founders

“If somebody is there with three people presenting to us, and they do all the talking, and they are talking for the other people, it's usually not a great sign. If somebody sort of steps back and starts lauding, let's say a CEO is the founder, and they turn to …”

“Unless you have the founding team, maybe the founder involved, you're not going to be successful there.”

“When somebody lies about something that is in no way germane to their business, I'm like, that's a red flag for me, right? Like, that's somebody who has a difficult relationship with the truth and facts and reality.”

“The best founders I know, know what are the most important risks that stand between themselves and success. And they tackle those risks early, because if you eliminate those risks, you massively improve the probabilities of winning, as well as you make the com…”

“My first question with every interview is tell me about inception. So why do you want to do this so badly that you're willing to break through walls and spend years in the cold as an unknown at the shot for the shot of being a successful entrepreneur?”

“There's like the dreamers, the world builders, like the Elon Musk, and then there's the problem solvers. And then there's entrepreneurs or opportunists who just love the game of business.”

“You know, one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They're not, not even close. It's a sort of a prize pool at the end of the gam…”

“All people that work in a company are on a spectrum where on, on one side you have the founders where their identity is the company. They You know, they don't ask what their job is. They ask what the company needs. They work nights and weekends. It's like, it'…”

“The best thing founders can do is subtraction. This is surprising, but, like, it's the reason, like, it's much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things.”

“The job of the organization designer or the founder is actually to focus on the don't feel threatened part, not the human nature part. Like, let's just let human nature be what it is and say, if people don't feel threatened, they won't go into fight or flight.…”

“And then once a year, when you say, please hear me, I think, I know I don't know as much about this as you do, but I really still feel like this is something we should do. They pay attention, right? They don't always do it, but you've earned the right for them…”

“Especially in the environment and look, you know, investors, you know all of us, we sent many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded. And so they could look at something of like, what are you talking about? My business keeps on g…”

“Our friend David Senra, who runs the podcast Founders, has profiled, I think now, probably 350 Founders over time. And he says, I don't want to put two, don't want to put words in his mouth. I'm pretty sure he said the only founder that he has ever read their …”

“The research shows, by and large, the reason why Silicon Valley wants two founders is because the number one risk for investing in a company is that a founder gives up. Number one.”

“What I've observed is it's that identity shift is a prerequisite for most of the other things. It's not simply your ability to handle the politics and bureaucracy of a bigger company or to navigate a new structure. I actually think most founders don't make tha…”

“I believe in cultures where, you know, founders have license to go in and all the way to a small decision and fix it. The infamous question mark emails from Jeff Bezos, you know, that type of thing. That's the right way to run a company.”

“And I think founders don't take on enough accountability towards making these acquisitions successful as I think they should.”

“If you get a positive reference check on someone, then it's positive. If you get a negative reference check on a founder, it's usually neutral. Unless people are saying they're ethically bad, or there's some issue with them, or whatever. But there's two reason…”

“If you can't tell me what your business is about in 20 seconds, you should not do your business because how are you going to market it to the world? You've got, and I'm not talking about that technical algorithms of AI. I'm talking about What does it do?”

“The main advantage of being a founder of a company is if you are always on, which I tried to be, What you have is you have the context from day one, right? And if you're always on, your brain, all your brain has to do is do the delta between day one and day tw…”

“We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right, and our ideas are usually wrong.”