Entrepreneur

“If they want to do, have a career, particularly in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs, I think it's totally useless.”

“Like many entrepreneurs or people who want to be an entrepreneur come to me, I discourage them. And when they come after three, four times, then I know that they really want to do it.”

“I read the average entrepreneur makes 46 to 65,000 dollars a year.”

“And I think this is the disaster that most entrepreneurs are doing, which is like chasing all three at once and not trying to filter advice through what you want for your life as an adult with the Willpower to choose yourself. So you're like, no, I'll have fre…”

“One of the most powerful things an entrepreneur, a salesperson, a creator, an artist has, is a simple sentence, which is, thank you, it's not for you. It might be for somebody. You should make something for somebody, but if someone rejects you because they are…”

“What I've noticed is that I believe, mostly without exception, every second or third time entrepreneur that I've seen that's doing it, Does some validation, has some conversations, does that research, and digs in”

“Well, the problem is the mega platforms are taking call options. So is this good for the mega platforms? Is this good for the LPs or is this good for the entrepreneurs? Well, probably for 95% of the entrepreneurs, it's not good.”

“You want your mind to be, how hard can it be? And let the suffering come to you a little bit at a time. You know, don't imagine how hard it's going to be and let all of that turn into anxiety and not doing something about it.”

“Entrepreneurs that are coming up since the Uber time. Are not scared of regulation the way that bits.”

“Most people cannot become entrepreneurs. They're not ambitious. They should not be ambitious. You could argue the numbers, but it's a small percentage, and other people want to work for them. So people like working in large institutions. Large institutions pay…”

“The fact that you see this entrepreneurs make this mistake all over and over again, they over optimize for growth at the expense of durability.”

“That's where I think boards and investors and as an external parties can be really good advisors, not because they know the business, because they are outside the business. The emotions are not connected to the business, where you're able to bring very unemoti…”

“I think we do a disservice to everybody when we go back and retell the story in a way that is not honest, because it confuses the people who are on the path of figuring it out.”

“Entrepreneurs do not take risk. They do everything in their power to minimize risk.”

“Commitment to the time it takes to build a brand and to build success is something that's hard to teach if that, if it's their first job out of college, you know, instead of having the experience that you can't really pass on to them.”

“I think there's something similar between an entrepreneur and a gangster. So few of them make it. So many die early. The odds of success are so low. Gangsters are celebrated via Hollywood, Bollywood in my case, and entrepreneurs via podcasts like mine.”

“My experience is that people who have the endurance are the people that have a chip on their shoulder, something happened along their journey. That they're wounded, traumatized, and they want to fix it. And the cure is the creation of something that didn't exi…”

“I think a lot of entrepreneurs were unhappy when they started companies, and so now when they're famous or all over the internet, they're unhappy now, and they were unhappy then, and so now there's a lot of people that talk about how miserable it has to be to …”

“Where the entrepreneurs are advantaged by their lack of attachment to history and tradition and the old way of doing things. Where the iconoclast is the in your business, the iconoclast and the young guy. Not only celebrate, they're the you know, they're the t…”

“The thing that's been surprising, though, is like how fast we've been catching up. And I think that that's been really kind of heartening from both The number of entrepreneurs that want to help, and then the willingness of the U.S. Government to say, hey, we'r…”

“Like so many entrepreneurs, I, we've all seen this, right, where they say they'll, or they want to bring someone in, and there were issues with around Blackstone at the time and all the businesses, but then once, once those issues are kind of fade, then the en…”

“And I think a lot of us that are entrepreneurs, we're driven by insecurity. We're driven by some hole. Not all of us, but a lot of us. Something in our childhood, something. A lot of us were not the coolest kids or whatever, and there's something in us we want…”

“These corporations, they're operating at a scale that is really unimaginable to many entrepreneurs. And so it's not so simple to just take your thing that you created and just slide it into a product or service line. There's a lot that needs to happen. And so …”

“One, if you give an entrepreneur money, they're going to spend it. There's no doubt if somebody gives a bunch of money, we'd find a way to spend it. But when you don't give them any, and they're hungry, you figure out a way to make it.”

“And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of our product, Tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't wa…”

“And so the worst entrepreneurs, I think, try to ship at a hundred percent and end up shipping at 40% six months later because they never had real data to work against.”

“So we get wired for problem seeking and problem destruction. It's good for achievement, but it's not good for happiness is to be a problem seeker.”

“Problems that people face at this point in their life most entrepreneurs have not experienced, right? So, like, they are not thinking about what an eighty-year-old might need because they've never been 80, right?”

