founders

“One thing I've noticed among founders and just people in general is they tend to write like a PR person and not like a human and not like, you know, the way that I kind of describe Kind of a frame of writing, maybe your tagline for product or for your launch i…”

“However, I think it's super important that founders see a line of sight to work on this for, I think my rule of thumb is a decade. Just do you see yourself working on this for a decade? And maybe it's not a decade that you actually work on it. It probably won'…”

“One of the really big pitfalls I see, especially for B to B companies, but really For everyone is they write in a way that people don't talk. So the document, when I get the first draft back from founders often has things like leverages and empowers and like a…”

“Sometimes founders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning, and they're the best suited to that. And they just need someone to help them get that stuff out. And that's when they need an engine person.”

“I think especially for founders that haven't hired for this caliber of talent in the past, it's really easy to be distracted by shiny objects and look at huge names. You want to find the CPOs of Google and YouTube or what have you, because that seems like it w…”

“You'll find that the founder and that leader will build a different level of rapport and trust by not going through a formal interview process and having it feel transactional, and then with that, magic can happen, and you can land incredible people.”

“I think just putting them on the spot a little bit and asking them to show their work rather than just sending over a deck of searches that could have been done by other partners or could have just been done by other people on their team.”

“You got to forecast a year, but then set milestones, checkpoints, and kind of make predetermined decisions that allow you to avoid the bias of then walking into Q one and being like, oh, we missed in Q one, but no, no, we're really going to hit it in Q two. Yo…”

“You can nudge yourself a little bit away from your happy place, but you're not going to go super far. You're not going to go from like a process driven meritocratic XYZ person all the way to like I'm going to start a collectivist company where everything is so…”

“You can't really lean on your employees and say, Hey, I'm feeling really shitty as a founder today. Like everything is going to shit. Employees isn't going to take that well. So you lean on perhaps your investors and, but they're not really available. But what…”

“If founders are lucky slash good enough to find product market fit, they've usually built up all this intuition about their customers, about their product and their business that are really hard to explain to others and may even be like subconscious. So when t…”

“So if you can do it, I would definitely advise founders to bring Advisors in for equity, if you can. And I think the same applies for your internal growth team. You want to make sure that the teams are incentivized, not on activities, on doing stuff, because t…”

“I see a lot of founders get this wrong, and they prematurely will shut down a conversation or they won't talk to an incumbent or a potential future buyer because they take too competitive of a stance. But that's a mistake because M&A is all about creating plan…”

“Start preparing to sell your company from the moment you found it, which is kind of a weird thing because obviously if you're starting a company for most founders, they want it to be the next big thing. They're not starting it in order to sell it, but it's jus…”

“If you're in the trenches as a founder, the easiest way to map out a sharp problem is draw the current approximate average workflow for your target customer, at least what you think is a target and then draw the workflow after they've used your software. And s…”

“We're gonna have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are gonna just, they're gonna steamroll.”

“I think that like way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. I don't know why they do, but I think they apologize for how they want to run the company. They basically find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how …”

“And I think in some ways our industry would be much better off if there were fewer founders. I think in some ways the, I use the entire category of smart, creative, hardworking, talented, you know, borderline visionary people who Can raise that two million dol…”

“Another mistake that founders often make is they hire the number one account executive at a hot company to be their head of sales. It's not the same skills. Most sales executives should not be managers.”

“Second tier, third tier events. I do not think are worth it because they do not attract the best people. It's just a fact. We don't, most people, it turns out from our founders are our core ICP. They go to two events a year on average, two events a year.”

“Even if you don't know how to do outbound, even if you don't know how to send a cold email, even if you don't know how to do any of this stuff, and even if you don't know how to ask for a check, even if you don't know how to open or close, almost all founders …”

“Your first 10, 15, 50 unaffiliated customers, the ones that find you from the ether, they are like the next 50, a 102 101,000, and you can either embrace them or run for them.”

“It is your fault. A hundred percent your fault. If any of your hires fail, don't blame them.”

“Those first couple reps have to be people you would buy your own product from. That's it. Now we can talk about other criteria. We can talk about normalizing for deal size. We can talk about industry expertise. We can talk about all this kind of stuff, but whe…”

“Most founders have enough stamina to manage a couple of these AEs, these accounting executives, these folks who work the leads. Most founders do not have the stamina to manage 10 kids fresh out of college that need to be micromanaged on an hourly basis to call…”

“95 times out of a hundred, you've got to find a way at least to close the first 10 customers yourself.”

“Usually when founders are not nice people, they're insecurities at play.”

“In fact, I would say that it actually makes it very hard to be a founder if you've been a great CEO, because you've turned into this sustainer versus destroyer or creator, right?”

“A lot of CEOs have done well because they follow the dharma of the founders quite well. They have not diluted the dharma of the founders who have Started these companies and managed to sustain that.”

“I think too many founders you know, once they get to it, they are very apprehensive of going public and going through the IPO process and being a publicly traded company because they're, they think, I mean, that's at the beginning of the end. It's going to lik…”

“Founders spend 99% of their time building because that's what they've done, right? And they spend, like, one percent of their time picking and picking the market, picking the problem, picking the customer. And in reality, it's that pick that, like, determines …”

“The folks that are really great at product, the founders that are always deeply in the weeds on product and still care a lot and are still talking to customers no matter how late stage it gets.”

“Part of Really respecting them is respecting that they can make the choices they want and they're grownups enough that they can deal with the consequences of those choices.”

“My clue to people who report to a founder is to say, imagine if you're confused about How your founder is behaving. Imagine that they're terrified all the time, right? And see if that makes their behavior more clear. Because it is scary to be a founder, right?…”

“And it's actually something that I recommend to a lot of founders for, you know, maybe their first, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 employees of just have like a relationship design conversation with each of them when they're first hired.”

“And if a founder would get defensive, that was always a bad sign. Always a bad sign. The best founders would say, you know, gosh, I have thought about it and here's what I figured out. Or they just have this almost a tennis match and a conversation rather than…”

“Ironically, before they win, they have to have the courage to be disliked because people don't like their idea. They think it's stupid, lonely, but then after they win, it's even worse because everybody says you cheated, or you're a bad guy, or you broke the r…”

“Your job as the founder is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke. So the founders sometimes make the mistake of thinking that they're the hero, but they're not. The early believers are the heroes. And it's the job of the founder to tell a story. That emotes early believers …”

“We ran a survey a little bit ago. We need to rerun this where we just ask people what they have started their business about without Atlas and about 20% of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have had then.”

“So I think when a founder's in founder mode, what they are doing, and if they're doing it well, what they're doing is really deeply understanding the business and then figuring out when to use their power as a founder to either tweak things and send something …”

“Now, I think the way to use that effectively as a head of product is to recognize that they have that power to figure out how to use that power to get the things done that you know are best for the company. So I always think about, like, I have all the people …”

“And in magic box, founders are eager to do the same thing, thinking that competition will improve their deal size. When in fact, I think more often than not, that is a negative signal until the very end of the dance.”

“Second, they are way better at negotiating than you. So, any time dealing with a superior negotiator, the only thing you can do to try and even the scales is move the negotiation async. So founders repeat after me. I'm talking to you directly now. You will say…”

“Then I thought, you know, one day if I become a founder and I've got my own company, I could just tell people what to do. Then it turns out, I did that, and in fact, I actually have to influence more than ever, so all of you who think your job, you're gonna ge…”

“And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products, really good at driving efficiencies at scale. They have the city. They, everything that they do touches hundreds, thousands, millions of customers immediately. And so the type of PM that yo…”

“You do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on. And that first wave of growth has to be a founder led.”

“If you are unable to convince your existing investors to re to reinvest in the company in order to build the new part of the journey, the new the new journey, then you know what? Shut down the company and restart a new company that is doing exactly that. And t…”

“I really think, honestly, I think it starts the first project where For example, the founding engineers hands off and then the new hire is, is taking over responsibility or the person who was like sort of founder slash CEO is like first giving it to a PM to ki…”

“If you're truly on a track to become like a, an executive someday or found your own company and make it successful, you will find that the compensation is so much backloaded. That you would make 90% of your compensation in the last five years of your career.”

“There's a problem with selection bias that we, you know, we hear from the folks who, they were brilliant. They were, you know, they checked all those boxes I just described. They saw a great opportunity. They were smart. They, you know, executed well. They had…”

“When you have this ego identity of yourself about How fucking amazing you are. Then any moment that challenges that is super scary. Anyone who questions it is offensive.”

“Founders, Can get to the next product. And that's something that, you know, almost no professional CEO is able to do. Like there have been rare cases, but very rare.”

“You often want to bring in revenue operations, which is basically the analytical arm of sales earlier than you think, because having data, having process is actually what gives you insights as a founder into what is and isn't working.”

“Don't ask people for advice. Ask people for relevant experience. If you ask them for advice, they will always give it. But if you ask them for relevant experience, they rarely have any to offer. And if they don't have any to offer, then don't ask for their adv…”

“I just usually think the best startup as fat for founders, not necessarily for everybody else is the one you're already working at. And if you're not happy, turn that into your a hot AI startup. It's not, here's the thing. It's not too late, Lenny.”

“80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder.”

“When you feel that you're a little bit on the edge of society, or you're not maybe in the mainstream, and this is, you know, resonates with some people that's not as resonate with everybody. You feel very skeptical of the mainstream because you're just on the …”

“When you're in the, you know, the, you know, the back alley of that organization, the bowels of those organizations, you learn how bad it is to be an employee, like the bureaucracy above you leadership doesn't know what's going on the industry, the, you know, …”

“Once every five years, you might find one where early you can see, you can actually point your finger on it empirically, but that that's way too strict as a bar for an early stage investor. But you re I personally want the founder to articulate to me. Where th…”

“When I started the group five years ago, we had. For the first two to three years until we got to about 60, 70 people in this community of head of products, we had one founder. In the last 12 months, as we've gone to about a 125, we have 14 founders. 14 people…”

“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”

“Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's a prayer, but it's not founded in anything that your lived experience, it's not founded in your experience with your product, your experience with people experiencing your product and the data and …”

“What you're seeing here. Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now. Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now. Founders would not recommend their roles. Neither would people in sales or go to …”

“It's very clear that founders are top of nearly every measure. They're 71% optimistic. They're enjoying their jobs. The most, they have the lowest burnout, the lowest layoff worry, the most AI excitement.”

“Most, most C-level executives don't respond to marketing. They might see your brand. They're not going to respond to a marketing campaign. Okay. It will respond one-on-one and the best individual to one-on-one to a corporate executive is the founder.”

“The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. That's why founders are so good at this.”