Early Stage Startups

“Now we're seeing three bands of compensation. We're seeing the regular human beings, then we're seeing the AI guys, and then we're seeing the one to five superstars that we're talking about, right? That I have to that I have to find a seven figure package for …”

“I think that like, I think hiring the number one, number two, number three engineer of the business has almost never been harder. Because the alternatives are so obviously like hitting you over the head. If you can be a founding engineer at a startup, why coul…”

“Early stage, a lifetime deal is the smartest move you can make. You're basically raising capital from your customers without giving away equity, control, board seats, and getting amazing feedback. So I don't think there is anything better than this.”

“You should not be vertically integrating just because you can save five percent or 10% or 20, even 50% on a subcomponent that does not kind of check the box of like, does the company exist or not?”

“Well, as an investor, certainly at the very early stages to me, it's somewhat of a negative signal. If I see that they've hired and are actually paying, whether it's an investment bank or you know, usually these are more boutique type of operations.”

“Especially as an early stage company, don't do business. Don't take money from, Funds that are in any way loss averse, because that's where they get into this sort of pernicious misalignment of incentives you know, encouraging you to keep going because they do…”

“Early stage company, look, we do, you'll do negative margin deals, right? Like we're going to do this deal, but we're going to lose money on the deal. But we need the referenceable account, and we'll make up for it later.”

“When you're writing checks of that size and the company's that early, they almost always fail.”

“I mean, not always you find revenues. Revenue is the wrong proxy to look for, where the right proxy is to kind of look for validations, right?”

“Strategy for early stage startups should you know, my recommendation should never be on the offensive, that we have this patent, so you can't do it. Rather, it should be the other way around, since we have the patent, so we are, you know, legit to do it.”

“It feels like AI is raising the bar on an early stage startup on what they can do, what they can accomplish. And so it's making us be very selective in the investments we make because in three months we might be disrupted by something new.”

“Things are not going right if you are in control, like you really in the early stages should feel like you were kind of drowning. And that's when things are, you know, paradoxically going right, because you should have so many things that must be done as a rea…”

“Yeah, and I think, like, people are writing checks right now. It's definitely slowed down, to be clear, but we as investors are in the business of funding companies we think are going to be great.”

“The number one thing you look for in these startups, because they're very early stage, is can they, can you work with them, and can they pivot? All companies pivot, no matter what, they'll pivot, all these companies are going to pivot five times, but can you w…”

“You don't learn anything when you get a customer from an ad at an early stage.”

“I think that if you start as a small company and you have a, an amazing VP of sales, you know, they can sell anything, even if your product is really crappy. That's a curse. It's not something positive”

“Growth is and must remain a side effect or byproduct and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it has made a goal in itself, at least in the early days.”

“In the early days, just get close to customers. It almost doesn't matter whether you get, you don't need to optimize pricing. Kill basic, keep it, do a little A-B testing if you can, but it don't matter. Just close them, right?”

“I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design, because it's basically You should figure out a way to get it done for almost zero dollars. And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great des…”

“What good does it do to go out, you know, 12 months and try to behave like a big company, and you're just pulling numbers out of, you know, out of nowhere. It does more harm than good because you kind of start And part of the reason I said that is because like…”

“That's kind of how like auditors sometimes compare startups to their growth rates when they're setting four or nine A's or things like that. Like they're using data sets that include only the absolute major successes and not actually the full data set that inc…”

“Our first group of customers for startups, like small startups, early stage startups, those people don't even look at ads. Like they, I don't think they pick products because they see ads like out, out there somewhere. They pick products because they hear abou…”

“Yeah, I think it's really a mistake to look at revenue multiples at like half a million.”

“And just remember, if your company is successful, these initial five, 10 customers you sign up at the start are going to be a tiny, tiny fraction of the revenue you make over the next five years. And so It's more important to start signing deals and getting to…”

“And I feel like transparency is not really the norm in early stage startups because the goal is to pretend publicly that everything's fine so that you can make your investors happy. You can get more clients, but privately, typically things are shit show.”

“And I think a lot of times like junior folks are oftentimes the cheapest, but also like from a pure salary perspective, but also can be a huge force multiplier and just a large arbitrage opportunity.”

