The Wisdom Wall

“Very common thing people say in software, uh, in, in, in venture. Oh, the only execution, the only mode is execution, which is not, which is definitely not a mode.”

“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 The, the trade-offs between those three are usually an illusion that usually the thing that can be…”

“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. Like you've built this business. You made all the decisions…”

“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 somebody who's two years out of college, who doesn't know anything…”

“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, you really have some obsession with ownership, but I think most of these things are confusion about ownership versus control.”

“of B to B deals that seem 99% likely to close, 50% of them fall through.”

“I think there's just almost pure downside in listing these things out to investors.”

“And I think that you gain more of an appreciation for how the other EDI businesses ended up where they are, because they got to one of those paths and they said, all right, like this is gonna, this gets us kind of part of the way there and we'll fix it later. And they, they, they stayed there and ended up on this kind…”

“what you generally see is that companies are able to ship for some short period of time, two years, three years, and then the system ossifies and then they go and they're kind of stuck with that system. Going forward, and that's basically what they're gonna sell. The question is, have you built enough in that cement…”

“there's a myth that the best entrepreneurs are, are risk takers. When in reality, the best entrepreneurs are, are risk killers and they're trimming away failure paths. And Thing is when you trim away a failure path, your odds of success go up.”

“It's when people are, are, are buying the product despite all the things that it doesn't do. And the deals are closing anyways. The deals are closing anyways, and everybody's so happy.”

“The reality is that most people don't care about the product only being 80% as good. For most people that doesn't matter. They're not willing to pay a lot more for that incremental, incremental piece.”

“I think that there's more to learn from the category of discount retailing than there is, you know, in software than there is to almost any other category.”

“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 quality, the costs usually go down.”

“you find that most of the things that people warn you about don't come to pass. And like most of these edge cases don't come to pass. I think it's a little bit different in consumer with fraud and stuff like that, but it'd be to be generally don't need to worry about those things.”

“I learned that the, the hardest thing to do is to get your first customer in any one of these segments. It's okay. Like consumer is, is, it's not that hard to get your first customer. There's enough people out there. In terms of wholesale, everybody wants to know, who are you supplying now?”

“yes, the beginning of something can be exciting, and the end of something can be relieving, but like, by and large, the muck in the middle is where the value is built.”

“There's a tremendous alpha that can be found from doing things better than other people.”

“So no matter how big you get as an EDI company, you have to integrate every single one of your vendors one by one with Walmart or Tractor Supply or Target. There isn't this such thing as you connect once and the transactions just start flowing. In healthcare, the existence of clearinghouses means that they're…”

“if something doesn't lead to Lower costs, sustained lower costs over time, or the sustained ability to charge higher prices over time, and ideally both, it is not a moat.”

“All software is a cascade of miracles. Like when you look at something, you know, I think you, 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 in the weekend. And then you, if you keep running with…”

“I think that product market fit is the antidote to stupidity provided that is product market fit with high gross margins. And I think like product market fit with low gross margins is, is a tough business.”

“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, the reasons why someone doesn't end up working out as an investor, as an employee, as a…”

“when things are working, it kind of, not that it doesn't matter what you do, but there's lots of different ways to be successful. The important thing is that the decisions that you're making are consistent and that they're well implemented. So some of this stuff is like, I'm not sure how much it matters as much as it…”

“We do demo day because it's a way that everybody can get a shared understanding of how the product works and what's changing. And also because it encourages people to ship in incremental units that are viewable on a week by week basis. It's not the purpose of seeing if work is getting done.”

“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 something that you want to do, provided that the circumstances are,…”