startup

“If you're one of your companies stop sending their updates for a bit that company is about to die or they're on their way to dying and they go into a shell”

“I'm going to invest around 250 to 500,000 dollars in the next probably 18 months in startups.”

“I don't like starting lots of little stuff. I prefer to dedicate my life to something. And I'm very cautious about what I'm willing to do that with, because you probably can only do that three to four times in your life.”

“If what you're really going for is I want to make You know, 200,300 1500 thousand, a million bucks a year, and that, that is my goal, not to change the world. There's so many better ways to do it than do a startup, in my opinion.”

“When people think they need a mentor to go do their project or to like start their startup, they're looking for a mentor first. It's just an advanced form of procrastination.”

“The second bit is that the maze is time varying. So what's a bad idea today could be a good idea in the future or vice versa.”

“I think a lot of startups, it's a little bit of chicken and egg. How do you get the capital unless you have the team? You can't hire the team until you have the capital. But you don't get enough capital until you prove it, and so you get a million bucks, then …”

“And even startups who can't really raise well or don't, aren't strong enough to go public, they can go public via a SPAC, and then all of a sudden, hey, we got liquid. Great. So, so there's definitely a lot of, like, lipstick on the pig going on.”

“Typically, that means it's failing horribly, or it's actually quite large. Like it's usually like one or the other.”

“A startup is really like a speedboat, right? It's exhilarating. It can go anywhere, but at the end of the day, you know, you're driving over waves, you're getting your, you know, body destroyed, you're freezing cold. You might hit a rock. You might get drunk. …”

“I had this phrase I used to say at our startup, which is you can always run out of money, but you can never declare creative bankruptcy. And that was always my rule was like, I cannot have a conversation with somebody who says, ah, I can't think of an idea. I …”

“Startups are the only asset class, like, real estate doesn't work this way, stock market, like, in real estate, if you want to buy it, you go buy it. If you want stock, if you want to buy it, you go buy it. Startups are the only thing where even if you want in…”

“And by the way, this just general thing, which is companies that go get it, that get acquired. And then like, kind of like, Dissolve in the big company. Just go restart those companies like three years later.”

“So my position is I lean more towards kind of Paul Graham and the spectrum, which is, I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a kind of downturning ec…”

“And actually that shit doesn't work in startups. It is not the norm and that would be the outlier if it was to work. The norm is what they call the benevolent dictator.”

“I've done that a handful of times. You know, probably at least 10 to 15 businesses of which, you know, 90% of them go to zero, and then there's a few that pop and become, you know, pretty big.”

“A startup is kind of the same way when it's young, which is that the only advantage it has is that it's really valuable. So don't harden that too quickly by going and publicly announcing it when you may not have You know, tested it enough to understand exactly…”

“It worked, in the end it worked, right, the 15 year arc, You get like a, then the odds flip from like, 90% of new businesses fail to actually like, 90% of you guys will succeed if you actually enjoy this enough, where you'll keep doing this even though you hav…”

“I just feel like it's like this, because there's something inorganic about the studio model versus like just a normal startup that comes from an entrepreneur solving their own itch.”

“Your cap table, I think, is the one thing in your company that is irreversible for mistakes. Besides that, most every mistake that you make, most mistakes, not all, most mistakes you can reverse or you can fix. Cap table, the one thing you can't fix.”

“There's a bunch of really smart people that are now, have a new business strategy, and their business strategy is to buy wounded unicorns.”

“They should be like, 10 x economic opportunities, and then 10 x reputation. It never works the other way. Like, there's no company that there's a 10 x reputation opportunity first, and then there's a 10 x economic opportunity. Like, the economics have to be ca…”

“These are great businesses that will just keep growing, keep compounding. You could join them today as employee 500 and you will become a millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff. If you could just identify the kind of like 10 companies a yea…”

“So since then, about 36% of startups who have raised money since then Had raised at a lower valuation.”

“I'd seen, over the two years at USP, so many people start startups to start them, and then get into them, and then be like, I don't want to work on this, but now I have people in office, investors, like, I can't stop.”

“Most people actually try a bunch of stuff, and eventually something might work, but it's like, At best thing five, and it might be thing 55, but no one really talks about that because it's both because it's like painful and kind of not fun, and you know, it's …”

“I think that there's gonna be some really successful startups that take AI and the concept of biohacking and then use plants as their focus, as their target market, rather than humans.”