Startup

“You learn a set of skills that you, is really hard to learn in a larger company, because everybody's being so careful in a larger company, or they're being so political, or all these things. All of that's stripped away in a startup. You're just trying to survi…”

“I I've talked with multiple public company CEOs who say they're hamstrung, their hands are tied behind their backs. They can't compete with startups, not because they can't do it. Okay. Rory O'Driscoll: That's true. Jason Lemkin: But because their legal teams …”

“As companies grow, and we've had the fortune of hiring really great people from other companies that have gone through hypergrowth, things slow down, and you kind of keep telling yourself, we're still a startup, we still move quickly, but you really don't, and…”

“I think if you define a startup by number of people or by like the funding round, like none of those things really make any sense. The core thing that defines a startup is exactly what you're describing, which is this kind of scramble energy of things are kind…”

“Too many times I see people like combine a fundraise with a revenue milestone. Do not do that. Those are two separate PR moments that can be made into two big moments, not one.”

“Exploring the kind of uncomfortable Parts of our social existence are things that startups are uniquely set up to do.”

“Don't build a product and a platform at the same time. You know, if you're going to be a platform company, build one. Our first company, we tried to build a sort of a social platform for mobile games and be a gaming studio.”

“When you find someone who actually is addicted to pain, they tend to perform really well at startups and they tend to make great leaders. They tend to grow very quickly. And our thesis has always been find these people and make them celebrities in the company.”

“People that are good natural writers do well because in a chaotic environment, you need to be able to distill your thoughts, present them in written form, And then really disseminate that across the org as quickly as possible.”

“You cannot increment your way out of Like slow growth, right? It's usually something to do with the market structurally, like you have some kind of a problem. So even if you increase your conversion rate by five percent and you do all of these things, it's not…”

“These heap leaches that we're talking about, they are multi-billion dollar assets that have to run every day, so if an external party's innovation adds two points of recovery, that's nice, but if it disrupts the heap, Someone's quarter is destroyed. Someone's …”

“If you look at if I look back and think of, you know, lots of startups that I've seen or been involved with, the ones that have failed most spectacularly have been the ones that have been funded the most well.”

“I think there are a set of products that labs are just culturally not set up and big tech not set up to go after. You think about launching, you know, a companion product at Google that may disagree with you, that may have sexual innuendo in it. Like these are…”

“Well, and most, because I worked after I graduated, I worked for Berkeley Skydeck, and most of the, like, startups that fail, fail due to, like, founder breakups.”

“One of the tougher things of getting ecosystems going, is you can have very, very smart people, you can land your customers, but then when you look around for who's my sales leader that's gonna take me from fifty million to five hundred million, You probably h…”

“I would, if I were starting a company right now, I would hire like the best generalist people I could possibly think of. Someone who I think could kind of fluidly move between that.”

“I can see a new meta of startups just recreating iconic movie scenes to promote their products.”

“This data is not readily accessible. You can't commoditize it nearly as quickly. And so it gives startups like a chance to actually gain distribution In like a more methodical way before the mega platforms can swallow it up.”

“The other co-founders most often not there in three years.”

“Early companies tend to run on, like, founder proximity. Like, you're in every room. Decisions tend to happen by osmosis. Like, the culture comes from your actual physical presence. And none of that gets designed intentionally because it never had to be. Like,…”

“They have this new approach with startups where they're like, all right, if you want GPUs, we'll take a chunk of your company and we'll deliver the hardware.”

“I don't think it is a startup's job to change a market or create awareness.”

“In terms of technology, you had the exact same shot of succeeding as Salesforce or Zendesk, et cetera.”

“Innovating usually means innovating in one place. You're innovating in distribution. You're innovating on service. You're innovating on technology. You're innovating on simplicity and product features on time to value. But not a lot of companies are able to bu…”

“I don't think competition is what kills startups at our stages, right? It's competition makes you do stupid things like copy other players or go toward the second, a different direction.”

