Cockroach Labs

“And even when you have egregious product failures, and believe me, when you're building a relational operational database, they can be pretty egregious. Every one of those has the seed of a stronger, more trusting relationship with that customer.”

“And the execution, if it's sort of blind, you're going to end up with a sort of local maximum, if even that. Instead, what you need to do is you need to inform all of that effort with a visionary belief in what you're doing. And that's what you bring as a foun…”

“What we are trying to do, this is sort of empirically determined, is say that the first 20 employees of the company would have 10% of the equity. And the next 20 employees would have an additional five percent of the equity. And then the next 40 employees woul…”

“We were building a product before we had customers for about three years, and I was programming.”

“I mentioned before there's some exploitive behavior from the cloud service providers, in particular AWS, and so you have to be very careful about your license if you're doing open source. I would not just have a very powerful core that, for example, is with th…”

“So that early go-to-market leader that rolls up their sleeves, they probably won't scale very far with you. Maybe a year, and that's actually pretty good.”

“On the way I've done a lot of angel investing, so I've invested in more than 80 different startups.”

“To beat all of the incumbents that are there, you have to be 10 times better. It's almost impossible to be 10 times better at everything that an involved product category has. But you can be 10 times better if you define a niche in that product category that y…”

“No matter how good your idea is, or how novel it seems, the best ideas arrive by multiple people at the same time.”

“And so when we decided that we were going to even consider doing another startup, which was Cockroach, we actually sat down, we wrote a manifesto on culture, before we even incorporated the company.”