Repeat Founder

“It almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn'…”

“So yes, there's, so instead of like, 80% of the playbook being replicable, now in the AI world, only 20% of the playbook is replicable. So I don't know if being a repeat founder has that much of an advantage in this narrow time frame where it's AI.”

“I find first time founders are zero percent calibrated to that type of thinking, and a few years in it is very difficult for them. And then repeat founders, of whom I work with several, always have a very similar logic because they've seen what happens, even i…”

“One of the problems you have when you're a multiple time founder is people have these positive associations with you. They know the thing they bought from you last time was valuable. They know you sold the company for a lot of money. So there's this kind of co…”

“My answer to this has been, I'm going to work with founders that are second time, third time, that I know are extremely talented and are working”

“When investors use the lens of repeat founders, which economically might be the right lens, historically, that shifts the demographics of the founders to the people who were founders, you know, 10 years ago.”

“A lot of repeat founders, not a lot of, but some repeat founders end up Over indexing on their particular story in the first startup or first product they did. But by the time they do second, the world has changed. The expectations have changed. Everything has…”

“So repeat founders, they typically go for a much bigger goal. You know, Torsten did a gaming company, then he went into defense. And we can talk about Danny Alecke as the first company was e-commerce. And then he took on a massive challenge of building Spotify…”

“Like, I don't think I would be that excited to back a founder who built Fintech company one and then goes on to build Fintech company two.”

“So first of all, I think repeat founders do have better odds.”

“First of all, you only hear the success stories, like you only ever hear the success stories and they might sound like that, but the reality is often even that person that has a big track record wasn't that easy.”

“And while there are 37% of founders, the repeat founders in companies today, 59% repeat founders are in the top unicorns.”

“I actually put almost no weight on did they do it before and put all the weight on are they super unique, insanely talented, ruthless in a way that they understand how business is and can actually really get things done. I just invest in the founder regardless…”

“You see that kind of when repeat founders go and start companies, they almost invariably are willing to kind of build the organization You know, post product market fit, though it's invariably willing to kind of build the organization ahead of where things are…”

“A lot of times people have done it before are the most blind to the opportunity that they're going into because they think it'll be, you know, be easy.”

“I think if you look at some of the biggest, most important companies over the last 10 years, they're first time founders, you know including Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. So, you know, I don't I don't think repeat founders are always the best founders.”