startup

“When you have a high valuation, it starts to limit your options. And I think we're starting to see companies that were highly valued, that had a moment where they could have been acquired or gone public if they were, you know, less richly valued, but that mome…”

“There's a lot of very straightforward structural reasons why startups are not going to be accessible to large institutions ever, and they're also structurally very, very inefficient, and probably always will be. So I think there's a tremendous amount of potent…”

“We're seeing emerging startups take marketing seriously right out the gate, and they have a huge advantage even up against large firms, because the large firms are sort of like retooling and getting there, and the startups are starting with a gorgeous website …”

“The biggest issues, I think, the two biggest issues for startups is they overcomplicate everything, and they don't take enough risk, right?”

“And I've now seen enough startups to tell you that in certainly the majority of cases, there's a founder issue. It's a very, very stressful experience starting a company and almost inevitably at some point there's tension between the founders and it can arise …”

“I'd say a very important lesson, and I think one I kind of learned the hard way on my second startup is don't try to create the trends as a startup, try to ride the trends.”

“In fact, disflation is probably a bigger risk than inflation over the last few years. I don't think the feds worried about interest rates, and that will continue to allow multiples to expand. It'll allow equities to continue to rise and allow startups to have …”

“Paradoxically, I think the thing that's the biggest change in my career is it's gotten both cheaper and more expensive paradoxically to get a startup from inception to exit. Cheaper in the early days because the cost of inputs has gotten so much lower with AWS…”

“In the beginning, the company needs to make something and sell it, and there's like not a ton of strategic vision in those first 365 days.”

“Attrition happens very slowly in our business. So I'm not sure it's that much different from what it is today. I mean, obviously we're going through a very significant correction here. And I think there will be a lot more companies that disappear than farms or…”

“The reality with most startups is if you're building in a good market, there's probably like 10 teams that are working on the exact same thing at the same time as you.”

“You're on the right side of the angels if you have 24 months of cash, because you got to realize you got to start fundraising at 18 months, not at month 24.”

“So when these big pension funds need technology, it's not like there's an army of startups out there that are trying to solve their problems. It's actually just the established players that are invited to participate in RFPs.”

“There's thousands of companies that are going to need capital between now and the end of 24. The investors at almost every stage have generally been hurt by the macroeconomic environment. The purse strings are pretty tight. But the amount of companies that may…”

“They believed in an aesthetically different superior future, and that's why early customers move. They move for aesthetic reasons rather than practical reasons. The same reason that people buy art. They buy into the aesthetic vision of the artist.”

“If you're harnessing a regulatory inflection, I hope you were involved in helping that law get written, because very few laws get passed just out of the goodness of people's heart. Usually there's a set of people who are lobbying for those laws. Usually they h…”

“And in startups, you can't be non-consensus and right without taking the risk of being non-consensus and wrong, but there's no free lunch in that regard.”

“Here's the other thing I've learned is that startups, even the founders, have an incentive to tell the story differently after the fact, because in the early days, they're trying to appeal to the misfits and the early believers who believe as they do. In the l…”

“Every startup idea has been tried, because there's an efficient market for ideas, but all of the good ideas will happen. So the only question is, why is now the time for it to happen?”

“This is the biggest problem that startups have is they solve a problem that only exists in the minds of the founders and nobody else.”

“So if the answer to your product idea as a startup is, how does that compare to X? You're doing something wrong. You're either not different enough, or you're not leaning into the difference enough. You're being not courageous enough in communicating the diffe…”

“That's why it's more correct, in my view, to think of it as a movement rather than a market at first. It's a movement where a set of people move at first, and at first they're your early believers who believe what you believe about the future. It's a subset of…”

“The way I like to say it is you need at least a Delta IV experience, and so if taxis in San Francisco were three out of 10 good, ride sharing needed to be at least seven out of 10 good. Because if it's seven out of 10 good, then they think you can't compare th…”

“Perhaps the best way to mitigate risk is to put yourself in a position where you have more control over the outcome than less. So I have always viewed companies that I've started as less risky than going into a big company job because in a big company, you don…”