The Ledger, every show

“And I think the even scarier thing about this is that, like, when you start with a team of business people assessing engineers, and they are naturally gonna start by hiring worse engineers, all of your future engineers are high negative effects.”

“Sometimes the number one thing to do if you're in this position is to not start the company right now. Is to go get a job at a startup. Is to go change the people you know. And What's so interesting is that, like, sometimes taking that step sideways is the eas…”

“I would argue that if you're the Googler, you're getting a bad deal if you're doing, like, a hundred hour weeks and grinding, and, like, your boss or your boss's boss is getting, like, mega vacations and ten million dollar a year packages and, like, promotions…”

“When the team you're coming into is extremely upfront with you about how it's going to be, and it turns out that way and it's not good, it's not necessarily you're being exploited. Like you made that choice. You chose that.”

“Talking about who you will hire on the ask slide. Nobody cares who you will hire. They care what you're going to do with the money, and more specifically, what revenue milestones you're going to hit, or what usage milestones you're going to hit with the money.”

“Those politicians, what they're looking for is tech jobs. They're like, the, What they really need is a Google office. Like, they're not gonna get the Google office by having a startup culture, but their politicians didn't realize that.”

“You and I both saw a lot of people leave the Bay Area during COVID. All of them came back and they all said this.”

“Getting into the Bay Area is so relatively easy to all the other things you have to do to succeed. Choosing where to live is so relatively easy to all the other things you have to choose correctly. Why not pick up the easy wins? It's an easy percentage multipl…”

“What's funny about maybe these Uber ones that are slightly different from the Facebook and Google ones is like, I don't think Uber even did these things.”

“The people who code are the most powerful people inside of software.”

“I've been often surprised at like sharing bad news. Like, oh, we only have two months of runway. Right. I would think would be demotivating, but for great startup employees, they're like, all right, how the fuck are we going to fix this? And then you can get j…”

“Today, I might argue that big tech has become put itself solidly in that list, right? It is amongst the finance and consulting and legal and medicine. You know, college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview J…”

“The highest status job in the early stage startup world is investor, right? It's the one everyone wants to meet, everyone's talked to, everyone seeks approval to.”

“Often you lose control of your company. So like when you confront the challenges, suddenly, you know, your board can fire you. Often you find yourself burning tons of money because all the people who gave you money expect you to spend it. Oftentimes you have t…”

“It's always about moving fast. That's the lie. It's like, if we had this, we could finally move as fast as like, you know, we could finally build all the things that I want us to build.”

“When you're YC, VCs don't rip you off.”

“What are some of the other misconceptions that you saw that were, you know, obviously, I mean, I would argue like obviously designed to try to convince people to not do YC. Like these were like designed attacks on YC.”

“If you ever see someone making an argument that's 100% ripping something else down and zero percent explaining why their thing is good, if all of your talking points is the alternative is bad, you know, maybe all you're selling is fear because that's all you h…”

“I had a fake advisor who literally took. Two percent of our company. To help us fail at raising a round that was rescued by our existing inside investors.”

“So it's like lending and big physical things definitely require a lot of money. It's not obvious to me that there are many other business categories that require a lot of money where cash is the advantage.”

“Your friends are idiots and don't know anything, especially if they would never use your product. Investors are close seconds as idiots, especially if they would never use your product, don't invest in your space, aren't good investors, don't invest in a lot o…”

“I actually think I rather help someone being too pessimistic, strangely, because usually when I try to help introduce realistic expectations, they can adjust. You know, usually we just need to tell them what's reasonable, and suddenly they're like, oh, ok, I g…”

“It's so obvious the society we lived in, we live in today, was built by people who were playing positive some games. So what it really is, is, like, those people created, like, a little bit of excess capital That the zero sum game people are like harvesting. T…”

“I don't think people are confused whether they're gambling or building houses. I think that they know whether they're gambling or building houses.”

“There's actually, you know, a large number of rich people who are kind of not in that building society group. You know, they made their money by taking it from others who are dumber than them. They look back and they're really concerned and you kind of can't w…”

“If your startup salary is allowing you to save money, it's probably not good, right? You shouldn't be sitting here, like, with Google employee level savings running your startup. However, if your startup salary is giving you the lifestyle that allows you to be…”

“For the best founders, no action is like, you know, 2030, 40% of the time what they do, maybe more. But for other founders, they don't even know the play exists.”

“The best people, shit goes wrong, and they go take a hike or something. And the worst people think shit goes wrong and they drink and do drugs.”

“What I think that this is what's tricky is that I think someone needs to be out there saying that these aren't the things you have to put on the table to win. Yes, when you're working hard, you're gonna probably have to spend less time with your family or frie…”

“For the first time since winter, 2020, this new batch, the summer 22 batch will be in person.”

“In the middle of the hype cycle, hiring is harder. Getting access to customers is harder. Like, 17 of your competitors are gonna all get funded. Like, you know, it's weird because on the surface, the hype cycle looks good, but when you actually get into the di…”

“I think the founders I talked to, they don't want to build a startup ecosystem. They want to be a part of a startup ecosystem.”

“I think that a lot of that content marketing is unfortunately written by like people our age, people with kids, people living in San Francisco for like the last two years who were generally pissy about COVID. And it was like less responding to someone who migh…”

“I think that's extremely rare for an investor to be demanding you to like burn like crazy. I think that the horrible truth is that founders don't need much of a push.”

“Technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of Fang. And misunderstand is an understatement. They grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a Fang job and what value they can't extract.”

“Their standard for getting a product into even beta at Google is 10 X what an MVP in a startup is, and they just have to unlearn. It's like, can anyone find this useful? Launch.”

“More often than not in this pre-product market fit phase, the mistake is that there's the wrong person in the company, not there aren't enough people. The mistake is like, you've got an engineer that no one wants to work with, or no one's measuring any of the …”

“You aren't going to get rid of all the recruiters. Even though you don't believe they should exist in the world, they are going to exist in the world. Either you're going to accommodate them, Or they will kill you. Like they tend to actually have way more powe…”

“The platforms change faster than the human problems. So like you and I have lived through one, Web one O, Web two O, mobile, and whatever the hell you call it. Turns out that like, I want to go grocery shopping, but I don't want to go to the grocery store. …”

“I think the other fun insight here is that like portable online gold Is valuable. Like it is 10 X better than gold. And so as something you might want to have, if you think gold is something that you might want to own, and it seems like the market does like ow…”

“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”

“I think there's a whole set of other people who don't have very many problems in their life. And I think those people kind of reach for like the UN problems or the global problem, right? The problems that like they are told they should care about, but they don…”

“I would argue that in a lot of the teams that we fund, two, three, four founders, They're not all equally passionate about the problem, right?”

“95% of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated, and their startup's gonna die in the next two or three years.”

“If something's being undone on paper, There is a business in putting it into the computer, and like, by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper, you could build a billion dollar company and bring it to the computer, and that's actually not true. Like,…”

“In any situation where you actually have real cost, you should be charging from day one.”

“Charge more than you might feel comfortable so you can identify the people who are most desperate for it.”

“If Uber had launched in New York City, it wouldn't have worked. Because, like, the pain did not, yeah, did not exist in New York City. The pain was so great, great in San Francisco that everyone was willing to use Uber Black.”