Opinion
Libin: Silicon Valley Startup Model Engineered to Benefit Top-Tier VCs
“This idea of making a startup, a Silicon Valley-style startup, the concept has been engineered to benefit top-tier VCs.”
Opinion
Libin: Calling an industry a relationship business signals it is immature
“A sign of, like, a non-serious business is when people in it say this is a relationship business. This is a sign of, like, it's immature, and it's not professionalized.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Libin: Big Tech's Data Advantage Will Be a Big Nothing in Five Years
“So I think over the next, like, five years, this, like, alleged entrenched data advantage of big companies will turn out to be, you know, a big nothing.”
Assertion Partly supported
Libin: Average Expected Return for Startup Founders Is Sharply Negative
“Because the average expected return for founders of making a startup is sharply negative.”
Insight
Great Products Get Discovered Automatically Without a Distribution Strategy
“I've never cared about discovery and about distribution. I think, like, the best stuff gets discovered automatically.”
Insight
Libin: Early-stage VC incentives force startups to take damaging shortcuts
“The incentives are when you're investing, especially if you're doing early stage investing, just like me, you're not looking for things that are likely to succeed, right? You're looking for things that have a plausible chance of succeeding, even if it's not a …”
Insight
Libin: The shift to video communication is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity
“And for mm-hmm, since I think this is a multi-trillion dollar thing that's happening right now, I think mm-hmm needed to get pretty big, pretty quickly, raise external capital, and so it was a perfect thing to say, okay, yeah, embodying this in a spin-out star…”
Insight
Libin: Founders should be the worst person at every job function
“So never hire someone whose job you can do better than them. Only hire people, only surround yourself with people that are ridiculously better than you or that are superior to you in their job or other things as much as possible. Like always be the worst perso…”
Insight
Libin: Evaluating pitches based on what you would build is flawed
“When you hear a pitch, you get excited about what you would do with this idea. And that's a really shitty way to make investments because you're not going to do anything with this idea. You got to try to figure out what they're going to do with this idea.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Libin: Video integration will transform everything within two years
“Integrating video into everything in this hybrid model is going to literally affect almost a hundred percent of all things in life. It's going to be a bigger transformation as the dot-com transformation was, except it's not going to take 10 years. It's going t…”
Insight
Libin: Most startup boards are stateless, but Roelof Botha maintains context
“Most boards' conversations are totally stateless, meaning that the board members walk in, and they don't remember anything that you talked about before, and you start over. And this is the most frustrating thing for entrepreneurs, because, of course, like, you…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
80% of Work Software and 50% of Consumer Software Will Become Conversational
“So my guess is about 50% of what we use as consumers will become conversational, botified, and about 80% of what we do at work.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bots Will Disrupt Software by Joining Multi-Human Conversations
“I think it's a major point of disruption. I think that the single biggest change is going to be for the past few decades almost all of our interactions with technology have been one person interacting with some system. So it's been like you using Microsoft Wor…”
Insight
Libin: The biggest shortcut early-stage startups take is hiring personal friends
“One of the many things that are wrong with startups is startups are all about shortcuts. All of the incentives are to take as many shortcuts as you can. The biggest shortcut that you can take is just hiring your friends”
Insight
Libin: A founder's struggle to delegate is a failure to hire well
“Like, it is your failure if you have not hired people that you think are better than you at their job.”
Insight
Libin: Employees earn no credit for following instructions, only for outcomes
“There are no points for following instructions. There's only points for succeeding, for doing the right stuff”
Disclosure
Libin: Formal performance reviews often do more harm than good
“I just haven't had good success with like reviews that felt more useful than harmful.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Libin: Within a year, native video startups will redefine meetings
“And obviously, within a year, like, this isn't what video is going to be like. Obviously, It's going to be the next generation of like native to video companies that comes along and says, well, no, we're not trying to recreate the old reality. We're not trying…”
Insight
Libin: Exceptional talent is global, but opportunity is concentrated near Stanford
“Exceptional talent, like, Mozart-level brilliant, exceptional talent is very, very rare in the world, but it's evenly distributed, and, but opportunity isn't, and so it is bad for the world that so much of the opportunity for crazy, exceptionally talented, cre…”
Insight
Libin: A good idea remains good regardless of market cycles
“For the most part, a good idea one year is still a good idea, regardless of whether the market is up or down.”
Opinion
Libin: Working two years in VC made me a better CEO than operating
“I think that my two year inadvertent vacation in venture capital, I think has probably made me a better CEO than any actual time operating a company.”
Opinion
Phil Libin: Geographical Silicon Valley is less important than ever for innovation
“Silicon Valley, the actual geographical Silicon Valley, and basically San Francisco, and, you know, the area between San Francisco and Stanford is, I think, less important than it's ever been for tech and for innovation.”
Insight
Libin: Forcing Great Product Creators to Become CEOs Makes No Sense
“Like it doesn't make sense to take brilliant product people and force them to become mediocre CEOs before they can actually make that product.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Libin: All Turtles will expand to eight global cities within five years
“So the vision is, you know, in five years, we'll be in eight different cities. We're in three. Now we're opening up the fourth one next year. We'll be in eight cities, eight world cities, each one working on a number of very practical products that solve real …”
Phil Libin