Floodgate

“If you want to start a great startup, don't try to think of a startup. And the reason for that is that great startup founders are like time travelers, and they get out of the present, and they visualize different futures that are a breakthrough, that break fre…”

“Companies have markets that could be segmented, sub-segmented, and classified. Startups don't. Startups, they create movements. They create, they have a secret about the future. They get early believers who co-conspire with them to create a, co-create a differ…”

“Sometimes by saying what you're not for, but like niching down, you're very powerful to the people who care about your niche because people say, where have you been all my life? And so what you're trying to do is find that set of like-minded co-conspirators Fo…”

“I don't even think a startup is a company, right? So I think a startup is, The capabilities and talents of the founders and their insight about the future and what you're betting is on two things. One is that their insights, right? And two is they're good enou…”

“If you're trying to create a breakthrough by definition, it breaks free from the present. So by definition, it can't be compared to something in the present. Because if it's comparable to what's in the present, it's too incremental. It's too conventional.”

“Only with big inflections does an entrepreneur go from being disadvantaged to incumbents to having a fundamental advantage vis-a-vis incumbents.”

“With Lyft GPS has got included for free in smartphones, and we believe that everybody's gonna have smartphones someday, even though in 2010, only 10% did. So you could say, wow, now I can see a world in the future where drivers and riders will be able to locat…”

“There's 2000 seed funds now. And so it was innovative when Ann and I helped invent seed investing in 2006, but like now there's 2000 firms.”

“What's interesting is, in our world, none of those mental models apply. And so, because a startup's not a company, there is no operating history. There, there's no moat. They don't even have a product yet. They got no customers.”

“And so in sector after sector of our economy, the companies that are software defined at their core, I believe software defined network centric companies at their core are going to keep winning. And they're going to keep displacing the companies that think of …”

“When a startup starts, it goes through this breakthrough sequence. It has to have a great insight, which is something about the future that's not obvious that most people don't know. And then after that, they have to create a product breakthrough where they ge…”