The Ledger, every show

“I actually have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all them, and I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job, who never sat in this seat, and so I guess it's not exactly advice, but it was implied advice of, you know, I should pretend that I'm going to …”

“I think consumer AI still feels uninvestable. There's no obvious distribution. There's been, like, two companies that make sense, like Sumo and Midjourney. There's, like, this prosumer place, but I think that the whole environment is amazing, but I also think …”

“Viral based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real. There's right. We've seen these, they're sinking speed boats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right?”

“Too many teams Waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”

“And I had a handshake with Ilka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for four hundred million in cash.”

“I think that you owe it to, in that moral contract to your good employees, to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.”

“The more that FDR style Trump and people get popular support, it's going to become a more and more isolating, lonely place in two years to still be Like, you know, California, Gavin, everyone's saying, don't worry, we're gonna protect you against these people.…”

“Now I got involved with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin early, and then I thought I was Too early, and maybe it wasn't going to happen, and now I'm completely drinking the Kool-Aid, and I'm completely enthralled by just the potential of cryptocurrencies to get us…”

“The best product makers, the best masters of the craft, Are the best at copying. And they have the least ego around it. And the most junior amateur people feel the need to change everything, and they're the worst at copying, and they fail for the wrong reasons…”

“So, so I do think that everyone kind of becomes full stack when you, when the stack's automated and it's just promptable. And so I, and then it gets down to taste.”

“Do not build it right. Build a culture of building it wrong. Do not, build it right, presume some level of success. I love Eric Ries. We've had great debates. I, I'm in the same spirit, but that word viable is actually hurtful because viable also means hope of…”

“I think that the metaverse is starting to happen and I think it's going to happen and it's going to be As big as Zuck thought, and it's just not going to happen inside of an immersive game goggle that is painful and hot to wear on your head, even if the form f…”

“From a standpoint of proven, there's, there is no proven path for distribution right now in, I would argue in consumer.”

“I don't trust the CEO of a consumer company that doesn't love their product and doesn't know their product better than anybody else.”

“Founder mode is for Every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you don't, you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors.”

“When it really is it, you just know, but when it's not quite it, you walk around unsure if it's it. And if you're asking like, is this it? Could it be it? It's definitely not it.”

“AI itself isn't a new platform. So when you think about new platforms like that used to be new mobile game councils, but you know, the web and the web in a browser was a new platform and mobile was a new platform. We all move into a place of discovery where we…”

“When I hear people giving talks about culture, especially when they're currently a CEO, my fake CEO meter goes up, my alarm bells go off, because I'm like, okay, if you're out lecturing about culture to people, I kind of doubt that you're actually doing things…”

“I think these two to five trillion dollar companies are going to be 10 to 20 trillion dollar companies or more.”

“In the Peter Thiel sense, it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product maker. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator. And so it can feel like a beat down that your path to innovation st…”

“They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile, and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends, and they made a massive hit.”

“If we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it, it's, it might, Usually t…”

“It almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit, but the world doesn'…”

“That's to me the real founder mode is, can you have the courage to tell your team and your investors that this isn't it?”

“The viable is the word we gotta kill along with hope. Because viable is where hope comes from. Right? If it's viable, it might make it.”

“People don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative.”

“If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not an A.”

“If we think that the amount of tokens that we're buying today, you know, that will basically be free in a year or two, that, that, that, that token, you know, supply is going to go up so much.”

“We had a stand-up call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're gonna do today. And I go through name by name and say, okay, did you get that done? Can everyo…”

“We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right, and our ideas are usually wrong.”

“And Jonathan Abrams was I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close. In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day. He feels like tribe. He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”

“My philosophy, which may sound anti-innovation, but it's actually in service of innovation, is all new fails. Until it finally doesn't. And at Zynga today, the mantra inside the company is still all new fails. If you assume all new fails, you probably won't be…”

“Before you have the right to do better and new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven.”

“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”

“You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control.”

“The way I ran the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone, everyone's voice to be heard, and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef.”

“The other thing I learned early on about the way engineers hate their jobs and hate their bosses is what I call the moral contract. And when I first started working with engineers, these guys, Scott and Kadir, I saw how much the engineers get screwed in these …”

“One lesson I learned that really, I hate management, so I don't do one-on-ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on-ones, because he created politics, and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one-on-ones”

“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”

“But I love what they're doing, and I just say that my own opinion, and this is not knowing anything I think that it's going to, I think it's going to over deliver not to set expectations, they don't want that, but I think it's going to be more aggressive and o…”

“Between Peter and Reed they've been friends for life, and they had a falling, deep falling out over all this”

“I went to the transition office. Right. And helped Interview some people.”

“Eventually I came out two days before the election Publicly for Trump.”

“Eventually I came out two days before the election publicly for Trump.”

“The lesson from Tribe that came resoundingly out for me and still stands out, that as entrepreneurs, part of the journey that we're on is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. I think as a rule of thumb, if you're a good entrepr…”

“And I generally said, if half your audience clicks on it, you pretty much know it's an idea worth pursuing.”

“I like to hire people who have what I call broken resumes. So someone who has seen greatness, touched greatness, come close to greatness, but then fallen because things just didn't work out. I find that those people are more humble and curious and more hungry.”

“The two biggest lies around startups are founders saying, I don't care about the valuation and investors saying, you know, we don't care about control.”