founders

“You said when you reframed this, you have to be, you know, different. I don't think it's the case, but it is the majority case.”

“There's a wonderful study that came out from UCSF Berkeley and Stanford called, Are Entrepreneurs Touched with Fire? And it looked at the mental health of entrepreneurs and founders in Silicon Valley and found that a surprising 72% of founders report mental he…”

“You hire a founder from Seed, and, like, what you're looking for up front and the creativity you need can actually be very at odds with what you need from real management later on, and, you know, it used to be that the founders would come up with ideas, and th…”

“The worst case scenario is you waste a decade of someone's time on something that's not going to work. Right. And so the reality is I actually think it's like rip the bandaid off. If you're on the margin, if it's not working, like it's actually kind of disinge…”

“It's one of the beauties of Silicon Valley and our economy as it's set up, is like, this is a no-fault zone, unless, you know, so don't lie, don't make shit up. It's either working or not, and you probably know, Right? And if it's not working, it's completely …”

“That's why your seed investors, you know, hashtag marketing for ourselves are really the only aligned capital you'll ever get. Right. Cause we come in and the reality is we're, seed investors get fucked even before the founders do.”

“VCs do this, and I just think it's in every founder's right to do the same thing and say, look, you know, when competing offers come in, Who do I want to work for? And am I okay with if I make this person a billion dollars or a lot of money, what I think they'…”

“If you're an investor who is now backing a founder without a safety net, you are gonna be damn choosy about which founders you back, and you are gonna back the cream of the cream founders who actually know how to do the maneuvers.”

“I'd actually argue that they're kind of the whole paradigm of like smart product founder, hire a business person, good, make business work. That's actually like never actually true. What you need is smart. You need the founder to be that person.”

“I think in the next 12 months, I will get more and more pitches of people who are like, I don't need two and a half million dollars to prove one statistic to try to hail Mary and A. I actually need like four or five, but on the other side of it, I should have …”

“We meet with founders and you can see that they're thinking about their Forbes cover instead of thinking about their business. And that is a huge, huge red flag to me, because you can't be in the you business. You have to be in the business of your product, an…”

“When I'm speaking to founders and when they're pitching, when they're kind of not clear about the roadmap, Right. I get it when you're, when, but when they're not fully clear, when I find them asking me questions like, well, what would you do? Well, wait, that…”

“On the founder side being removed, that usually comes because the growth rate of the founder is not keeping up with the growth rate of the company. And so they're falling behind in their ability to lead the company and to make strategy changes that need to be …”

“The absolute best thing a founder can do is call it and like pivot hard or shut it down, figure out who wants to be on the boat and get off and be honest with employees because it is like, from my perspective, I don't care about the money. The money is the mon…”

“All the founders know that if you're working with offline and slow, we're gonna tell you to shut your fucking companies down when they're not working.”

“Take a few million bucks, go build a business that fucking works. You have to skip the middle with having a profitable business that works. So you never need the middle and then you come out the other side or you have a very profitable business.”

“The founder should get to stay forever if they want, like Steve Jobs asks Zuck, you know, whatever. No, because the founder is like the leading vision that has to like carry the company onward forever, but these C-level people that are there for 2030, 40 years…”

“There's a lot of businesses that are pretty complicated that are really smart person can actually fully grasp and keep in memory and know how to allocate resources and what decisions to make. But, you know, and I think that's been that horizons and push way fa…”

“And like the hot take is this is the most difficult time of all time to be this category as an LP GP or founder.”

“When you're at a meeting, if you don't take your coffee cup after you've had coffee and offer to return it to the sink or the kitchen and you leave it there, guess what? That's a demerit.”

“I actually don't think you want to go with the person who has the best etiquette. I think the most interesting people are the most improved, right? Like you want the person who comes in with terrible etiquette, but takes it seriously and comes out with great e…”

“It's what all great founders do when they need to, yeah, exactly. Hide layoffs and change the business model.”

“If you're a founder, software is no longer any sort of differentiator. Software is just like consumable. Like, it's just like, it's like a piece of media. Like, it's not like you can't build a software company.”

“We're also seeing founders that are running massive agentic stacks, and they're swapping out for open source models, like left, right, and sideways, because it's just like unsustainable for their margins. Like they just cannot pay these luxury prices.”