founders

“If you, if you're not fluent in two languages, you should definitely be fluent in one and, you know, functional in the other.”

“There can be perverse incentives because now there's so much money and they're not actually able to ship a product.”

“This is a story that the founder has lived and breathed. They can tell it better than anybody else, but it's not going to scale as the company grows.”

“So when I talk to our founders, I always talk to them about you know, the true, the worth of HR is, is that they are an extension of the founder in their vision, in the way that they want to build the company, in how they bring people on board, and how they ac…”

“One of the things that I think nobody ever believes that their company is not inclusive. Like, I've never spoken to a founder. Oh, no, you know, we're exclusive. We don't let anybody in who's a woman. Like, that never actually gets said, and nobody ever thinks…”

“And then I think you're also seeing these really massive rounds because what I'm seeing is really competitive deals where investors feel like there's not that many super Unicorn potential startups. They want to pile into those, and so that drives up valuation …”

“As long as the founders run the companies there's normally enough pressure to keep doing things. Once the founders are replaced with politicians who act like CEOs you end up with you know, much less incremental stuff happening.”

“Well, the first way I actually begin is by looking at the biographies, of course. I have a heavy propensity for people who have survived failed startups, near-death experiences of big companies, and along the way have demonstrated some degree of creative disci…”

“Towards the end too, is the founder has to own the decision. You know, you can't have a situation where, you know, you're trying to make a decision based on consensus.”

“For an executive search, CEO of founder being really the first point of contact with the company. So that the executive has an opportunity to start developing that personal rapport and relationship with the CEO right out of the gate. And if you're able to star…”

“If you're talking to one, I mean, you should have a plan in place and not to put a time sink into it, but you should be thorough about it. No, not, it's not 10, but it's not one. So it's picking that, You know, to the top of the top, top group that you're most…”

“And I think one thing that you can do as a founder is you can force the corporate development team to be more efficient. If they think that they're going to need to bring in a product person later, Or if they're gonna, if there's other people at the company th…”

“We've found that when a company is going to get disrupted, the person, in many cases, with the best odds of countering the disruption, is the founder.”

“We think that if you just look historically at many of the great, you know, important technology companies of the last 50 years, hundred years, many of them are run by their founders for decades.”

“If we're just talking pure compensation, then I think cash is actually a better vehicle than stock, because one, like, stock is variant, and you may not get paid not because you can't invest, but because the thing goes to zero. And is that really your fault as…”

“The thing that founders have is literally the ability to break all the promises. The founder can say, I know, I told you last Tuesday, we're building, you know, widget X and we're doing the following way with this margins, but I've got news for you. We're now …”

“Like, you as a founder have to be on some level super delusional and convicted that there's this big market. But you have to be really open on the details.”

“I think very few investors and founders have the patience for the level of uncertainty that it takes to build a new category.”

“I think the takeaway, though, for founders, I think it was probably never a good idea to build a company to sell, but it's even more so not a good idea today. You need to first hit product market fit, and then you need to figure out how to scale, and you just …”

“The big lesson I do think that people should definitely walk away from as founders is to again, remember that it's not just the shiny product, but boy, managing distribution, managing pricing, understanding how you bring things to market and do so is, is, is m…”

“An agency is ideally managed not by the founder, because as a CEO, you have lots of things to do, right? Like, you're growing a company, you're probably managing engineering still. Like, there's a lot of things to do. So ideally, you have someone with a lot of…”

“A crisis, I would not leave it to a founder or a management team to manage a crisis on their own if they don't have deep PR expertise.”

“And don't trust an agency ever that will promise you a headline or a story or any kind of outcome.”

“And then you get a really good view into what's going on when you ask about the absolute dreaded headline, because you can actually glean what is potentially underneath that you're not necessarily being told.”

“Like, a good founder has to basically have every conceivable skill. Like, you basically have to be good at product development, and at marketing, and at sales, and at finance, and at legal, and at HR, and management, and, you know, on and on and on and on. And…”

“Getting to that next product after you get the first product, getting to the next product market fit required an innovator, and so if you wanted subsequent product cycles, you needed the founder”

“Most of the really great companies, like forget about successful, but like great companies, companies you admire in tech were all run by their founders for a very long time.”

