The Ledger
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Justin Kan Defends Zenefits Founder Parker Conrad as an Impressive Leader
“I always think that he is like a very impressive founder and someone who is like relentlessly bent on growing his company.”
Justin Kan: Venture Capital Is Easy Because VCs Do No Real Work
“Because you don't do any of the real work. You know, like, this is, I can, I talk to founders all day, and I give them my advice, and they either do it or they don't do it. But at the end of the day, you know, I, you don't have any control. And so you wait, se…”
Kan: Y Combinator is so stable you "can't fuck it up"
“And the time at YC was nice because YC is very stable as an organization. It's a brand. People want to go there. You know, you kind of like can't fuck it up really. And so the kind of mental burden was like way off by comparison to startups.”
YC Continuity Fund Was Designed to Compete With Public Market Investors
“The continuity fund originally was conceived of as a way to compete with more of the growth stage investors that were coming into the market in the later stage. So that's people who weren't actually classically VCs. I think as you've seen like tech companies, …”
Kan: Incumbent law firms are heavily incentivized not to innovate
“Found a lot of things that I thought were like broken about the legal market and legal industry that created incentives for the incumbents themselves. Not to change.”
Kan: Founders have a fiduciary duty to investors to avoid burnout
“And if you burn out, you are not doing yourself or your investors or your employees or your customers any favors. You need to like retain yourself. And so you need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be retained for a long time. I …”
Kan: The happiness of selling Twitch for $1B lasted a week
“When we sold Twitch, Almost a billion dollars. Like I was very happy for one day, two days, even a week. But after that, I was just, I remember, you know, kind of just went, okay, that's the new normal. And now I'm back here at my baseline.”
Kan: It is a myth that founders must suffer to build startups
“I think people feel like they have to suffer in order to do a startup, and I actually just disagree with that. I don't think you have to suffer. You're going to experience pain, definitely. Things aren't always going to go right, but you don't have to suffer.”
Kan: Treating Atrium like an investor was my biggest early mistake
“I think I approached Atrium with a little bit too much of an investor attitude in the beginning, which was a little bit too much like hands off. Like I'm just going to build a team and the team is going to do everything without like really myself getting in th…”
Amazon's Twitch Acquisition Exceeded $1 Billion After Employee Retention Packages
“We ended up selling to Twitch To Amazon for nine or seventy million dollars. Does that annoy you that it's not a billion? I think they specifically did that, but you know, it's after retention, it was over a billion”
Justin Kan: Snapchat Is the Most Compelling Product of the Past Decade
“Their product teams are like pretty good and they've Really built a, what I think is the most compelling product I've seen in the last 10 years.”
Justin Kan: Navigating nightlife sober forces you to build real confidence
“I would never have thought that I could have fun without being hammered at nightlife before, but it's kind of like having to actually just live your life in Normal mode instead of easy mode, you know, and figure out how you can have the confidence and be okay …”
Justin Kan: Quitting alcohol is tech's easiest performance optimization
“Yeah, I think it's becoming much more socially acceptable and in this, I guess, especially in Silicon Valley, you know, where people are looking for all these performance optimization things and they're intermittent fasting and eating keto and meditating and l…”
Kan: Learning as a startup founder is an inherently painful process
“When you're the founder of a startup, you are forced to learn things. The thing I forgot about that process is that when you're learning is actually mostly a painful process. And what I mean by that is it's mostly involves failing at things until you finally g…”
Kan wanted to quit Twitch and Justin.tv every single summer
“When I was in my first section of my entrepreneurial career, you know, building Justin TV and Twitch, I remember that every summer I would want to quit and go get a job or do something else.”
Kan: Tying your entire identity to your startup guarantees burnout
“My entire identity was wrapped up in my company. And being an entrepreneur. And so the problem with that is that when things go badly, you feel badly about yourself. You transpose those feelings that you might have about what's happening in your company onto y…”
Kan: Naming emotions at work helps diagnose underlying operational issues
“Being able to name your emotions enables you to actually drive into the deeper issues for what might be triggering them in you”
Kan: Silicon Valley culture makes sharing negative company events nearly impossible
“And even I can't advertise like super things that might be perceived as super negative events. It's really tough to do in our society.”
Justin Kan: Successful Investors Need Platform, Selection Thesis, and Relentless Pursuit
“Well, I think investors have to have, you know, there's three qualities of investors that I, or of investors or firms that I think are important investing. I've thought about this a little bit. The first one is a platform that generates leads for them or reaso…”
Justin Kan: When Faced With Only Bad Choices, Doing Nothing Is Optimal
“One of them is that you don't actually necessarily have to do anything. When you don't have a good decision, when you're faced between multiple bad decisions, maybe you should just do nothing and wait and see what happens.”
Justin Kan quit drinking alcohol one year ago
“I quit about just over a year ago. Actually, I just hit a year, maybe a month ago, and I wasn't really drinking as much as I used to, but I was still drinking probably 15 to 20 drinks a week, and I just realized that it wasn't serving me anymore.”
Kan: Alcohol Cravings Diminished Significantly After Two Weeks of Sobriety
“After the first couple weeks, it became pretty automatic, and I wasn't craving it as much anymore.”
Kan uses a therapist, two CEO coaches, and leadership groups
“So now, today, you know, I have a therapist, I have a CEO coach, I actually have two CEO coaches, I have different conscious leadership groups that I'm part of”
Justin Kan Sold Web Calendar Startup Kiko on eBay for $250,000
“Ended up selling on eBay. Decided startups weren't quite as bad as we'd thought because from the eBay sale, which was about a quarter of a million dollars, we made a little bit of money.”
Y Combinator Shortened Founder Interviews From 40 Minutes to 10 Minutes
“So the interviews when they started off were 40 minutes long, which I'm sure to the interviewers felt exhausting. Now they're only 10 minutes long and they still feel exhausting.”
Kan uses a daily phone alarm to meditate on non-attachment
“I have a timer on my phone every day that actually reminds me to meditate on attachment specifically and to remind myself that, you know, if I achieve the thing that I want, I think I want, actually, I'm not going to actually be any happier, whatever that goal…”