Zack Kanter
21 statements across 1 episodes · 5 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Nov 6, 2025 by Zack Kanter · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Zack Kanter's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Zack Kanter, oldest first
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 6, 2025 positive
Kanter: Stedi screens for candidates held back by their current environment
“What we think about during interviews is what I look for during interviews. I want to get a sense that the person is held back by the environment that they're in, that this person could be achieving more if not for the team that they're on or the organization …”
Nov 6, 2025
Kanter: Engineering leaders should prune design docs to maximum two miracles
“All software is a cascade of miracles.
Like when you look at something, you know, I think you go and vibe code for a weekend and you're like,
oh my God, you know, why doesn't my company ship more?
Because I just shipped all the, look at all the stuff I shipped…”
Nov 6, 2025
Kanter: Launched first business by buying $2,500 of parts on credit
“So I signed up for a credit card, and I bought 2500 dollars worth of stuff, and I basically packaged it into a kit, each one of these different pieces, 12 different components or so, and I packaged it into a kit, and listed those for sale on the Impala SS foru…”
Nov 6, 2025 negative
Kanter: 20 years of experience is often just one year repeated 20 times
“In the beginning, you look for people who have a lot of experience. And then you realize you hire someone with 20 years of experience, and they don't have 20 years of experience, they have one year of experience repeated 20 times. By contrast, you hire somebod…”
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 6, 2025 positive
Kanter: Stedi de-scopes features until they are barely usable by one customer
“If the, if there is the option to ship things
Incrementally.
It is, I think, virtually always better.
And that's how we ship things now.
Like we ship, we don't ship big bang features.
In fact, like we de-scope features to the point of where we're, where we thi…”
Nov 6, 2025
Kanter: Principles are unconditional commitments, while preferences depend on trade-offs
“I think that when you think about, you know, basic way I describe principles versus preferences, it's like a principle is something that you're doing no matter what, you know, that, that you would, that you are dogmatic about it. And the preference is somethin…”
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 6, 2025
Kanter: Automotive aftermarket has a $200B repair and $40B upgrade market
“There's the kind of need-based repairs, which is, you know, somewhere as a Two hundred billion dollar market, so you know, your tire blows out, or you need a new muffler or something. And then there's the want-based purchases, which are the upgrades, and I was…”
Nov 6, 2025 negative
Kanter: Founders who hate their companies only have themselves to blame
“When it came down to it and you probed these questions of what they were looking for is basically they had, they disliked the business that they ended up building. And to me, like, that's a kind of a crazy situation to get yourself into. Cause it's your fault.…”
Nov 6, 2025 negative
Kanter: The quality-price-speed trade-off is an illusion
“They say, okay, well, you know, quality, price, and speed, you have to pick two. And I think that that is like the most losing mindset in business and engineering and design and whatever the thing is. And that the trade-offs between those three are usually an …”
Nov 6, 2025 bullish
Kanter: Venture capital makes far more sense for high achievers than bootstrapping
“So as a high agency person, being able to remove the fundamental constraint of capital as the limiting factor of a business, like, to me, it's like the equivalent of going pro. I think that there's vastly more cases in which venture capital makes sense for a h…”
Nov 6, 2025 positive
Kanter: Focusing on quality reduces costs more reliably than cost-cutting
“Always focus, focus on improving quality because the quality gains usually materialize. If you say like, okay, we're going to reduce the defect rate or we're going to, it's just like a very measurable thing. And, but what you find is that by improving the qual…”
Nov 6, 2025 neutral
Kanter: When hires fail, it is almost always for anticipated reasons
“People are very loudly and obviously going to broadcast to you who they are and what they believe in and what they want and what they want to do and how they're going to act. And it's up to you to listen to it. And like the reasons why someone doesn't end up w…”
Nov 6, 2025 negative
Nov 6, 2025 positive
Nov 6, 2025 neutral
Kanter: Stedi tells new hires on day one that everything is their fault
“On everybody's first day at Steady, I say, welcome to Steady, everything's your fault now. And then I say it's not as bad as it sounds, actually, everything's your fault now also. You know, everything's your fault, and your manager's fault, and everything kind…”
Nov 6, 2025
Kanter: Founder anti-VC bias stems from confusing ownership with control
“Would you rather own, you know, a hundred percent of a ten million dollar business or 10% of a billion dollar business? Like, of course, I think unless you really have some obsession with ownership, but I think most of these things are confusion about ownershi…”
Nov 6, 2025