startup

“And the fact that people are asking you for other things probably indicates that your pain point's not big enough.”

“And the M&A, the real smart M&A people are saying, okay, yeah, let's kick some tires and we'll go for a test drive and we'll look over everything under the hood. And then they realize, okay, you're basically running out of money. I'm just gonna, again, same th…”

“I think another myth in the world of Startups, depending if you're VC backed or not, a single or a double is really great. We love being able to find businesses that we may be able to sell or exit for 2030, forty million dollars. That's not a small amount of m…”

“And so I think it's a skill that's important for founders as well to learn how to not just build a thing, but how do you gracefully deprecate a thing and kill it.”

“Startups, especially the younger they are, they often have a very, yeah, wishful thinking about how to interact with corporates, right? They're basically just cool. We just have to pitch and they will love our product, but that's just not how the world works. …”

“Because you can't just have only startups, because they just won't be able to disrupt the system, right? So you need everybody else on board as well.”

“As a startup, you can't be fighting multiple battles. All at the same time, right? We can't be in the PR media business and the idea generation business and the fundraising business all at the same time. It's just too much.”

“But for the other 99%, it still takes three to six, sometimes eight months to raise capital. Oftentimes that is almost a full-time job during that time.”

“Paid ads to me are the fallback crutch that too many startups rely on”

“Because AI is helping startups build so much quicker it's turning into like these cycles of innovation and disruption are so much faster.”

“I think you got to be in the office at least three or four days a week. I think there's definitely a spot for hybrid. I think you're not going to get, like, top talent if you can't have the flexibility when, you know, kids have soccer practice or someone's sic…”

“When you do start a company with a co-founder though, this has to be something that you align on. So not only being Mindful of it, but then who you're going to start a company with you need to be aligned that this is something that we're, we have to have. Ther…”

“I think for somebody who's very tech savvy and can have a finger on the pulse and be able to hold everybody accountable and know what's going on. I think that that's not necessarily a bad idea, but it's a terrible idea. I would not recommend it for anybody who…”

“If you work with somebody at a big company in the past, and they were a top performer, they may very well be your lowest performer in a startup because it takes a complete different DNA and skillset to be successful as an early individual contributor or any ro…”

“Lone Rangers can be very, very exciting in the early days of a startup because of the high output but they can also be very dangerous and create a huge problem for the business down the road because they're unwilling to share that information and they're unwil…”

“If you have like a family startup where husband and wife start a company that can work and we have an example for that, but it's rare. So it's usually more that you have a group of people with different backgrounds.”

“The typical thing is that the startup feels like, oh, this is our last round. Usually they need another three rounds. If not more and there, they need a lot of support.”

“We are a firm believer, nonetheless, that a core part of being successful as a startup is, yes, you have a wide TAM, but you execute specific to a vertical, specific to a workflow.”

“We believe that what startups actually need are real opportunities to validate product market fit with customers. They don't need to be mentored. They don't need a bunch of classes or workshops.”

“We're actually an investor or a nonprofit, but we invest money in startups and the way that we invest is when we run these public innovation challenges. Like with the airport or the sea port or with solid waste, we invest a 100,000 dollars in each of the winni…”

“Policymakers are impatient, so they want a flashy success quickly in a startup, and then hundred job announcements they can make and ribbons they can cut on the other end.”

“At any given time, we think that a startup is working backwards from one of three things, very simply. I'm either working backwards from M&A. I'm working backwards from profitability. I'm working backwards from the next fundraise. You got to choose one.”

“I don't think that the startups are able to influence the large corporate in the way that I would expect them to. And the reason for that is the large companies work at a very different pace, and their ability to do experiments and absorb experiments is very l…”

“So we use a lot of startup, but again, I would say, We use them in a very tactical way to say, oh, you made a solution, we'll use it.”

“What they don't have, and they recognize is a culture and an ecosystem where this talent can go from being a researcher, winning Nobel prizes, which they do, to startups going to market, and that's what they're working to change.”

“I think if you are a founder who is trying to maximize the valuation of their company, moving to SF is the obvious right strategy. I think there's actually no way to debate that. Higher, the highest valuations do not exist outside of San Francisco.”

“You know, it candidly, if you put a tagline on that, it used to be really cool to say how many people worked for you. The higher the number, the better. And now the exact opposite is true. You want to have as lean a team as possible. You know, the idea of havi…”

“Carta sits on top of the cap table of 60,000 startups these days, as well as fund admin for two and a half to 3000 US venture funds.”

“So one thing which I can see is when there is a good amount of Hand holding or a program management happens from the enterprise side this relationship really blossoms and becomes really good, and typically we're seen when either innovation teams, or even maybe…”

“Startups, if I have to say are extremely good problem solvers. Not necessarily great at navigating through the nuances of an enterprise relationships and figuring out how to sell probably.”

“You end up pivoting, learning use cases when you work with enterprises, what you thought about as a product at the beginning, and you actually deliver it, it's going to be completely different because you pivoted so many times, because you learn by working wit…”

“Because I believe that those who are AI native are going to zoom past most of you know, companies in the market, and I really think startups are in for a rude awakening, because I actually think that startups are going to have a very, very hard life ahead in t…”

“In a startup, you have prototypes, and you can launch, you can soft test everything, and you can test a little bit, you can test a little bit more, you can test with one buyer, blah, blah, blah. In a game also, you're always testing, but ultimately, there's on…”

“First of all, I do believe that GCCs alone will never be a hundred percent successful in a certain way. Obviously the startup ecosystem, the, it's about, when we say ecosystem, it is not just about GCC. Partners, startups, everyone has to come together to crea…”

“AI in general unlocks a lot of potential in people who didn't know how to write code. So in, in recent years, we've seen a number of startups that are rising from, you know, from the ground up with like solo founders using AI agents, like 10 different AI agent…”

“About 25, almost 24% of startups will fail because of either hiring poor hiring management decisions or just general leadership problems. So these are the sort of Mesh issues that they deal with, and that is the third leading cause of startup death. It's above…”

“It's, we are a law firm, and so we're delivering outcomes as a service, and so we don't sell to other lawyers, we exclusively sell to startups, and so in small businesses, we engage startups, we are, we represent you as a lawyer, we have malpractice insurance,…”

“Not being transparent.”

“If it's a something core enterprise technology, you won't find many startups who have built a solution which are scalable. Right. It could be your CRM. It could be your big finance solution and all. It's very difficult to find because that's why these establis…”

“When we go through the regular routes, especially as a startups, through our, The bureaucracies of the entire large organization to the procurement, legal, it is very, very difficult for, it's a maze difficult for startups to navigate through. Whereas when an …”

“An investor is telling you to do something which may not be right for the long term direction of your product, of your company, right? And you have to make difficult choices at that point in time. So are you going to compromise on your product or on your value…”

“Well, and most, because I worked after I graduated, I worked for Berkeley Skydeck, and most of the, like, startups that fail, fail due to, like, founder breakups.”