Dalton Caldwell
20 statements across 1 episodes · 13 bullish · 2 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Apr 18, 2024 by Dalton Caldwell · said 4 times in 1 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Dalton Caldwell's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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brought up most by Jessica Livingston (4)
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Everything said about Dalton Caldwell, oldest first
Apr 18, 2024
Apr 18, 2024 negative
Caldwell: Founders use landing pages and ads to avoid awkward customer conversations
“And I think a lot of folks, their inclinations are to like, you know, build a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and try to get people to sign up for something. And again, maybe I, maybe that's something, but I think a lot of the reason people do that is …”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Reading popular sales books gets founders 80% of the way
“I think a lot of founders are afraid of doing sales and they don't know how to do sales and they think they need these really experienced sales coaches and they need all this training. And I'll be like, well, go onto Amazon and Find the most popular sales book…”
Apr 18, 2024 neutral
Apr 18, 2024
Caldwell: Startups usually die from founders losing hope, not running out of cash
“It's pretty rare. I would argue that the cause of death is that they had lots of firepower and they were feeling really positive and they just ran out of money. That's actually like more rare than founders think. It's much more common that they still have some…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Shutting down a startup is forgotten within 10-20 years if handled with integrity
“No one will remember that you shut down your company probably in 10 years or 20 years, like time, as long as you have integrity. As long as you're an honest person, as long as you handle yourself well through good times and bad, people will remember you fondly…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Patrick Collison personally checked in weekly with early Stripe customers
“I was an early Stripe customer at my startup and yeah, Patrick would like we used Google talk at the time. Patrick would be sending me messages like on a weekly basis, just like checking in. And so again, it's funny how successful these folks get, but yeah, Pa…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Outlier founders share deep internal conviction and refusal to fail
“The thing that I would argue folks that build really big companies have in common is they just really want it and they really believe in themselves and they really believe they can make it work. And that they're somehow deep in their internal psyche. There's s…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Brex and Retool appeared to be their YC batch's worst startups
“Vyond Change their idea and got really excited about it and renamed to Brex. And this was Brex, which is like a Decacorn. And Cashew changed their idea and renamed to something called Retool. And so out of my 35 companies, the ones that objectively seemed the …”
Apr 18, 2024 negative
Caldwell: Music discovery is a classic tar pit startup idea
“Honestly, I worked on Tarpon ideas myself as a founder, which is a music discovery. This is something I did in my first startup. That was definitely, you know, Music startups are hard. And trying to be like, oh, we're going to fix music discovery. This was cla…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Startup success requires irrational persistence through multiple near-death experiences
“Across the portfolio of YC and non YC companies, there has to be this irrational, you know, intention to keep going even when the world tells you it's not working and you feel completely defeated. And you likely have to go through this many times and have thes…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Founders can find big markets by targeting hated enterprise incumbents
“My suggestion was to start by looking at what companies are publicly traded and or owned by private equity that are large and that also are hated by their customers. And to try to intentionally find where there's a knowable big market within a comment. Combine…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Founders should spend 20% to 30% of their time on customer calls
“I think it's look at your calendar and there should be, you know, 20 or 30% of your time that the calendar says something like customer Meeting, customer call, like meeting with foo, meeting with this person. And when the calendar is not that, or it's all, you…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Founders should validate and pre-sell before writing code or raising money
“If someone wants to do a startup and doesn't know where to start, just to give you permission to talk to potential customers and try to pre-sell something before you write code and have those conversations. I think so many folks don't know where to begin on st…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Razorpay looked like a tiny TAM before Indian card usage exploded
“I was a, I funded Razorpay, which is I think the largest payment processor in India. And the TAM of that was tiny because no one was using credit cards in 2015 in India. So you had to believe that the size of the credit card industry in India would like a hund…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024
Apr 18, 2024 neutral
Caldwell: 100% of startup founders experience a near-death moment
“If we define it as the company had a near death experience where it was going poorly and the founders seriously wondered if it was all going to be over a hundred percent of the time people go through that, you know, with the founders like, yeah, I guess we're …”