Founding Team

“The core of that was not key. Oh, he has a different skill set and somebody else. It's trust. And that, you know, that is how these things come together.”

“One of the things you learn when you sell a company is that at some point in time, it becomes too late. You can't reverse this decision. So you have, from the get-go, you have to decide how you're going to compensate in equity, your founding team, your staff m…”

“Having the founding team be in that 20 to 25% range, or thereabouts, at a B is, like, a really strong position.”

“The things that transcend AI will become probably then even more important because they will be the things that separate the sort of flash in the pan, you know, overnight success that then fizzles because the founding team wasn't really in it for the right rea…”

“The classic YC thing is just when you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money, and if they say no, then find a new problem. Like, don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does, because you don't have that kin…”

“I would say the most common example is where you have a founder that doesn't build a, like a, Diverse enough set of skills around them with the rest of their founding team or their executive team. And they assume that their, you know, specific superpower will …”

“Instead of having one equal co-founder, I took the same amount of equity and I distributed it to a founding team.”

“I'd say the most important things are understand that business. Like, is there opportunity Is there leverage to be had in the business? I think this is something like they're hiring you because they need to help to grow, but you want to figure out if they're a…”

“And so I think the biggest consideration is where is your founding team at? What are the biggest gaps that you need to fill? And really thinking about a CPO as somebody who can play the role of up-leveling the product organization, but needs to be complementar…”

“I've definitely seen people that can do both, but it's rare that people can wear both hats. So I often tend to like founding teams where one person is the storyteller and the other person is like the, you know, operator and executor.”

“So if there is a team that's applying where at least one of the founders is at a skill set level to be hired into a technical role at a top YC company, they have five X better odds than teams that don't.”

“On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those first 30 50 people is a mistake. If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are respon…”

“But to hire a growth person to figure out your growth model from the beginning, I think that's a mistake. Stake and it's a delegation. It's like hiring a product person and saying, I don't know what I want to build, go build it for me, but I want to have succe…”

“Looking at the best founding teams, you usually have a mix of both, right? Like, if you look at philosophy, you would probably have something called the realist, and you would have someone called an idealist, right? They usually, like, if you look at the best …”

“At the same time, the founding team needs to have enough equity to make it worth their while. And I think some VCs have it upside down where they say, well, we're going to own all this business, but then you've lost alignment of your founder. And if you lose y…”

“One that stands out and that I find myself thinking about frequently as an investor is people solve problems with the tools that they have. That means that a founding team and their first hires there need to be matched to the core competencies required for tha…”

“A lot of it really is in close consultation with the founding team, because you may want to hold, but if the founding team and the management team really are closest to the field, obviously, if they see a market transition or if they are getting tired and they…”

“I have generally a saying that's drink when you're fed. And so maybe more saying, you know, you take money when it's available, but it really comes into the circumstance, comes into the problem you're trying to solve.”

“I generally think that, and your podcast is probably helping this in many ways, in a good and bad way, there's too much focus on the venture capitalists. There's too much focus on the investors. At the end of the day, why companies are successful is because a …”

“Out of the three things, market, team and traction, market is something that you just can't fight with at all, right? I think teams you can still work with, you can fix them, you can hire more people you can chip and chop and things like that. Though it's hard…”

“Great startups have a system to have hard conversations. Bad startups either bottle it in or get into constant fights.”

“Unless you have the founding team, maybe the founder involved, you're not going to be successful there.”

“I think the most important thing is to resolve it, even if you get it wrong, because you can always correct the wrong thing, but at least you have somebody in charge. I think a lot of founding teams end up with a lot of fights that then slow down the company d…”

“So in other words, if you have an optimist and a skeptic, and they both agree on what a valid test is, then I think you actually will end up with a good test. But if you have three optimists in a room who all agree on what a good test is, I don't believe that …”

“There's, oh, by the way, only one person has to be super determined.”

“I think a great team is a very positive signal. I think a bad team, depending on context, may actually be a neutral signal.”

“But again, I think it's almost the way the CEO or the founding team communicates. It's a great predictor of success. And again, I think being a good communicator, it's obvious, but the people that are concise and size and they come to a meeting and they're lik…”

“But the best Founding teams actually are teams that, that bring together a very strong technical co-founder, as well as a very strong and experienced non-technical commercial co-founder.”

“I think most people make the mistake of starting with an idea. And it's interesting, I think there's a lot of controversy on which way is better, but I think it's actually better to start with at least an idea of who you want to work with, and then kind of for…”