Founders

“I haven't seen a company be started by a founder and then part-time focused and just have it magically find product market fit. Team members, employees are not founders unless they are founder level, right? They're, if they're founder level thinker and they ar…”

“Part of being a founder is adaptability. You have to be able to adapt. You can have a clear goal, but if you need to shift things to actually, like, be able to make a return to your investors, to be able to actually, you know, hire more people or really produc…”

“Some of the best founders, best managers, they're just teachers. They have this unique philosophy, which we've, you and I've been talking about, you know, for quite some time now, and then they just spend their time teaching their entire organization the way t…”

“And what the trick is, is to retain that founder in a company forever if you can, and for as long as possible. Because once you lose that founder, you do lose the soul of the company.”

“So I always ask founders and say, you know, you can't answer why me? Why now? And why this? Then you have a me too product, but you have to add all the time to your career, be able to say, why me? Why now? And why this?”

“Most, most C-level executives don't respond to marketing. They might see your brand. They're not going to respond to a marketing campaign. Okay. It will respond one-on-one and the best individual to one-on-one to a corporate executive is the founder.”

“The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. That's why founders are so good at this.”

“You learned some lessons from failure, but I think you learned way more from success.”

“The difference between a company with a half a billion outcome and a ten billion outcome is just purely the hunger, ambition, and fearlessness of the founder.”

“At the end of the day, what really drives that conviction is that direct one-to-one interaction with the founders, and if we see that founder truly growing in every meeting, and, you know, every time you meet them, they have a new set of answers, and you feel …”

“Definitely worth spending extended time in the Bay. I don't think like short three, four days, two week trips help because you need to let serendipity happen. You need to come spend some extended time, go to a bunch of events. Many of those events will be low …”

“We don't sell directly to founders. Founders have no money. Researchers who are trying to commercialize do not have money.”

“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on t…”

“I think one of the curses of being a founder today is just how much like founder advice there is out there.”

“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…”

“The same amount of seriousness that you apply to the product or the code or the hiring You have to be applying to your story, and you're the only person who can say it. You're the only person who can do it that effectively, because you have, at the beginning e…”

“It's the space in between the facts that ties them into a story that is our responsibility to fill in, because if you let people fill it in haphazardly, they might end up with any conclusion that you don't control.”

“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?”

“Honestly, the best salesperson in any of these companies is a founder, and what they're doing is bridging the jagged edge to what the customer's capability is, and that's it.”

“When founders of startups, especially ones that like know their space, well ping other people very often your ICP customer early does want to talk to you. And the reason is because people like discovering new products and they like seeing new things and they l…”

“I still see that the vast minority of the time. Like, I think it's easy to extrapolate and go, that's a trend, and I could be very Pollyannish about this, but for the most part, like, I see founders wanting to make it work.”

“A lot of the times you'll have founders who say, oh, like my original team can't scale with me, which, you know, sometimes that's correct, but a lot of times it's just a misdiagnosis. Like when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to …”

“Every time I go on a call with the VC, that VC probably wants me to be the best founder that they've ever met. I mean, that's their job. They want to invest.”

“I feel like a lot of founders now are almost a little bit too worried about what the labs are doing. And so they're not entering new verticals or sort of staying away from things that they think is in the roadmap of the lab.”

“So what they don't talk about is the, You know, the phone calls where if you guys don't do what we say, you probably gonna be blackballed. You probably won't be able to raise money again. You know, it's a, you're dealing with these powerful venture capitalists…”

“I tell founders today or anybody in startups, if you want to do this, you have to go through cringe valley for a bit. You're going to put stuff out there that feels just terrible, but that's the whole point. You learn, you put yourself out there, you build the…”

“The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you. Is unbelievably small.”

“You don't solve uncertainty with more thinking. You solve uncertainty through action. The founders who keep moving, they try to stick with momentum, keep executing, and that's how the emotional regulation happens in the best way and the fastest way.”

“I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.”

“Radical transparency actually isn't a risk. It's actually an unburdening of your stress.”

“Don't worry that somebody is going to leave and go to your competitor and take that information. By the time information is useful to that competitor, you will have done something else.”

