early-stage startups
also referred to as: early stage startup · early stage startups
42 statements across 39 episodes · 10 bullish · 15 bearish · 36 people on the record · first statement Feb 5, 2015 by Niko Bonatsos · across every show →
Everything said about early-stage startups, oldest first
Feb 5, 2015 positive
Jul 27, 2015 positive
Early startups should track usage metrics over MRR
“And I think in the beginning, especially when there's, you know, it's just so much uncertainty, I think it's very, very good to figure this out on a high level and then track, Tracking this over time, because it doesn't necessarily, you know restrict you to th…”
Oct 28, 2015 negative
Feb 22, 2016 positive
Dec 12, 2016 positive
Aug 30, 2017 bearish
Sep 7, 2018
Early diversity hiring is a startup's best recruitment engine
“Doing your absolute level best to fill a team with diverse candidates is not only hard, it is probably the single best thing you can do as an early stage startup. Because when you have people from different backgrounds early on, call it in the first 50 employe…”
Aug 5, 2019 negative
Nov 17, 2021
Early-Stage Growth Teams Should Value Correlation Over Causality
“The guidance that I generally give, especially for the early stage startups, is move fast, be comfortable with correlation, because correlation just provides Quality hypotheses, and that's all you care about at that point. You're not looking for something that…”
Feb 11, 2022 neutral
Levie: High early-stage valuations will yield spectacular failures and big winners
“There will be a lot of bets that will not work in that model. Because again, back to category, you know, one, there are lots of challenges companies run into. So we will see spectacular failures in this approach, but ultimately they might get paid for by the s…”
Feb 11, 2022 negative
Feb 18, 2022
Rhodes: Early-stage startups should prioritize speed over financial forecasting
“When you're an early stage startup, speed is so important. And there's so many unknowns that you can easily waste time trying to predict what's going to happen. And a lot of times the best way to figure out what's going to happen is just to do it.”
Apr 25, 2022 negative
May 9, 2022 bullish
May 21, 2022 bullish
Jun 8, 2022
Jun 29, 2022 bullish
Aug 17, 2022 neutral
ARR does not matter in the early days of a startup
“Early days, I don't care at all about what price people pay. ARR doesn't matter at all. There's a hot take from a sales leader early days. I think the only thing that matters is that you're learning and that you have good customers who are good fits that are g…”
Aug 30, 2022 negative
Oct 7, 2022 neutral
Weil: Rigid product strategies require product-market fit; early startups pivot frequently
“Like you invest in the early stages in companies and they're going to pivot three times before they find anything. So laying out a strategy and sticking to something, it assumes that you have some degree of product market fit.”
Jan 13, 2023 bearish
Feb 3, 2023 positive
Jun 21, 2023
Jul 12, 2023
Egan: Early-Stage Startups Should Avoid Hiring Coin-Operated Sales Reps
“It does not pay to have coin-operated sales reps in the early days. They're going to be overly focused on quotas and crushing their number to get to a certain outcome. The early days are really about who is creating the best connection between my developing pr…”
Jul 12, 2023
Egan: Early-stage startups need generalist sales reps before scaling specialized ones
“Early days of hiring reps, you're going to need Renaissance reps that have a very wide breadth of skill sets who enjoy the building process. And as things go on and you start to sell, scale your sales team, you're going to see reps that are there for really to…”
Jul 19, 2023
Isford: Early startups shouldn't spend time perfecting growth metrics
“That exercise is not one I would spend too much time on because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric and you'll probably want to ch…”
Aug 11, 2023 negative
Sep 20, 2023 negative
Nov 10, 2023 negative
Nov 22, 2023
Seibert: High late-stage salaries prevent talent migration to early-stage startups
“And that's probably the counterforce is all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 20, 21 have high salaries. And if you switch, you'll get more equity, but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”
Dec 6, 2023
May 8, 2024
Hulme: Free products generate bad feedback because users don't value them
“I see a lot of businesses, and it's slightly different in consumer, but they will not charge their early adopters, they won't charge their design partners, they won't charge their ICPs, and the problem with that is you don't know if it's valued. And generally …”
May 10, 2024 positive
Shurtz: Early Startups Should Target Category Killer Logos Over Volume
“So for me, the entire orientation of an organization in the early, early stages, I'm talking like sub a hundred. Now I think needs to be figure out the industries and the verticals. You can be successful and go get brand names, category killers and rotate hard…”
May 15, 2024 negative
Siroker: Early-stage board members struggle to gain enough founder context
“I do think boards as a company gets bigger and bigger and closer to going public are really important for governance and accountability. But when the company is so early on, it's very, very hard for a board member to get up to speed. You know, they're showing …”
May 31, 2024 negative
Lerner: Traditional corporate performance skills are useless in early-stage startups
“The way you get promoted in a lot of companies, in product, in marketing, is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none o…”
May 31, 2024
Lerner: Early-stage startups must turn the entire company into the growth team
“So in an early stage startup, I think there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team, right? Like you go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, becau…”
Jun 14, 2024 bullish
Oct 21, 2024 negative
Oct 30, 2024 negative
Saarinen: Early-stage founders buy via word-of-mouth, not paid ads
“Our first group of customers for startups, like small startups, early stage startups, those people don't even look at ads. Like they, I don't think they pick products because they see ads like out, out there somewhere. They pick products because they hear abou…”
Jan 17, 2025 negative
Nov 7, 2025
Early-Stage Startups Should Take Negative-Margin Deals for Referenceable Logos
“Early stage company, look, we do, you'll do negative margin deals, right? Like we're going to do this deal, but we're going to lose money on the deal. But we need the referenceable account, and we'll make up for it later.”
Aug 12, 2026 neutral
Tech compensation features three tiers including seven-figure superstar AI packages
“Now we're seeing three bands of compensation. We're seeing the regular human beings, then we're seeing the AI guys, and then we're seeing the one to five superstars that we're talking about, right? That I have to that I have to find a seven figure package for …”