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David Sacks: Glorifying 'Doing Things That Don't Scale' Leads to Unscalable Startups

David Sacks · 20VC: Craft Ventures' David Sacks on How To Assess Founder Psychology, How To Accurately Evaluate CAC, Burn and Churn & What Makes The Very Best Startup Boards · Jun 15, 2020 · at 33:38

David Sacks is a General Partner at Craft Ventures. He pushes back on Paul Graham's widely followed startup advice during a quickfire Q&A round.

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“I strongly disagree with that mantra, and I think it's one of the chivalests that gets startups in trouble. The whole point of technology is to find the elegant, scalable approach and the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be. When you start to glorify doing things that don't scale, you end up with a startup that doesn't scale, which is kind of the opposite of the whole point.”

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