“The biggest opportunity for founders is to become an educator. Become the person who all the customers look to as the expert.”

“Even if, as the VCs, we have board control, 70% ownership, and a drag along for the founders. Jason knows this. If the founders who are core to the business don't want to sell, it's not going to happen.”

“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 constraint actually is not capital, as I've realized over time, there's a lot of money in this world. The constraint is talent. Right. There's a lot of people who want to start companies. So that's not the constraint. There's very few people that are reall…”

“It's a weird like dichotomy, right? Because at some level you want them to go search for the truth and not be happy ears. At the same time, you need to be outrageously optimistic to build a business, you know, because it's going to suck along the way. And for …”

“I want them to be able to convince people who in a rational world would not be joining your company to be able to join your company. Right. Because you're going to pay them less. You're going to make them work more. There's more risk with this company, but the…”

“It's a disastrous noise. Values can't come back. You have to start from the foundation, you know, once, I mean, we've heard of a lot of startup examples blowing up, you know, because once you reach a certain size, it's impossible to, you know, sort of revert.”

“It gives you a level of resilience that nobody you ever hire is ever going to have.”

“What you're seeing here. Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now. Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go to …”

“It's very clear that founders are top of nearly every measure. They're 71% optimistic. They're enjoying their jobs. The most, they have the lowest burnout, the lowest layoff worry, the most AI excitement.”

“Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company. Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell.”

“I would say one of the biggest lessons I've learned from Fred is that there is really nothing more important than your relationship with the founders.”

“Founders are lonely. I, you know, I could tell you as a former CEO, it's a lonely, punishing job.”

“You actually want to shadow the human before you build. So once you find the job, right, you, you've identified what the job is before you like prompt, before you start coding, just shadow a human being who does the job. I know a lot of founders want to skip t…”

“What we did well and what I would do, I think if I was to start again is yes, I'd raise the funds. That's important, but I'd still operate as if I only have a 100,000 in the bank account, you know, where you just got to iterate really fast with a small group o…”

“B plus is the enemy of an A. B plus often, if we stick with the B plus, is taking up space. It's distracting us from unlocking the A, and to fail or to call the ball that that idea isn't that good, it in itself is really powerful”

“PG said his advice to founders was always, you should hear the no, but ignore the why, because the odds of them telling the truth multiplied by the odds of them being correct are so low that you're just like very little signal in what investors tell you about …”

“There are people who would be bad employees in any company because they're just like difficult to work with. They don't listen to like instructions. So like they don't follow like roadmaps. Or not, they're not like easy to collaborate, but maybe the flip side …”

“The founder was a fine dining chef in Denver, right? He wanted to open a fine dining restaurant, and so he opened Chipotle as a stepping stone saying, I'll open this thing, I'll make some money here, and then I can open my fine dining restaurant. So actually w…”

“Next to founding a company and coming up with an idea, the next most important thing is to make sure that you have somebody who can succeed you that can do better than you did.”

“Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience, it's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data and …”

“Founders hold grudges in a way that VCs actually, I think don't because VCs, you miss the deal. You got to find another bus, right?”

“We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right, and our ideas are usually wrong.”

“I think you have to do the manual stuff at the start to kind of, to tinker the messaging. So, like, what I would be telling founders to do is, like, start with social selling on LinkedIn and, like, be as personalized as you possibly can from, like, voice notes…”

“Most founders are hopelessly naive about this point. They think that they're in control of the company, and they're always so betrayed when they find out that their own founding documents basically say that they can be removed at any time. And they don't reali…”

“We're also seeing founders that are running massive agentic stacks, and they're swapping out for open source models, like left, right, and sideways, because it's just like unsustainable for their margins. Like they just cannot pay these luxury prices.”

“If you don't get the governance of a company right, no other decision you make will matter in the long run because you won't be the one making it.”

“I don't think you should move, and I do think you should visit, is the way that I've been telling founders lately.”

“Founders either have to agree to or not this system. And so we actually are the ones propping it up. We're giving it the fresh meat it needs to survive because it's so value destroying.”