Startups

“And yet we know That's 65% of startups fail because of relationship breakdowns.”

“Hire the smartest people you possibly can and put up with them, right? And we all understand what that means, right? But you really need them for competitive advantage.”

“What I find is that the great startups very often are more like social movements. So if you look at a movement, typically a movement has a minority of people. Who feel a sense of grievance with the status quo majority, and that minority of people wants to chan…”

“Startups are fundamentally a disagreement with the present. And the president is going to fight back, and it's not going to fight back fair. The president isn't interested in negotiating with your future, right?”

“And so I think that's true of AI, and I think we're kind of in this five-year window where it's not completely obvious where to play, just like it wasn't completely obvious in the first five years of the internet, but all my instincts tell me that it's going t…”

“A lot of startups, like, way too early on, they focus on, like, trying to build some image or, you know, generating a splash or whatever it may be before they kind of get ahead of the product before it really even exists. Many autonomous vehicle or other LiDAR…”

“While all startups have pirate-like qualities, scrappiness, inventiveness, rule-breaking, there's a difference between ethical pirates and criminal pirates. Ethical pirates may ignore conventional rules, but they're driven by their own strong moral code.”

“And when you're a startup founder, it's all pirates. Who joins a startup? Crazy people. Because startups are so risky. They've got a chip on their shoulder. They've got something to prove. They don't want rules. They want to do everything. You know, they want …”

“That's really important because startups, once they get big enough, can only grow by word of mouth. All the growth hacking eventually stops working.”

“What you want to do as a startup is kind of release the draft paper, the one that you're sort of embarrassed for the teacher to read, right? The one that you would never actually hand in, and So we have to deprogram ourselves to, you know, so that we actually …”

“As soon as your users can't live without your service, you're a mature business.”

“When you're letting a fire burn, it's not simply up to you to wage a lonely battle with your own nerves. Your team may start to get the sense that, like the band on the Titanic, you're fiddling while the ship sinks. You have to show them that yes, you see the …”

“Part of the reason that there's a focus on relentless pace is because more or less a slow moving startup is dead, right? So it's a key portion for the success of startups that they're speedy, that they're fast. If they're not faster than big companies, they're…”

“The most scalable ideas don't have to tackle dramatic problems. They have to tackle neglected problems,”

“There's a potential mortal risk in being conservative. You might think you're best serving your investors by being as efficient with capital as possible, but that's actually not true. You reward your investors by creating a successful company, and raising only…”

“I think startups raise way too much money. The less money you raise, the more control the company you keep, but more importantly, the more constraints you create. They develop a scrappy culture. The scrappy culture requires you to build more novel solutions, u…”