“The way you get promoted in a lot of companies, in product, in marketing, is by doing the stuff you're supposed to do, but doing it faster and doing more of it and making fewer mistakes and managing more people and more budget and making good decks. And none o…”

“So in an early stage startup, I think there just comes a point where your company becomes the growth team, right? Like you go through fundraising, you go through building your product, and sort of the eye of Sauron turns, and it's like time to do growth, becau…”

“I do think boards as a company gets bigger and bigger and closer to going public are really important for governance and accountability. But when the company is so early on, it's very, very hard for a board member to get up to speed. You know, they're showing …”

“So for me, the entire orientation of an organization in the early, early stages, I'm talking like sub a hundred. Now I think needs to be figure out the industries and the verticals. You can be successful and go get brand names, category killers and rotate hard…”

“I see a lot of businesses, and it's slightly different in consumer, but they will not charge their early adopters, they won't charge their design partners, they won't charge their ICPs, and the problem with that is you don't know if it's valued. And generally …”

“Many early stage startups launch a beta with a presumption and maybe even the dependency that all that's being Tweaked in the beta is, is bug fixes. You know, you'd like, you really don't want to learn anything net new about your customer in the beta. You're, …”

“The later stage of a company you are, the more it makes sense to trade overhead for resources... And in the early days, you think that also applies. Like if only I had more money, if only I had a few more developers, you actually want zero overhead. Like the l…”

“You hire enough people, you've basically created this complex system of scaling that back is super hard. Like imagine you have 10 or 15 people and you're like, I don't even know if we can reduce this to two or three people at this point, because I don't know h…”

“One of the things I see at earlier stage startups is that the marketers don't put in place their attribution tracking, and they really don't have the tech stack, and they can't see into the right data. So they, Not only don't have a balanced scorecard with the…”

“You couldn't afford to do that earlier on. You would, you just have to have an existential crisis and ship as quickly as you can.”

“And that's probably the counterforce is all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 20, 21 have high salaries. And if you switch, you'll get more equity, but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”

“Those large enterprises, especially in an early stage startup, they will suck the life out of that startup because they will say, I need these hundred features.”

“If you're using it to get to a ridiculous level of precision on the cost structure that you expect to achieve in, in five years, you've probably wasted some time.”

“The easy access to money at a accelerated stage that the company is not ready for usually will destroy the company's value.”

“I think sales is incredibly hard to hire at startups, specifically because the whole nature of sales is like the people who want to go early are like anti correlated with the good people, right?”

“That exercise is not one I would spend too much time on because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric and you'll probably want to ch…”

“Early days of hiring reps, you're going to need Renaissance reps that have a very wide breadth of skill sets who enjoy the building process. And as things go on and you start to sell, scale your sales team, you're going to see reps that are there for really to…”

“It does not pay to have coin-operated sales reps in the early days. They're going to be overly focused on quotas and crushing their number to get to a certain outcome. The early days are really about who is creating the best connection between my developing pr…”

“And I think entrepreneurs hate that advice of like, it only exists for as long as you make it exist. And then like, once you stop trying, it goes away.”

“It's really hard really early on in early stage startups, which is where I'm focusing my time now, because you don't have enough people for statistical significance.”

“If the core thing you're going after is real people will, you call enough customers, you will find some that are willing to go through hoops, as you said, To wait longer than they should, to forego spelling errors and contracts, just to get the thing that they…”

“So right now, at this particular moment in my life, I'm probably not gonna go hard at a super early stage startup. Right. Because I believe that you probably need to be in person and working really hard together for long periods of time.”

“The people that tend to like working at the first 10 employees tend to be nonconformist. Right. Cause there's no structure. It's like chaos. So that's like a really good move versus going into like the big tech treadmill.”

“That is a reasonable default, especially if you're early stage, say perhaps pre-PMF or just about reaching PMF. Then craps person is of good default.”

“When you raise massive amounts of money early, how are you going to sell for 10 X what you raise? Who's going to buy you for five hundred million dollars? You're dead.”

“What usually happens is they either are, either they joined your startup because they're, they weren't doing well. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it. Either there's a reason they joined your startup and left Google, or they had expectations that you …”

“However, for your purposes, as an early stage startup, you should just have a single business model that you're focused on.”

“My experience, okay, ours are really good when a company understands itself really well. Most people listening, me, you guys, like, we don't know our business that way.”

“Like you invest in the early stages in companies and they're going to pivot three times before they find anything. So laying out a strategy and sticking to something, it assumes that you have some degree of product market fit.”

“I think you need someone who is really able to find their own leads, is really able to hustle, is hungry, Can live in an environment where there's nothing there yet, where there's no established process, who is really a builder and wants to build things, who w…”

“Even if it doesn't work, you're much better in-housing it than throwing it over to someone else and having them give a, you know, probably not their best performance and trying to get you placement.”

“Early days, I don't care at all about what price people pay. ARR doesn't matter at all. There's a hot take from a sales leader early days. I think the only thing that matters is that you're learning and that you have good customers who are good fits that are g…”

“Momentum matters so much. And momentum is reflexive in that, you know, high momentum leads to more high momentum, low momentum leads to more low momentum, because there's this energy that, that kind of goes through companies where when there is momentum, when …”

“So if you are much smaller, like your friends and family, that better be near close to 80%, no matter what, because if you can't even convince the people who care about you to use the product, it probably isn't gonna solve the job for anyone else.”