“Those advisors who are bringing that scientific advice to you, either in your company or as external advisors, are not going to understand why you're not doing all the things that you have to do for that seven year timeframe, because really what you've got to …”

“At this point in time, there is nobody better equipped in a startup company to talk about the beauty and the benefits of the product, and the vision of the future that we're painting. There's nobody better equipped to do that than the founders who started the …”

“I'll tell you, it's so analogous to the way a founder and Will work with the investors, right? The VC, the board. It, it's up to you to manage that relationship. It's up to you to set the terms.”

“So this is a term that I think most people don't spend a lot of attention on but can actually have very material economic consequences Particularly in cases where the company may not be performing as well as could be expected.”

“However, I think the one thing that founders can forget is that no matter the sort of platform shift, whether it's been internet, cloud, mobile distribution is always key. And so even with this new sort of product leap where maybe, you know, you have consumers…”

“I think my number one advice would be to shop around. For a certain process which you don't want to use, there's capacity, but for another one that you do want to use, they don't have the capacity.”

“I have never ever in my entire life heard a founder or a business owner say, I can't wait to buy accounting software. Like, no, what the founder says is, I really need someone to solve this problem for me. I need someone who feels like they're on my team, some…”

“In the early days, you really can't hand that off to an employee. They don't have the incentive like you have when you're building the business.”

“I always encourage entrepreneurs to like, especially founders try to purposely decouple yourself From the founder mind and the CEO mind.”

“Incumbents, especially incumbents that no longer have their founders, incumbents are highly likely to underestimate the amount of structural change and they're going to have a hard time adapting to it.”

“One of the key ways you evaluate founders is like, what difficult challenges have they been through in their lives that they were able to overcome? And the best forecast of being able to overcome a profound challenge in the future, which every entrepreneur dea…”

“Well, and it is worth saying there are founders who will, if they do not have a crisis, they will create one. They absolutely seek out disaster.”

“Founders who have great sort of you know, reputations, public presences are able to recruit better, are able to have lower customer acquisition costs, are able to have cheaper cost of capital because they can raise better.”

“Founders will get much more time. The market gives them more time. The board gives them more time. The employees give them more time. Non-founders for various reasons, and I don't know if you agree, you don't get the same amount of time.”

“It's a lot more powerful that founders know that I've been a founder. And I know this is a such a cliche thing to say, but I do feel that resonates much more than like, I got a PhD in computer science or I know infrastructure.”

“They'll do well in their own archetype. When they have to step outside of their own archetype, they make a mistake. They hire people that are like their own archetype in other roles where that could be lethal.”

“And it's very hard to understand the customer if you've never served, if you've never worked inside of government.”

“My view here for founders is if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant, and you don't want to be the assistant.”

“For labs certainly for big tech, and perhaps increasingly for labs, the priorities get set in their promo committee, always. And if you're a PM, and it's always the sort of mid-career PMs, and I've been one of these, and you, like, the incentives are always to…”

“The more out there we are, and the more outspoken we are, and the more controversial we are, the better for the business in the sense of the entrepreneurs love it. The founders want to work with, this is very clear at this point, the founders want to work with…”

“You know, for us, that's great, because the audience, our audience is founders not the world. And so, you know, having a way to talk to 90% of founders as opposed to four percent of the world is just a much better thing for us.”

“And I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, like you might not need to do all of that, but if you're, Trying to meme a dream into reality. I think you have to play that game.”

“The classic Question I'm sure you get that, you know, all investors get all the time is what's hot and what should I work on? And that's the wrong question to ask. Like the right question is like, what are you interested in? What do you know uniquely?”

“I think this is actually a really important topic for founders and for early stage revenue leaders today to figure out how you're educating your customer on like, here is the thing we are signing up for. We are not signing up for, you know, maybe you are, mayb…”