founders

“Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for in a founder. We like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that fire fast.”

“One, every founder I know has multiplied their percentage ownership times whatever the highest price their company was ever valued at. And thought about that number as their net worth.”

“You can't be a founder of what will be a great technology franchise and do it part time and have a great, you know, great work life balances often gets bantied about. It's impossible.”

“I think it's more important to have that, like paranoia, you know, deep within you that, like, forces you to, like, kind of live in fear your whole life or something that, that, like, allows you to be, you know, successful.”

“During the stage where people want to invest, but they haven't yet, ah, that's when they're most willing to be helpful. And so it's actually like a great way for you to use that to proxy how helpful they'll be afterwards. Because if they're not that helpful in…”

“The bad ones tend to, like, be More obvious. Faster. The great private tech investments, I think, are sometimes slower to prove how great they are because, like, you have these amazing founders who are just, you know, constantly making decisions which take the…”

“If you just are willing to do that serially, just keep jumping off the deep end, go after problems you're frankly not qualified to go after, but you know, there is some belief you have the raw potential to do, like, you turn into a superhero. I think that's ac…”

“And then if you look at the present moment, there are now hundreds of founders who are building in the national interest with a U.S. Capital stack, one of our other advantages, of over a hundred billion dollars invested in the projects that they're doing that …”

“I think it's actually probably a pretty good time to be a founder in a non AI related place right now, because there's like less competition, less smart people.”

“I think if you want to be successful, you can go look at every single industry and you can say, okay, who is the dumbest people and what makes the most money? And if you go like attack that area, Probably pretty good space.”

“A lot of people call founders visionaries. We're more expeditionaries. We're on these expeditions. We only call it visions later. We're really just one foot in front of the other.”

“The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you. Is unbelievably small.”

“Honestly, the best salesperson in any of these companies is a founder, and what they're doing is bridging the jagged edge to what the customer's capability is, and that's it.”