startup

“If you want to sort of really dominate a market and be the player that everybody needs markets, reference each other. Right. And you have to build up that momentum to sort of say, oh yeah, what does Clickfolio do? Oh, boom. They do this. For this kind of a com…”

“One of the mistakes, frankly, that entrepreneurs tend to make is they'll, they'll start a company in a completely kind of random domain that they don't have a lot of experience or they don't have firsthand experience with the particular problem that they're so…”

“Venture tends to push a kind of short term thinking. You know, oftentimes there's a conflict. In the business between doing what the right thing for the business would be if you were to run it for the next 20 years versus doing the thing that's going to allow …”

“I think the expectations of the market of a new startup, whether it's VCs or actually your buyers today, are much higher than they were eight, nine years ago.”

“When you're going from zero to one, everything is zeros and ones. It either is extremely important, must be done, or it doesn't matter at all. Like, this is the shades of grays that kill you, because You have so many more things to do than you could do than yo…”

“If you're Call it, I don't know, pre-ten grand or 20 grand a month. If you have like more than five people, I don't know what you're doing.”

“Similar to an employee, right? Like by the time that you're like, I don't know if this person's really working out. Maybe, maybe we should part ways. You probably should. 80% plus of the time in startup world, like bigger companies different, but in startup wo…”

“That, like, lesson of, like, the everything comment, I think it's, like, one of the scariest things I've, like, you'll ever hear at a startup is, like, Well, this product would be cool if it did everything. Right. And it's like, it won't be good until it do…”

“If an idea starts with people who know nothing about an industry saying, wouldn't it be cool if. Like, it's probably, right? You're doomed. It's not leading to somewhere that you want it to lead to.”

“The longer startups can stay experiments without these external stakeholders and their only stakeholders are the people on the team. And then the customer, the better you can run experiments and the better you can actually find value.”

“The point here is not to prove that we can make money. The point here right now is to prove that there is a need and there is a pain point that has to be solved. So I like going more after the ones we don't know and call Molly.”

“Even a hundred million-dollar startup should feel ridiculous to most people, because the odds of that happening are so vanishingly slim, and it's weird to me that we all talk about this thing that's less likely than most lottery wins, so, you know, I don't tot…”

“Like, you hear these stats that nine out of 10 startups fail, and I like to tell them that, like, look, no, it's not nine out of 10, it's 99 out of hundred, because you didn't count all the first 90 startups that the founder killed themselves, like, you know, …”

“The average person sees 4005 thousand advertisements a day. There is no startup budget that is going to break through 4000 to 5000 advertisements and actually, actually create some awareness for your product.”

“It's like a lot harder than raising for a startup. But dude, I'm pretty sure that your average VC raising a fund will have this mental limits and they'll think that, I don't know, BlackRock would never invest in them or that the Saudis would never invest in th…”

“I think that for most startups, it's actually probably the better path to go down to begin with. Because you can speak to the customers more closely when you're selling to them. They have to make more of a decision because they're signing a contract and they'r…”

“Listen, I, I've seen more companies, you know, choked by indigestion than starvation, right? They've just, you know, they try to define their business by their technology versus the markets they want to serve.”

“It takes a long time for the bankruptcies, or the winds down, or the forced exit, forced mergers to actually happen, and in the meantime, there's a lot of different pieces that, that you can pull together To keep going”

“I typically see PMs like the first PM be higher number, I don't know, 30, number 40, something like that. I think that is a, I think that's like the right sort of time to think about it because you've probably raised enough money. You've seen enough traction.”

“So there's some businesses that are built where there's like a really small window of like success to exit. So you've got like, you know, if you don't exit in three years to one of like the top 20 companies in the space, like you're being, you're building this…”

“And at some point you work with someone and he finished his service and he starts to start. He's like, Hey, this moron worked with me like two days ago in the same room. He can do a startup. I can also do a startup. Okay. And it becomes this place where it cre…”

“Doing a startup is A lot more work, or at least a lot more time invested than you know, raising a kid.”

“Large companies are not really excited about bringing on someone that has a high chance of turnover. And it's just kind of come in and like disruption. And they were much more excited about bringing in like a, you know, a multiplied Team multiplier team that'…”

“And when you're just trying to like figure things out, it's actually easier with four or five people than with like 20 or 30.”

“25 to 35% is where many solid startups live, and because you can go very far on that, I think if you're sub-twenty, certainly sub-fifteen percent, it's just gonna take way too much work, like, and your metrics all across are just gonna stop making sense, becau…”

“At any given moment in a startup, whether it's a week, a month, a quarter, whatever that timeframe is, you actually can't prioritize like you normally would in a normal job. We say, these are the things you got to do. This is the most important. So we'll start…”

“Everyone sort of feels like I have to raise money to build a company. And it's, that's not true. The difference between like, oh, I want to build a million dollar company or a ten million dollar company or a hundred million or a billion dollar company. Like th…”

“Most startups fail due to founder conflict. Having things written down creates a lot of alignment.”

