
• The Muse- Hiring Platform for startup jobs
• Techcrunch- Tech news site
• Techmeme- Tech news site

21. LETS KEEP IN TOUCH
•Twitter: @joshuaogundu
•LinkedIn: Joshua Ogundu

22. WHY TO JOIN A ROCKET SHIP
By Joshua Ogundu