Matthew Prince made his first money selling illegal fireworks in fourth grade
Matthew Prince · Matthew Prince: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes | E1072 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023 · at 1:49
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, discusses his earliest money-making memory in response to a question from host Harry Stebbings about his childhood entrepreneurial mindset.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In about fourth grade or so I had access to a bunch of illegal fireworks. And I would sell them at school, which was, made me really popular with the other kids, but not so popular with their parents. And so I think that that, that probably something around that there are a bunch of, again, sort of strange little entrepreneurial things that we did in, in school. Although I, again, it was none of them were necessarily big money makers, but that was that was probably the first thing that I charged someone money for.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Matthew Prince
Prince: The Bay Area is terrible for scaling companies
“It's, it is, I mean, when we were starting, and by the way, it's why it's the best place to start companies, but it's a terrible place to scale companies.”
Prince: The story of eBay starting with Beanie Babies is PR BS
“So, so the eBay example, you're like eBay started with Beanie Babies. So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS.”
Prince: Starting in a narrow niche creates local minimums that hinder growth
“Where it runs a risk is if you start, start to say, you know, we've got to do X. First of all, you'll attract people that think X is, even though you say the journey is much longer that they'll think that that's the end state. And then secondly, it might be th…”
Prince: Almost all successful startup founders begin with broad, ambitious visions
“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 …”
Prince: Bootstrapped Tough Mudder might be more successful than Cloudflare
“I think it's an open question whether, you know, they've been more successful or we've been more successful. Like, they have no costs. They've got this thing that's just a machine that just kicks off a ton of cash, and he can go and focus on, you know, other t…”