Floodgate

“There seemed to be a lot of mental models for investing or operating companies, but they didn't seem to apply to startups.”

“Had I invested 250,000 dollars in Airbnb at the time, it'd now be worth a billion dollars.”

“What we've come to realize is that a startup isn't really a company at all. A startup is a set of founders with hopefully a set of proprietary insights that are a result of them living in the future.”

“What a startup has to do to become a company someday is they have to achieve three or four crucial breakthroughs. One is they have to have a breakthrough insight. And then they have to have a breakthrough value proposition. And then they have to have a breakth…”

“And I looked at all the companies that we had passed on that we should have invested in, Airbnb, Pinterest who else, PagerDuty, Anaplan.”

“So, for example, we invested in Lyft when it was Zimride back in 2010, and it would be very easy for us to believe we knew more than we knew at the time we made that investment. Same with Twitter, same with Twitch, same with Okta.”

“So, so for example, I don't react super well to we're all still working at our jobs and we can't wait to leave as soon as we get funded. So I I'm like, look, if you're not passionate enough to leave your job and do this full time, why would I be passionate en…”

“If you're a consumer mobile app, you might iterate twice a week or even more often. And if that's the case, I care very little about how you're a monetize. I care more about are you coming up with clever ways to get distribution to spread your idea very quickl…”

“So it's basically Some work that you did to discover something that most people would think is non-intuitive.”

“What you want to do when you go through an idea maze is you want to look at every previous attempt At the boundary of your idea. Oh, am I going to charge for my software? Okay, great. Has it ever been built in open source? Am I going to charge for it by the co…”

“What a lot of people tend to do, which is an answer I don't love is my team is awesome. That's why now the other teams haven't been as awesome as my team. So we're going to win when they haven't, because they weren't as smart as we are. That, that may be true,…”

“And you know, you're on the right scent when they say, oh yeah, we tried that already before, but it didn't work. And most people think that's bad, but it's good. And the reason it's good is because they know they have the problem. And they've actually done so…”

“One of the great heuristics of true product market fit is exponential organic growth. And exponential organic growth happens because your enlisted customers tell cross-referenceable other people, this product rocks. And it's the most efficient way to grow beca…”

“On the job training doesn't work in the growth mode of a startup, because if we have to TEDx our revenue in 18 months, we can't learn that on the job. We have to have people in those roles that know the job and can be trusted to execute.”