founders

“There's some guy in corp dev and private, that's their job. Their job is to know who you are. It doesn't really mean all that much. And the flip of it is there's nothing down downside about building a relationship with them, but it's towards the bottom of your…”

“I try to avoid standing meetings. And the reason is, is because what's important this week or for the next week or two is going to be very different than what's important in the following two weeks. And I like to change and shift my hour, like where I spend my…”

“Most CEOs And founders are actually pretty mediocre delegators. when it comes to working with an assistant we've worked with, you know, a thousand plus at Athena and some of the best YC Sequoia back companies, and most founders never graduate beyond the kind …”

“I think most founders undervalue how important it is that they, it's a personal, it's such a personal choice. So in the case of John, I mean, John was like, Hey guys, you know, we're going to sell this business or I might, you know, I need to change the scene…”

“The fact that I use other founders and entrepreneurs as a reference for the skills that I need to build a business and the emotions that I need to have while growing a company, all of those things perpetuate my feelings of fraudulence.”

“Consider for a second that that founder doesn't know how to create safe space for themselves. How about that? Right. They have no idea how to actually even not judge and criticize themselves, much less anybody else.”

“What this experience again calls out to me is I just think a lot of people get sucked into the winless game of building companies for non values based reasons.”

“And investors also, in my experience, want founders who are willing to stand up for themselves and to push back because it's a microcosm of their experience as a CEO long-term.”

“And so what I've actually come up with is this idea of what I call approachable expertise. And it's a tone that you want to deliver where it's like, Hey, I know what I'm talking about, but Alex, like if you have pushback, let's have the conversation. Let's, le…”

“I think you can always, always, always take a secondary if someone offers it to you with the caveat that you make the exact same offer to the rest of your team. I think that's a really important rule, but otherwise, I know a lot of investors are like, oh, you …”

“Because a lot of VCs, frankly, are, they're the ones who Kept telling the founders to take secondaries because they wanted to buy into these companies that they weren't able to, and now they're upset about it.”

“I think founders will be really honest with other founders. So don't be afraid to, you know, you're thinking about taking a term sheet from an investor. Look at, you know, all the other people they're on the board with and just reach out to the CEOs of those c…”

“What I can tell you anecdotally is that I have talked to a lot of founders who regret not selling sooner, and I have never talked to a founder that regrets selling too soon.”

“This is the definition of blitzscaling scaling popularized by Reid Hoffman, and it is not at all what 99.9% of founders should expect or aspire to have from their business.”

“More important than raising capital or the valuation you can raise at are the expectations of the investors you're raising from and how aligned they are with your expectations.”

“Whether it's messaging to your employees, to your investors, or to your customers, repetition to the point of exhaustion is the only way you can be confident that people will know what is truly important.”

“Simply put, most startups and their founders don't spend their money well, often using it as a crutch for a suboptimal product or a misguided tool for growing their business too quickly and growing it the wrong way.”

“I think one of the most important things for a founder or leader to do is set the pace of the team. I think the pace of the team is one of the most important things you can do, and that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work, but how decisive t…”

“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report To the founder, product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”

“Founders do lie, and founders do embellish, and they do it necessarily to get their business off the ground.”

“That is also why when you're in hiring mode in the early years of your business, unless you already have a management layer or an executive team, you or one of your co-founders will probably have to spend something like 50% of their time exclusively recruiting…”

“When founders say they don't have an ego around being an entrepreneur, I generally think they are lying or they aren't self-aware enough to know that it is a large subconscious driver of their behavior.”

“Usually there's two formulas, sort of. One is they've had experience in that industry domain that's very, you know, special. So, they understand what's broken and why, and they also understand how to fix it because they actually suffered through it, and they'r…”

“The only thing in common among successful founders that I've worked with, funded interacted with is they have one comparative advantage with the rest of the world where they're in the top one percent or top 10 basis points or sometimes even top one basis point…”

“Content will never be a must-have for founders. It is a nice-to-have, and early-stage founders do not have the luxury of time to spend on nice-to-haves.”

“It is important for founders who have quote unquote made it to share them openly. Otherwise, the next generation will assume that their role models are perfect, which is harmful.”

“Lack of self-awareness is one of the most dangerous traits in founders because when you don't have self-awareness you have tons of blind spots, and you don't know when to hire people or change course to uncover or fix those blind spots, and because at a pre-se…”

“At the end of the day, when you are raising a pre-seed round, I'm going to say this over and over, but an investor is investing in you more than they are investing in a business. Because the odds that the business you are pitching right now Kind of the pre-see…”