“I find it's almost guaranteed that you're either going to have to fight status quo and people just not wanting to change or move because they don't really have a burning need, or you're going to have to find competitive vendors. Like the odds of you Being in a…”

“Out of a hundred enterprises you're going to talk to only probably five to 10 of them will even consider working with a startup.”

“Yes, while this has done a lot to the execution part, it does not really seem to have speeded up the innovation and the invention part, because theoretically, imagine you speed up everything, then who cares? There are 10 times the number of venture-funded star…”

“If you're incremental of what is already there and you have an FD model and, you know, bad cost structure, you literally have the worst of all worlds basically.”

“If they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it, but not very well, That's maybe not a great sign because that's probably a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more tr…”

“So I kind of think the same rules apply, you know, the battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets the distribution before the incumbent gets the innovation. But with many changes, one change is the incumbent can get the i…”

“And now I actually think with the power of agents and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like, I think, but maybe the startup is like a mecha Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI, and you know, the la…”

“Building every vertical application on top of that, trying to go, like, eat every startup, eat every company, no interest in doing that really want to just provide that platform.”

“I think this is gonna be the best time in the world to do a startup, and it's gonna be quite amazing to see.”

“I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness, and startups will continue to be important forever.”

“In fact, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that The power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society, and it's not just concentrated in a few compani…”

“I bet there's some future trillionaires sitting in this room, and I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past”

“I think that nowadays, with modern models, there is so much product overhang that I, I'm not seeing startups capture. And I think there's people thinking about these problems, but there's just a huge amount, amount of opportunity to elicit these behaviors from…”

“Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. The single most important technology in human history, the computer has been completely reset. An…”

“An investor is telling you to do something which may not be right for the long term direction of your product, of your company, right? And you have to make difficult choices at that point in time. So are you going to compromise on your product or on your value…”

“There's kind of two outcomes that are great. If you start a company, right? One is you retain control of it and it becomes huge. The second is it fails quickly.”

“I think I've seen a lot of friends engage in philanthropy and it's just like startups. A lot of it doesn't work, but the best ones do incredible things.”

“Whenever somebody says this is so scary, everybody should have to come in and get a license from the government. I'm like, well, the government does a lot of things very well, but the one thing they're not great at is like understanding the very frontier of te…”

“The most in my career today, there are the most reasons to not announce, if you can get away with it, to not announce a hot round. Right. If you've already got enough, if you've already got enough going on to attract talent, right, for recruiting especially if…”

“I actually do think that, you know, there is too much capital available today in the for startups. And it's actually sometimes creating failure paths for people. I think they're not getting what it takes to build a great company.”

“I would say in, in the last 25 years that I've seen, I would say it's been, it's easier to build a startup And get a good exit from it these days than it used to be in the past.”

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”

“A new company's most important strength is new thinking. Even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.”

“Every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”

“He has this thing called Teal's law, which he says that a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three were not so great, why would you run a company wher…”

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those on the outside w…”

“I've seen with a lot of the startups I'm investing in now, They'll just spend a week or two working with you know, a director to make a launch video.”

“Not being transparent.”

“If it's a something core enterprise technology, you won't find many startups who have built a solution which are scalable. Right. It could be your CRM. It could be your big finance solution and all. It's very difficult to find because that's why these establis…”

“When we go through the regular routes, especially as a startups, through our, The bureaucracies of the entire large organization to the procurement, legal, it is very, very difficult for, it's a maze difficult for startups to navigate through. Whereas when an …”

“What I've learned from my portfolio and I think you guys will agree is it creates an out an unexpectedly large amount of alignment. You get, you sell five percent of your company to a hundred billion dollar partner. It don't matter to Rory's point. It just don…”

“Why is a, why would you join anything that you don't have high certainty, not just they're going to be a unicorn because it's not good enough, that they're going to have tender offers, right, in the next 24 months.”

“At least in startups, the best advice that I've ever gotten and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is, like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep.”

“I think you're going to go to a startup, especially the startups right now that are mission driven.”