founders

“That's where people can sometimes go wrong, is they'll think, I'm a product founder, I'm not hiring a head of product, and that's not the right way to think about it in my mind or I'm an amazing marketer, I'm not gonna hire a head of marketing. You're just hir…”

“I think there are, for most founders, you'll have at least one thing you should never give up or at least that you shouldn't give up permanently. Commonly those things are going to be either product sales or marketing.”

“When you're in your most uncertain moments as a founder, it's really tempting to offload that decision as much as you can to your investors, to other execs, to your co-founder, to try to basically see, all right, if I'm like, 55, 45 on this decision, let me ju…”

“So that's one role that I think founders tend to hire a little too late for because it seems like it's a nice to have Like there is no pressing, like it does not contribute to growth or customer acquisition. So it feels like it's overlooked.”

“So there's another model where the founder goes into, well, I was a genius in the first one. Therefore, I don't need to do all this stuff again. It was obviously my insight when in fact, What they didn't realize it was their customer insight that they had been…”

“When the company finds product market fit and you need to build repeatability and scalability in the company, these same founders throw organizational hand grenades into their own organization and culture, trying to keep that chaos going on inside their compan…”

“What they really need is a good therapist. Unfortunately, it makes them, if they get good therapy, it makes them an ineffective founder for their next one because you beat that. That intensity out of them.”

“My test, actually, I get it down to a test that investors should think about. Is you want to ask the founder from a successful company, how many red eyes were you on? That is to be able to jump on a plane for, in fact, just to be clear, you know, here we are i…”

“Every successful outcome is led by a founder who is deeply impatient, really impatient.”

“I think they're fucking filled with happiness and enjoyment and energy and also tortured by the fear of failure and by whatever demons drive them or whatever passion drives them. Like there's this awesome Jekyll and Hyde yin yang You know, dynamic to what it's…”

“Don't set these dumb exercises that many founders do, which is just like, write me up a 30, 60, 90 day strategy plan. Like, Anyone with access to Google can come up with a fairly good document on that front. You want someone who can get very deep on your funne…”

“The only people who can start and build great companies are people who hate corporate life. And the people who love corporate life can't build and start great companies.”

“Founders by definition need to develop an extremely high level of empathy and understanding for the needs of people across multiple personas. And also understand a baseline grasp on how markets evolve over time and what makes for something that's more durable …”

“The FOMO of not being in on their next thing is greater than my willingness to create confrontation with them, which is not a hard ratio to keep over one. Then I'm not going to give them as candid feedback as I probably rationally should, or I'm not even going…”

“If you don't know how to grow the product yourself, you know, you're hiring someone else not to be your head of growth, but to like be your figure out how to grow this business person. And that's an extremely hard job. And most of the people who can actually d…”

“I think that experience is just like extremely undervalued in startup culture. And I think that's a huge mistake. And one of the pieces of advice that I most frequently find myself giving to founders are people that are thinking about starting companies is lik…”

“I don't think any important decisions like this can be made by committee. Like they should, I mean, they should use input from all the folks who, you know, were part of the interview process, but ultimately the founder has to decide or the hiring manager.”

“Almost never have I seen like a founder or an exec hire a sales leader and like actually be able to articulate very clearly, like I'm going to be a sales led company or I'm going to be a product led company.”

“I think for competitors, it's absolutely one of those things in which they're the ones who are the closest to your problem as well, and you should absolutely be looking at what prior art is, or, you know, the state of art on their end.”

“Knowing that being the person in power, you know, by the time anyone's speaking up to challenge you or to Give you feedback. This has probably been bothering them for longer than you knew.”

“When I reflect on my own experiences and things that bother me, Pet peeves of mine. Things that I think are annoying. That's where a lot of my best stuff comes from. And I think, you know, that's kind of going full circle to what we started with, how important…”

“I think that many pairings of execs and founders that work really well are when execs recognize that their founder can be spiky in different ways that might not really make sense, that they are really good at certain things and not as good as at other things. …”

“The companies are driven by the founders and sort of key executives, but generally it's driven by one or two people. And so if you don't sort of intervene in all these decisions, whether people like it or not, like the micromanagement kind of thing, you actual…”

“And then I did something which I honestly don't think any founder should do. We're talking about product market fit. This is almost a surefire way to prevent yourself from finding product market fit. But I sat down and I said, okay, I want to start a company. …”

“He's going to think about the problems that we have for minutes to tens of minutes, and we're going to be thinking about it for hundreds of hours. So it's like, what is he going to uncover that we haven't, and if he does, it's like, so the, his biggest value i…”

“You have to be quite objective. And if there's anything that founders, you know, have a really hard time getting feedback on is, are they being objective? Because all of the training and all of their instincts have told them, Generally speaking, people are not…”

“Just like a craftsman, if you spend a long time on it, you will just get better at it. Now the question is, there's some craftsmen who are already at the LeBron James level, and they're going to get to the next level, and there's some people who are like me, a…”

“That's why I think it's really comes from the Founders personalities. It's very hard to live something you're not... If you are who you are. And like, that is the culture of the company. Even if you write down a different culture from who you are, So unless yo…”

“As an engineer, as a founder, you, you've developed these muscles on how to build, and you are very good at building. But what you only do once or twice is pick the thing to work on. And VCs, you know, one of the, I think the luxuries that we have VCs, we get …”

“We basically just had the mandate. We're like, look, we're like more than half the company is going to be founders. I think it was more than two thirds at some point, but it's like, I'm one half is going to be founders or founding team members.”

“If you don't have experience managing salespeople, try not to learn as on the job for the first time there. If you can, you know, you have the money and ability to recruit a senior person, do that because you're de-risking your learning and a lot of things tha…”

“Almost invariably, every company tells you what they're working on is the hardest problem in the world. And I just don't think that's categorically true at all. But because, you know, you end up becoming either a slave of your own success or end up having some…”

“The difference is you have to be willing to give up some level of autonomy when thinking about the product. In a founder-like company. And you have to be willing to, you have to know how to influence really well, and you have to be able to understand what infl…”

“What we did well and what I would do, I think if I was to start again is yes, I'd raise the funds. That's important, but I'd still operate as if I only have a 100,000 in the bank account, you know, where you just got to iterate really fast with a small group o…”

“It gives you a level of resilience that nobody you ever hire is ever going to have.”