“One of the hardest parts is making sure you always have your kind of sponsor inside the big organization, because until you have it, I feel like things are slow, but they go on. As soon as that person leaves, moves, goes to some other job, then you're, you hav…”

“People ask me, should they start a company? And my answer very quickly is no. And the And the reason I say that is actually related to your question. I say that because if just talking to me and I tell, you know, you're convinced that like, oh, maybe I shouldn…”

“Over raise. Cash is literally the single most important insurance policy that every single startup has years before they're profitable and capable of standing on their own two feet. There's no amount of optimizing for dilution that will ever convince me that r…”

“I think market always trumps founders when there's like a bad market and a good founder market wins.”

“It's not first mover advantage. It's first to product market fit that wins regardless how much they raise. And if you can get to product market fit without much money, You're gonna win even if the other guy raises more.”

“I think for the most part, raising a lot of money early is it, it's, it makes the company worse rather than better for the most part.”

“Validated learning about customers, if it's truly valid, should allow you to go from one to ten million in two years or less.”

“A lot of people say to me, Hey, well, I don't have a natural way to get out of the present. And I'm like, okay, then maybe you shouldn't be thinking of starting a startup.”

“Most startup ideas I find come from not having a formal assessment process, but rather by living in the correct future and tinkering with what's happening in the future. And by tinkering with the future, you learn what's new about it, but you also learn what's…”

“Most companies die because I think they get the culture wrong because it's not fucking fun to work at your startup where you're grinding 13 hours a day with people you don't even like.”

“You're not going to go through referrals and word of mouth at the beginning. Most people don't know this, but branding really kicks in after your attempt. Like most startups don't think in tenure horizons, but if you actually look at your brand name and this r…”

“For all the science that you might think exists in this space, people will tell you that they're the smartest operator in the world and they came up with a plan when the reality is that 90% of this stuff, 99, is people driving off their gut, chasing the things…”

“So any drops that you see on these charts from say, 22 to 23, or even candidly, 23 to 24, I don't ascribe much of that to AI. I ascribe a lot of that to just the new meta around startups of try to stay lean as long as possible.”

“One thing about managing big teams that people don't understand is the gap between, say, 20 people and 15 people is not five. The gap is five factorial. It's all of the relationships of those extra five people to the work that had already been doing. So it is …”

“You only have two real advantages. One, you can really cater the initial set of value of the product to what they want because you're building it as you're talking to them, right? So you can do the things that they always wanted to get and nobody else would gi…”

“All of these categories are getting so crowded so quickly. And I think that is a real step change from what was going on certainly pre-pandemic, but even just pre-ChatGPT. It just feels very difficult to find a truly novel idea.”

“A long maybe will kill you.”

“Really your only tools, the speed at which you ship product and the speed at which you iterate, you know, that's really it. That's like kind of the only competitive advantage to be honest.”

“I think most startups are not enough, are not being enough, are not meant to be Standardland businesses, but more like a feature in a, or a product in a bigger business, right?”

“I think most first time founders or founders who haven't yet had a good exit deep down, they're often playing not to lose. They're not playing to win because the reality is you put so much into a startup. It's your whole life. You're making very little money c…”

“The biggest problem, in my view, of startups is not a product that fails, because most startups can fix a product. It's the irrelevance. You have sold someone, that product is sort of, it's sitting in the side, no one gives a shit.”

“If a company is bought by a private equity firm, that typically to me means that A, it's a big market that people have sharks, but B, the B firm will like rip out the people. They'll go through like a period of fast growth and they're going to sell it. There's…”

“I don't think competition is what kills startups at our stages, right? It's competition makes you do stupid things like copy other players or go toward the second, a different direction.”

“Innovating usually means innovating in one place. You're innovating in distribution. You're innovating on service. You're innovating on technology. You're innovating on simplicity and product features on time to value. But not a lot of companies are able to bu…”

“I don't think it is a startup's job to change a market or create awareness.”

“I find it's almost guaranteed that you're either going to have to fight status quo and people just not wanting to change or move because they don't really have a burning need, or you're going to have to find competitive vendors. Like the odds of you Being in a…”

“In terms of technology, you had the exact same shot of succeeding as Salesforce or Zendesk, et cetera.”

“Out of a hundred enterprises you're going to talk to only probably five to 10 of them will even consider working with a startup.”

“You cannot increment your way out of Like slow growth, right? It's usually something to do with the market structurally, like you have some kind of a problem. So even if you increase your conversion rate by five percent and you do all of these things, it's not…”