Hiten Shah
Co-Founder, FYI. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
1shows
2appearances
36statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Hiten Shah said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hiten Shah: Nobody in tech actually knows what they are doing
“I think the number one lesson there was basically nobody knows what they're doing. And that's not just them. That's also me. And I've also met with many investors and many other folks, even folks that worked at companies and nobody really knows what they're do…”
Hiten Shah: Startup founders want encouragement, not tactical advice
“One key thing though, that after a lot of reflection, a lot of time that I realized is that most people, they just want encouragement. They don't really want advice.”
Hiten Shah: Expansion strategy matters far more than initial market size
“Markets are all pretty big now, and I don't really care about market size as much as if this business has a natural path or some, not even natural, but the founders and the team are thinking about how it expands over time and where they see it going. I feel li…”
Hiten Shah: Burnout stems from attempting to control uncontrollable factors
“Depression or burnout or whatever other folks would call it is really a result of stress and unrecognized stress based on me trying to get control of things I cannot control. And that's the fundamental thing that really burns me out is when I'm trying to get c…”
Hiten Shah: Serial entrepreneurship is overrated and prior experience can hurt founders
“But there is not as much of an advantage as I think there might've used to be when it comes to a serial entrepreneurship. So I'm in full hearted agreement with that statement. There are advantages, of course, because you have some level of experience, but you …”
Hiten Shah: Founders must prioritize incentive alignment over personal friendship with investors
“If you have to make a hard decision or have a hard conversation with your investor or your investor needs to have a hard conversation with you cannot let the friendship get in the way because this is a business relationship and you need to make sure that you h…”
Hiten Shah: Venture capital investing beyond seed is a numbers game
“I feel like investing is something that you have to be pretty dedicated to in order to do an amazing job at it beyond like pre-seed or seed rounds. The reason for that is it is a numbers game. You are basically writing enough checks so that some of them work o…”
Shah: Drift's pricing strategy will force competitors to drop per-contact pricing
“And that once someone did it, eventually a lot of the other companies are going to get a lot of pressure to do the same thing.”
Hiten Shah: Founders who don't need venture capital shouldn't raise it
“If you don't have to raise money, don't raise money.”
Hiten Shah asks prospective hires about their earliest traumatic memory
“I do that even with team members, you know, especially early team members at a company”
Hiten Shah: Past personal hardship indicates a founder's capacity for persistence
“A sign of persistence or a sign of that they can be persistent is that they've had hardships in their life and have got, and have gotten through it.”
Hiten Shah: Founders must track competitors as high market density impacts customers
“So number one, there's more companies out there than ever. Number two, competition is heavier than ever. They used to say, don't focus on your competition, focus on your customer. Now what I'm going to say is focus on your customer just like you used to, but d…”
Shah: Late-stage SaaS companies face an inevitable valuation course correction
“There are a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money at very high valuation, and I don't think that's going to work, and that's very clear in SaaS. Not all, not every company has the growth rate of slack. But many companies have the valuations that are…”
Shah: Watching Senior Board Members Is More Useful Than Seeking Advice
“Be on a board and have someone who's more senior than you that's been on boards before as an investor, and you can just absorb by watching them and learning how they do things, but that is actually more impactful than talking to people and getting advice from …”
Shah: Overconfidence Diminishes a Leader's Impact and True Knowledge
“The more you think, you know, the less you actually are able to have an impact and the less you actually know.”
Hiten Shah: Early-stage fundraising timelines are compressed due to market capital abundance
“The timeline that you mentioned, yeah, it is being compressed. It seems like later stages, it doesn't seem to be compressed as much, frankly speaking earlier stages. It is cause there's a lot of money sloshing around.”
Hiten Shah: Seed investors primarily focus on getting startups to their next round
“The simplest outcome on the seed stage is that this business gets the next round. And so you have to understand what the incentive is for the investor, what the incentive is for yourself, which is obviously building a great business. I'm assuming if you're a f…”
Shah: Top VCs invest when startups seem bound for success regardless
“Does it feel like this business is going to be successful without me? That's, I think, what is in the back of the heads of the best investors. And if so, I want in on it.”
Shah: Institutional pre-seed investing trend will spread globally
“I think this trend is going to permeate everywhere. That's just, what's going to, it's going to boil down to. And some folks in places are probably a little behind just because of the amount of investors in that area, amount of sophistication in the area. But …”
Hiten Shah: Truly data-informed startup investing only begins post-Series A
“I think it's much easier to make really data informed decisions post series A. So if you're a series A investor, you're more likely to be able to make better data informed decisions.”
Hiten Shah outlines five core responsibilities for startup leaders
“And I figured out that like, I need to spend my time directing, coordinating, editing, motivating, and co-learning. And these are the five things that I come back to and remind myself of as much as I can.”
Hiten Shah: The biggest opportunities come from unexplainable, intuitive decisions
“Because I think that's where the biggest opportunities are the things that you feel are right that are unexplainable.”
Shah: Extreme process documentation is the key to remote team success
“Extreme amounts of process documentation and process improvement. Boring stuff.”
The other half of the tape: Hiten Shah's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Tony Conrad 1Ryan Hoover 1Aydin Senkut 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 7
2019 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Mike Vernal on His Biggest Lessons From 8 Years of Hyper-Growth at Facebook, Why The Strength of Data Moats Is Over-Rated Today and The Challenge of "Overthinking Investments" In Venture
- 20VC: Benchmark's Chetan Puttagunta on The One Question To Ask When Analysing Market Size, How To Compete in Today's War for Talent & Why We Have Seen An Over-Rotation In Running Businesses Based on Metrics
- 20VC: Why Historical Loss Ratios Are Simply Too High, Why Data Is The #1 Most Important Piece When Evaluating Effective Reserve Allocation & Why Nothing Is Truly Defensible Today with Jonathan Hsu, Co-Founder and General Partner @ Tribe Capital
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Hiten's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder, FYI | 2 | 36 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |