founders

“I can't generalize for all investors, but there are three things that I think are vital considerations for every investor. Hunger, speed, and humility.”

“Only one percent of founders, regardless of their gender, will ever raise venture capital, and so what are the other 99% of us startup founders do to fund our businesses?”

“It's one of the reasons I advise founders seeking investment, always to look to take on multiple investors over time, not just one.”

“The advice I always give founders is don't ask people what they think about your idea. Ask them what's wrong with your idea. Invite them to poke holes in it because you want to find those holes before you bring your idea into the world.”

“Founders wear this self-sacrifice as a badge of honor, but under the surface, there's often a feeling that the constant self-sacrifice is unsustainable, and this feeling often surfaces in a wake-up call.”

“A founder cannot succeed unless they're obsessed with their company. And so part of being obsessed with a company means that it's what they think about on Saturday morning. It's what they think about when they end up with, you know, a 15 minutes spare, you kno…”

“I think a fair statement is that the founders built the company in the image of what they saw at the Stanford Graduate School.”

“I didn't get the adrenaline rush I get out of being in the trenches of running a company, which I think is something that a lot of founders miss when they start investing.”

“So many private equity, so many companies go in and they buy these companies and they think the founders are stupid because they don't talk the same language. They don't understand who they are.”

“And I think this is where a lot of founders probably choose to walk away. And it's very difficult to stay.”

“Most founders would consider these social interactions grunt work and try to automate them away as quickly as possible with bots or interns”

“Just because you pulled off a feat with an insane degree of difficulty doesn't mean you need to recreate those same conditions to succeed. Sounds obvious, right? But too often, founders come away from a close call thinking that constant extreme pressure is the…”

“Founders don't care about moats. They don't have anything to protect. They have the ability to disrupt by bending the arc of the present to a different future.”

“And if you're, if your desire in life is to exit, then you should be doing something else because your motivation is in the wrong spot. And that means you're going to be making decisions that are never in the best interests of the one great thing that must be …”

“Half the time with pivots, it's ego, right, that you don't do the pivot. So you have founders who sit there and go, well, wait, I raise money on the first idea. I can't go back to the board and tell them that this isn't working. I can't go back to my family a…”

“The way you ended your previous relationship is going to influence, A, who you're going to choose, and B, how you're going to manage the next one. So you want people to really have an opportunity to discuss their endings of previous businesses”

“So what they don't talk about is the, You know, the phone calls where if you guys don't do what we say, you probably gonna be blackballed. You probably won't be able to raise money again. You know, it's a, you're dealing with these powerful venture capitalists…”