startup founder

“Well, one thing that drives me nuts is that they always, always are so wrong in their forecasts. I've never seen one that undershot his projections.”

“The real guys who are going to innovate and disrupt the world are the ones who truly believe and maniacally believe in what they're trying to do. And in some ways, you know, in a funny way, I think about it as these are technology jihadists, if you know what I…”

“So I'll add one thing that's an easy one that you'd be surprised how often it happens, is founders fighting during the meeting.”

“I think it's a dangerous zone. It's a higher beta scenario. It's either going to make you worse off or far better off. If you've got high emotional IQ, integrity and pretty good social skills, you're almost always going to be better off.”

“You just have to stress to the friends and family or only tech funds from those people that are prepared to take it as a complete write-off.”

“When you found a startup, your job changes pretty dramatically every six months.”

“Everybody must be paid a minimum wage. Because again, we've seen issues in the past where founders are they break up, and it's not a happy you know, it's an acrimonious split, and the first thing that the departing founder does is go and talk to a lawyer, and …”

“There's plenty of capital out there, and I'd say that it'll be easier for you in many ways to build a company in this environment because you'll have fewer funded competitors.”

“Ordinary, ordinary humans like us can't respond to the demands of a truly successful startup, one that has this hard, sharp arc of takeoff and sleep eight hours and cook our own organic breakfast and get in a brisk six mile walk and then write a little bit of …”

“I don't think in the near term you're going to have a machine fully replace the way, you know, venture investors work, fully replace the way startup founders work, podcast producers or marketers.”

“The most creative people in our economy today are the startup founders and the most daring and bold, and also frankly, the least supported are those startup founders.”

“For me, it comes down to, do you have a list of experiments you still want to do and you're excited about. So you've had a vision, you've had an interest in a particular market space, and you've gotten fired up about it, you've started a company, you've tried …”

“One of the things that I would recommend to founders is to be careful about putting false sense of timelines on a deal. So for example, it often happens that somebody will call and say, listen, we're going to get a term sheet from three other companies by the …”

“What I've seen is it usually happens around 50 employees. When a company gets to about 50 employees, maybe 60 or 70, where the founder has to start transitioning into more of a professional manager type role.”

“And really at the end of the day, as a startup founder, there's probably three or five major decisions you have to get right every year. And that will really dictate what's going to happen with your company in the future.”

“The simplest outcome on the seed stage is that this business gets the next round. And so you have to understand what the incentive is for the investor, what the incentive is for yourself, which is obviously building a great business. I'm assuming if you're a f…”

“As soon as you raise that first round, or you get to profitability, then put a personal trainer on the company card, put an exec coach on the company card, put a therapist on the company card. These are absolutely legitimate expenses, and you should be spendin…”

“Listen, outside of the VC community does give you some credibility. Like when you're selling to enterprise customers, for example. Two is that it's specifically the finance and accounting classes you take are incredibly helpful when you're building a business.”

“It's much harder in 2020 to start a company and fundamentally cheat and lie. You can't steal money or embezzle as easily as you could have in the past. You can't fake a product. You can't fake customers as easily as you could in the past.”

“The only job early on is to surround yourself with talent because the idea frankly doesn't matter.”

“But the big learning for me is that I think success in tech requires maintaining courage, no matter how terrified you are. And I think sometimes you have to go all in, even if you feel you have a losing hand. The path that I would say I took a lot as a founder…”

“If you increase the enterprise value of your company by one or two percent, you'll make far more than you will from this 5,000,010 million dollar fund.”

“There's too many founders that are going to raise nine-figure funds, While they're running their own startups, and it used to be a bad sign for the startup. How could you do anything other than run your own startup? But it doesn't matter what you and I think, …”

“It's such a confusing time for these founders, right? They, we told them, Cut costs during COVID. It's a recession. Who knows? The demand is gone. Then there was money flowing through the system. Money had never been cheaper. It was all about growth. We said, …”

“I'd say five percent can articulate what their company does in 10 words or less and tell a story with it.”

“I think it's healthy sometimes to cut through the fat and into the muscle because you can always undo that later. If you were wrong, maybe you cut a little bit too much. You might have to rehire people or you might have to You know, reinvest in things that you…”

“The amount of founders that can coherently say an answer, I'd say 10%, if that, five percent that are actually good.”

“Most founders gravitate to the risks they're more comfortable with.”

“You want to be very sober, very matter of fact, very clear about what the options are. None of this, oh, woe is me. How did this happen? This isn't fair because you don't have the luxury to think those thoughts. You don't have the luxury to worry about who's t…”

“With latitude, one of our biggest growth levers was when we started admitting startup founders, so we work with early stage startup founders in Latin America and we started admitting them, we created this token that said like, You know, I am, I was selected to…”

“I think that you can play this game of business at a really high level working 30 hours a week. And the people who say that they can't and that they have to work 70 hours a week are kind of Working on the wrong shit.”

“So yeah, you absolutely sacrifice your health over, over this process.”

“It is very hard to find an actual startup founder that, that started out saying, we're going to do this small niche thing, and then it grew into this, is this big task. Almost everyone early on, you know, it's why founders, you know, can come across as so, so …”

“It is very hard to find an actual startup founder that, that started out saying, we're going to do this small niche thing, and then it grew into this, is this big task. Almost everyone early on, you know, it's why founders, you know, can come across as so, so …”

“And I think founders should take inside, like, good inside rounds very seriously now because of the reason you said. This is different than a bridge, but if one of your investors really wants to step up at a higher price, Right? Just eight, six times out of 10…”

“Most of them haven't been a product manager. They have no idea what this role is about. So they don't know what to look for. They don't know how to grade it. And so they go off of pedigree. Oh, they were at Google or B they know the lingo, you know, they talke…”

“The most high-functioning boards, are the ones in which the team is actually treating the board as a resource, as a set of external people who are invested in the success of the company, but bring a different set of broad perspectives to the problem, and so yo…”

“I try to say fewer things, but more impactful, generally speaking, because it's easy to fill the time with lots of advice, and if I give 30 pieces of advice to a founder, they're gonna remember five of them, and so I sort of like, what are the, I'm always runn…”

“The only real protection you can have as a startup founder in your business is to be successful. If you're not successful, there's a lot of ways investors can exert their control.”

“This is why I tell founders to take their exits and then say no, because they can go bigger, but by default, take it.”

“I tell all founders to sell. That's my advice.”

“So what they do is they hire for tomorrow, not today, and if you do that, you'll never get to tomorrow. So you hire a guy for the job that you have today.”

“I worry that the, that it just makes sense to leave after the Series B. You should just leave. And I don't, I, and I think YC will get their seven percent, and the funds will still stay, but you'll just leave.”