“And I chuckle thinking about the fact that there are all these people on the internet who tell you can't make a ton of money as an employee. Bullshit. Bullshit. Mitt Romney makes more than like, 99.9% of entrepreneurs ever will.”

“But I think most things that lawyers learn are very Inconsistent with being entrepreneur. So when you're graded as a lawyer, you learn every exam in law school virtually is issue spotting. So you get credit for identify, there's like fact patterns, identify al…”

“As an entrepreneur, if your life gets too comfortable, you lose your ability to spot problems. It's like comedians. When comedians get too rich, they fall off a cliff because they don't have relatable jokes anymore because their life is completely unrelatable …”

“I think the biggest challenge in being entrepreneur is Your surrounding, your social surrounding, to be lonely. Most of the time you are alone in this journey.”

“And I think they're probably in all honesty, more people that are cut out to be investors than there are entrepreneurs”

“Most people take too long to make the leap for a number of reasons. It's really difficult to go from zero to one. But it, the journey is so rewarding, and once you've got to the conviction that you want to come up with an idea, And turn it into a product, it's…”

“I think one of the things that tend to generate entrepreneurs where it's into push people and drill into entrepreneurship is necessity. And if you think of a, you know, a country like Israel, where military service is mandatory, that has to do with necessity. …”

“Pain is a fantastic amplifier of capability. Some sort of, like, grudge, pain, anger, but, you know, the child that had a wonderful upbringing is a wonderful human being and not a great entrepreneur in many cases, at least at scale, at mega scale, because it j…”

“Technically entrepreneurs could negotiate their own legal docs with Claude. But that being said, you're paying for effectively therapy throughout the deal and like general guidance.”

“Any successful entrepreneur, if they don't tell you that, hey man, there was some time and some luck involved in it, they're lying to you. Like truthfully, there's always a little bit of that.”

“If you've ever been a VC pitch, they're really weird things, because they're basically, the VCs are up there playing defense. They're like goalies. And the entrepreneurs, the people who are pitching are just lying to them.”

“It seems to me like most of the greatest entrepreneurs, you actually would not want them as an employee.”

“A lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but many cases, your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing abou…”

“People think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control. And that if you're talented, and you're working on a valuable product, or a problem, and you solve the problem for other people, and you maintain control, you wind…”

“You see the success in most entrepreneurs lives happen multiple decades in. Because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work, and that's why the start, scale, sell doesn't work.”

“And this is it's called entrepreneurial terror, and I think most successful ones included have gone through this at some point, because the buck completely stops with you.”

“The moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That…”

“When I meet other entrepreneurs, the biggest sign for me that they're going to move very slowly is too much preparation, and I think these tools are so good You can go straight into a project with them.”

“In hindsight, I tell other entrepreneurs that don't be in a hurry to go public because it gives your competitors a lot of information.”

“Something that Andre Agassi has in common with a lot of the great entrepreneurs is they hate losing more than they love winning.”

“The best entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit great engineers. That's how you're going to get follow on money. Like everything comes out of that. So you'd never take money from a tier two if you could …”

“I used to find people, 10 dollars a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it.”

“If you try to make yourself look good by making an entrepreneur look bad, you're fired.”

“If I have ten million entrepreneurs and each gets a 100,000 dollars worth of capital, that's one trillion dollars. That's one trillion dollars. Yeah, it's not going to come from the savings of Indians.”

“There are a lot of people making excuses for being distracted and for engaging and feeding their entrepreneurial ADHD or their shiny object syndrome or their I need to be diversified or it's all a matter of luck so I need to make a hundred bets because one mig…”

“We think the number of entrepreneurs is going to multiply as well. Because the kind of the ease of going from an idea to a really fantastic solution and a fantastic product is just going to be so much simpler.”

“Given that founders operate with incomplete information all the time, and that as a founder, you have to make progress without perfect clarity, like, that's a core skill of being an entrepreneur.”

“Even when something isn't your fault, as an entrepreneur, it's still your responsibility.”

“Like, whenever someone's behavior in a business context doesn't make sense to me, I try to learn how they're paid, and usually the answer comes to the fore that way. And so, if you can just understand people's incentives, you can navigate around that and somet…”

“The people that are usually really great that create the greatest companies, the greatest inventions, the greatest technology. They're usually very obsessive and it causes them to discount other parts of their life.”

“I literally have had one of the greatest living entrepreneurs tell me that directly, that his friends and family know they could be in the middle of a dinner. If there's an idea or something, some kind of form of inspiration comes to him related to his work, h…”

“I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs have a reality distortion fields. They're able to get people to spend their normal skepticism, and for a moment, they let them into their vision, and they catch a little bit.”