Prince: Modest growth without scale is the worst outcome for startups
Matthew Prince · Harry debates Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: "Should startups target niche markets?" · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 24, 2023 · at 3:58
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explains why stagnant, medium-performing startups consume a founder's decade without delivering meaningful success during a debate on 20VC.
0:00 / 0:41exact quote · 41.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The worst outcome by far Is the slog. Where you have these companies that are growing just enough that it feels like success is just over the next hill. And they, and so they can't stop But there, nobody cares about them anymore, and their investors are tuned out and dread every board meeting, and they're, and you've got, I would guess, a bunch of slogs, and I've got a bunch of friends who I love and admire and respect, And they're in the slog and you can wake up very quickly and 10 years of your life has gone like that.”
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…”