The Ledger, every show

“There's like, build a viable business which you care about things like profit margin, things like this, or you just sell to a bigger sucker. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is based upon the latter of those, and like, the reality is at no point relevant in actu…”

“I just think it's all bullshit. Like, I think the reason the valuations are high is because there's a shit ton of money in the markets, and it has no place to go. Like, there's, we just printed, what, three and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money out of …”

“Most of the companies rating it as shit tons of money, they, they're not using, like, novel customer acquisition techniques that couldn't have worked 20 years ago. They're just willing to lose more money on it. And then the VCs are willing to allow them to los…”

“This whole idea of getting a gigantic war chest, I think that's bullshit. Like, I think that it's just a big waste of money and capital, and it just, like, ruins your company's culture.”

“Like, the vast majority of a VCs, of a typical VCs income, will not come from their carry. It'll come from their management fees or some slice of that over the course of their career. They don't give a shit about the outcome or the success of your business by …”

“How many of those same people just brought in some kind of outside executive from their VCs? Yeah, you just fucked your entire company. Because by doing that, you just indicated to every one of your employees, you cannot grow here. That we value skills that yo…”

“Again and again, every single big round we have, the employees get fucked. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that. It's like the VCs always win. The founders sometimes win. The employees rarely win.”

“I would avoid the VCs as long as possible, because they're the devil. Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes you need to do a deal with the devil, but you're probably gonna get fucked in the process.”

“Like, to celebrate raising money is to celebrate that you took out a loan.”

“With the exception that no business you cared about was ever built that way. Like every business, every, all the top names in the industry are built through word of mouth. And, but no one talks about that because it's not possible to be funded with capital. An…”

“Enterprise sucks, man. It's just like, it's super slow sales cycles. The margins are terrible. It's super competitive. It's whatever. The real opportunity is mid-market and below.”

“But the VC business model is they get paid when they invest. And so it actually, they don't really make money on the exit. Like, there's the carry, they would say, at the very end.”

“The second that you hire in, you know, sort of that, that, that pro who comes in above everyone else, you've just told everyone else in your company, fuck you. There's no way you can ever grow in this company. Because we have just hired someone above you whose…”

“There's a whole class of people out there preying upon startups that will just come in with amazing credentials and a willingness to obliterate whatever's in their way and because it's not their company in the first place.”

“Silicon Valley, more often than not, and I would say vastly more often than not, is building something that gets flipped and destroyed.”

“The difference is Silicon Valley investors aren't investors. They're gamblers. They're just throwing money at crazy ideas.”

“And I think that as an entrepreneur, we don't have a portfolio. We have one company. We need to make it work, and so I think we need to follow a playbook For how to make your company succeed, not how to make your VC's portfolio succeed.”

“I think that the best people out there just don't give a damn about your VC. They're probably not reading Hacker News. They probably don't care about TechCrunch.”

“Hiring is a solution to a problem. The more hiring you do means the bigger problems you have. And so it means you couldn't solve them in a more creative and scalable way.”

“Travis has a complicated story, and I think he's sort of developed kind of this legend around him, which is perhaps surprising to the people who know him, because he's actually a really nice guy with, I would say, one of the most strong moral compasses I know,…”

“Cause I would say like, I think about month, like revenue, obviously in month and month annual growth, but I would say all, everything else is just a vanity metric. Number of users you have, number of customers you have conversion numbers, all those kinds, lik…”

“I think the most important decisions are generally not quantified. We're not quantifiable. And so I'd say if you're running your business because you can prove with numbers that your decisions are good, you're going to fail because I mean, someone else out the…”

“There's no commission sales component. So no one's paid a commission at all, but we certainly have a support team that stands by because it's activity based pricing.”

“I would say stop listening to VCs.”

“Starting a business is so much easier, ah, than it's made out to be. It's so much easier than, it's like all the complexity is invented complexity. It's a complexity, I would say, being sold to you by Primarily with people who profit from that complexity. Who …”

“Nothing of interest or value happens in the board meeting itself.”

“And I'd say like as an asset class, venture capital returns less than, you know, S and P 500.”

“And I think the only way to achieve a broad scale and a long-term sustainability is profit.”

“I think that an IPO for a truly successful company is just a state change. It actually doesn't really mean anything too much to the company overall. It's just a way to get money.”

“This past year we put in a cap. We said this year, we're only going to hire 12 people.”

“We have more customers than Concur, and we're the fastest growing in our space”

“We don't advertise. We're a hundred percent organic. There's no advertisement whatsoever. And so things like churn was like these numbers, which seems so absolutely critical to your business. They actually just don't really matter to us at least because they d…”

“We don't have any commissioned salespeople, and so that, like, that screws up everyone's models as well.”

“Actually, our primary revenue generator is our support team. The vast majority of our revenue comes after you've interacted once or twice with our support team, but almost never with, like, a salesperson going through a demo and things like that.”

“Candidly, I view our entire space is vastly underpriced. Like the idea that you can get full expense management, mobile apps, all this automation for nine bucks for active and a third of your company's active. It's really like three bucks for head. That's like…”

“It's like about dominating the space and maintaining an incredibly low price right now for the industry actually helps keep the competition out. And so yes, there will become a time where that's the most important thing, but it's just not right now.”

“I think that formalized education is the biggest scam that we're facing right now, and I just am horrified by it, and I'm so glad that I didn't get trapped in the massive debt cycle that everyone else does.”

“This, like, the seed and A are primarily just about, like, you and the story you tell. Like, especially the seed. A, it's like you have to have some evidence that, like, you know, the story has some anecdotal evidence of some kind of traction. And then, like, …”

“Never mail your deck ahead of time, because then they'll make their decision before they see you.”

“Cause if you're gonna differentiate, you can't differentiate through functionality alone. It has to be through acquisition, through business model.”

“I would say like, so we think about 45,000 paying companies. So basically... So we've got more More companies is expensified than the next four expense reporting companies.”

“I think right now is a really hard time to start a company because any company that just involves like the internet and mobile and things like that, it's like, it's been done. It's been done like 10 years ago. And so I think we're seeing like this whole series…”

“No, we have no advertising going on whatsoever right now. It's all a hundred percent word of mouth.”

“The only reason We slowed down at all. It was because we got distracted by the enterprise.”

“It is just a brutal, awful slog in the start, and so as much of this conference is about getting to that hundred million, really, I mean, the hard part is getting to that, that one million. Like, that is the valley of death that basically will wipe out probabl…”

“Actually I have no independents on my board, because I don't like wild cards.”

“And I think they're brought in by the board, and if they're brought in by the board, that means that they're not really independent. They actually just kind of work for the board. Now not really, it's not quite the same, but it's similar.”

“The greatest companies don't happen because suddenly, miraculously, everyone in the boardroom always agreed on every single decision. That's never happened. The way it happens, great decisions are always controversial.”