startup

“Every great startup does not obvious things. Many times along its journey. Whether that's, you know, betting on a hire that like most, you know, VC board members are going to pull up their LinkedIn and say, that doesn't make sense to me. Whether it's getting i…”

“Something that Arielle TripActions used to tell me, he's like, you know, you need to reinvent yourself every three months because the business is going to change. Every three months reinvent yourself. Figure out how to up level yourself. And I do think that is…”

“And so I think for any startup, given the advancements in the LLM field, the current model you're using might be the right model today, but three months from now, 12 months from now, there's a good chance that another model might actually surpass the current m…”

“And a lot of startups actually went under in 2018, 2020, just realizing that they were not going to get there.”

“In the early days, I think your priority should be to make yourself relatable to where it exists. If you have three landing pages, you have a small team, you're kicking the tires on an early revision of the product to call yourself like some very lofty thing e…”

“I don't like making comparisons to starting a new product inside of a large company is like building a startup. Like, it is nothing like building a startup.”

“You don't get to say that you're building a product, but actually what you're building is a company and that's an operation, whether that's the recruiting or the sales or the product process or the quality process or whatever it is. And you're building it to s…”

“I am biased toward hiring ICs first. Ideally, you can find somebody who either has been a manager before, or has aspirations to be a manager, or, you know, if you can assess for leadership qualities in your early interview processes, somebody who has the poten…”

“The first experiment that I like to run is, can we build something that people love? And if you do, then the next experiment is, can we commercialize it in a material way?”

“There aren't that many that helped you become a billion dollar company. It's basically sales, virality, what I call like content loops, which is we distribute content directly to, you know, Google or to social networks to bring more people in, and then those p…”

“I think if you bring in highly specialized folks into a startup, it often doesn't work out because your diagnostic may yield a very different result three months from now than it does today.”

“In the beginning, most startups, you just get one thing working really well. That's good and bad news, right, if you're a founder. It means you don't have to do all the things on your slide, but you can't afford to anyway, so the key is to find your 10% of wor…”

“Execution has become more important than ever. And it's not so much about like idea discovery or like untapped market discovery anymore. It's just a question of pick your poison on how difficult, you know, it will be. But I think every space now is really chal…”

“You shouldn't probably emulate. You should almost do the opposite what all the other players in your domain are doing. And maybe you can take inspiration from some other companies in other domains and do something like similar there.”

“I think like what often happens to startups or any companies is like, The quality goes down because they get pressured on some, something else. They pressured on the, we need to ship this or we need to get, get these metrics up. And then the quality goes down …”

“It ended up being that the inside is that payroll, the pain from payroll was across industries. It was not just startups. And the pain was strong enough that even if we did not have a personal network with dentists dentists love gusto.”

“I think if you only like, if you let you come out of college and you go straight into like being an associate and then you become like a partner, I think you don't realize that the, what investors see and what actually happens on the ground is like actually qu…”

“They have this classic innovators dilemma that it makes it hard to steer the big ship to add these capabilities while still protecting their existing product and revenue not making drastic changes that are not backwards compatible. And so they're just naturall…”

“There's kind of two outcomes that are great. If you start a company, right? One is you retain control of it and it becomes huge. The second is it fails quickly.”