startup

“All this stuff on the margin is just getting cut. Right. And so it's like, it either has to be really working or is dead. There's no more like, eh, it's sort of working. It's a reasonable thesis. They're good people. Let's push it along. Right. No one has tole…”

“It used to be that like, You could get through a series A still on story. I don't think that's the case anymore.”

“You've got startups that have made the hard choice to stay remote. We've got, I would actually say that's the majority case in the startup world.”

“My simple answer is more. My request for startups is that I think it's a deeply hybrid world from here on out. I think there are, like, evolutionary forces at work here.”

“Can we just advise the companies to stop building for, to be a product for the next venture capital round instead of just Build good businesses and treat capital as an option on the future. It's not just about surviving. You want to thrive with or without.”

“Which makes sense if you're an investor, because you want companies that require more and more capital. So you get to keep buying more and more of the startup along the way, like capital. Ironically, venture capitalists love things that can be very large, but …”

“Cause I think it's important that to know that it's not just gonna be like, oh, get through Q four and you'll be better next year. Like, I think we should be advising these companies to really try to stay alive until even like mid 25 because of the way that th…”

“I think this is like pretty good because all of a sudden as a startup, you'd be like, you actually have to build a successful business to go public and make money and like be a successful company. You can't just build a product that's strategically valuable to…”

“And so if you're someone like me, who's in the camp of this is a great disruptive Business technology, and zero dollars will accrue to startups, and they're all going bankrupt. I am now a zealot for no fucking way, right?”

“With a two million dollar initial check, and the right iteration, and the right founder, and the right setup, you can build massive companies, like, with no outside capital.”

“And my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute. Because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year.”

“And in the internet wave, you could argue 80 or 90% of the value went to startups. And in mobile, it was the other way around. Almost all the value went to incumbents, and in part it was because it was an extension of access and UI.”

“I think if things aren't working, I think because money has been so available, people have kept their companies going longer than they should. And in a lot of circumstances more recently, where sometimes the best thing you can do is just kind of quit and resta…”

“I don't think that startups by default are probably going to use these. A lot of people don't have the skill set to boot these things up and to create it from the ground up, even though it's open source.”

“The only way startups win, right, I think in this world, is if the really big companies basically are too prissy And then also are too legal. Like they're suitable. They're real targets. So they can't do this stuff. And then they let all of the babies, like th…”

“Now it doesn't mean that it's all startups. It's going to be Salesforce and it's going to be service. Now it's going to be Oracle. And it's gonna be box.net which is not our official brand. We, you know, we will capture collectively all of that.”

“My bet is, a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today, and my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the…”

“There's a startup we're looking at that's that we like, but it's remote. And we're like, eh, we don't love what they're about.”

“It's kind of like you just demonstrate seriousness by all being in the same place and willingness. Like in some ways there are things in life kind of like Chinese foot binding where like, The value is the signaling, right? As much as anything else. And I do th…”

“The good news about investing in startups is they're mostly, you know, recession proof. They're mostly off into the future.”

“It's not going to be the startups and the up and comers that provide the more personal cases to people. It's going to be the incumbents and the incumbents with enormous business models that can afford to make this stuff really low costs for the consumer.”

“It's now easy to make a demo video that's hilarious of a product that you're never going to fucking ship and like is never going to make money. Like that's not actually fun. That's just silly.”

“In times of great change, victory goes to the people who learn the fastest and they're in things are changing very rapidly. All that's stored, how to do things gets thrown out the window. Right. And it's just basic because it's just less relevant. It's less va…”

“Honestly, the ones that are able to command the higher value valuations tend to be statistically the most successful.”

“Like storytelling, like the future of Hollywood is going to be like storytelling for companies and like we should do this, we should do the documentaries of startups and like continuously be doing high quality video.”

“And if the trailer is sick, then like, that means you have good taste, that means you have a story people are gonna care about, like, it means all the good things. And if your story is boring, or there's no good trailer, then your company's gonna suck.”

“This data is not readily accessible. You can't commoditize it nearly as quickly. And so it gives startups like a chance to actually gain distribution In like a more methodical way before the mega platforms can swallow it up.”