startup

“We have this concept we call the idea maze and the idea maze is the, is sort of the idea that That the startup ideas aren't really just kind of a static thing. It's kind of like, you know, you see the TV or the movies and they have the way they kind of, you kn…”

“Precisely because machine learning is something that can be used just about everywhere, right? In every single industry, in every single part of what a company does, So far, it's only been used for a small fraction of the things that it could be used for. So y…”

“Any negative that's there, ignoring it is leaving a landmine, but calling it out gives you your best chance at eliminating it as an issue. Whether you're an unknown startup or whether or not you got a strong competitor.”

“Especially for a startup, like the default outcome is your relatively near term non-existence. Like the default outcome is that you do not survive to survive over the medium or, you know, even with even more difficulty over the long term. That is, that's like …”

“What a startup has to do to become a company someday is they have to achieve three or four crucial breakthroughs. One is they have to have a breakthrough insight. And then they have to have a breakthrough value proposition. And then they have to have a breakth…”

“Insights are the bedrock of a great startup. And the failure mode in insight development is to live in the present and to look for market white space. Because if you're looking for gaps in today's markets, chances are lots of people have tried that. And if you…”

“And so trying to quantify the total available market, it's wrongheaded. It's more about quantifying the potential energy of the insight.”

“The shield is, your go-to-market strategy is so different, and the customer context that you're targeting is so different, that the incumbent doesn't feel an incentive to attack you. They just say, ah, you can have that market. That's stupid product, stupid id…”

“We'd be better off charging a price when the product's half done, because, you know, then we're going to find out how visceral is the pain and how compelling is the value that we're here to deliver for them.”

“Teams are different in startups than they are from companies because I like to say that in a company, it's more like a marching band. People need their sheet music and they need to dance in formation and play their instruments in exact terms. Whereas I don't k…”

“And so the reason I love the Herbie metaphor for startups is I think a lot of startups get very bad advice. They get advice that is sort of exhaustively correct, but what they don't realize is that when you're a startup, you can't do everything well. You got t…”

“What we've come to realize is that a startup isn't really a company at all. A startup is a set of founders with hopefully a set of proprietary insights that are a result of them living in the future.”

“And so like, I like to say that the great startups find people who are one day going to be great before the world knows they're great. And going after people that the world already knows is great, it can work for you, but usually you have to be a very establis…”

“That is the number one killer of startups, is people quitting. If you are betting on somebody to take on a major, majorly difficult task, the number one killer is that they give up. At some point, they tap out. And most people think it's because the company ru…”

“Rarely do husband-wife teams work out for a number of reasons, but not least of which, in our view anyway, you know, let's say that the wife is the CEO and the husband is the CTO or the CFO, You know, their direct reports are rarely gonna, you know, not gonna …”

“So I listened to a lot of podcasts and books around startups, successes and failures, looking for clues on how companies can fail more than looking for success indicators.”

“You need to be growing in the article, I say, 20% month over a month, but it can be 10%. It just needs to be sort of exponential or so. Or polynomial or whatever the correct math term is. And if you're doing that, you can stay on this path. If you're not doing…”

“Six months of the, of a person in the wrong position will set you back. Two years, because you're building these foundational blocks.”

“That our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone, the smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience, and so for people who are, you know, taking notes in search of a nugget, that's one that can change how you do your wor…”

“It's actually funny, a successful company has about five years, a successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. And they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like, of course, that's rational. Like, they've n…”

“It's asymmetric, right? The empire has to win a hundred percent of the time, right? They have to defend against all attackers, right? Whereas, you know, the attack, you know, so you can have many different attackers who kind of keep coming.”

“This applies to startups that spread faster are usually have a very light Trojan that spreads versus a very heavy thing. And therefore you're, if you really want to be at a high distribution startup, you have a build, which is very light spreads like a virus.”

“When does a startup become a big company? Like, is one billion dollar valuation makes you a big company? I think the answer is very simple. When you reduce The concentration of people with very high slope in the company.”

“And you go to a startup, there's no way they're putting you through a training program. There's no way they're critiquing your PowerPoint skills. You know, everybody's just barely treading water.”

“Most incumbent companies don't care about startups, and startups have five, six years before an incumbent wakes up and realizes it's a big deal, and then tries to crush them.”

“Their promising venture now faced the constraint that kills more startups than any other, running out of cash while running towards success.”

“I would say that most successful startups are like cults in many ways”

“You could imagine a digital fundraising process where you're plugged into, you know, an electronic market and you can push a button and you get the capital to run your business. I think that'll happen, not just for crypto companies, but for all types of compan…”