founders

“Most founders are going to have the big idea to start the company, and they're going to have many ideas that are all top priorities, and so I think it's the job of the VP of product to be able to not just prioritize those ideas but really do the analysis and g…”

“Particularly for that first one, or those first handful, and probably it'll last for a long time, you will need to own that sales process, and honestly, the larger enterprises will expect it and they'll value it too, but you're gonna probably need to take owne…”

“Employees are naturally sort of aligned, ah, to your vision. But also, they don't really have the same downside as yours. Like, they're not, their emotions aren't as tied in the company as yours aren't. If they, if you lose, you know, if you fail, To you, ah, …”

“One of the learnings I've seen is don't rush out too quickly to go hire the expensive enterprise sales reps. Learn how to sell those early enterprise deals yourself. Cause it is illuminating from a product marketing sales support and success standpoint.”

“Oh, you're so blessed and awesome as a founder that no one could possibly impact the business as much as you? Well, then you're not hiring impactful people, and that's your problem.”

“I think you have to make emotionally difficult choices, and I'll be very specific, all along the way to build a healthier company and to make you also maybe avoid this fate”

“We at Think Three think that there is an incentives misalignment, fundamentally, between most VCs and founders, and that that incentives misalignment is pushing companies to grow too much too fast, and it's ruining great companies like PowerDrive.”

“So, if you're a VC, you have the incentive, no matter where you think the company might initially fall on this rank, force ranking of multiples of invested capital, you have an incentive to try to force every company to be a unicorn, to try to shoot for the st…”

“Founders should more often be selling their companies more quickly and moving on to start more companies because they get a lot better every time they do it.”

“Most of the founders we talk to actually want to choose the lifestyle option, but they're almost sort of embarrassed by it, given the market we're in, so they feel like they have to sprinkle a little bit of big leagues into it, and that just makes their lives …”

“You are the biggest expert in your company. Don't let an investor convince you that you're further along than you are.”

“I think the funniest thing that happens in startups is success hurts more than failure. Because success comes with all these expectations.”

“I think for founders and other folks that are on this, I would model today, 50% decline in the number of companies that get funded and 50% decline in the dollars that go out there.”

“The first two reps have to be people that you would buy from, ok?”

“My rule or my advice is to founders is figure out how much money you need. Bootstrap, venture backed, whatever. Do it on a spreadsheet, do it carefully, then be conservative, then add 25%. If you raise that extra 25%, and then it's the right amount.”

“Because I think four to five years is when everyone hits a wall, right?”

“They rarely get great at the things that are not the traits of their founders.”

“If I were a founder looking for a VP of sales right now, I would be, and I didn't, you know, I didn't have, you know, a big network of sales leaders that I knew, or whatever, you know, whatever the terms of the scenario are, like, I would be meeting with peopl…”

“I've found that in true enterprise, like real enterprise, the founder is often the VP of sales until ten million.”

“There's too many founders that are going to raise nine-figure funds while they're running their own startups. And it used to be a bad sign for the startup, right? And it used to be like, how could you do anything other than run your own startup? But it doesn't…”

“When you don't see that, my rule is, and I've made this mistake since, don't invest. No matter how much you love the founder, you can love them as humans. They can be doing very well. But if you don't have this crazy 20 year commitment to building something hu…”

“Without question. And without question, it's better for founders. Without question. Every element of venture that is, and I'm being binary when it's off course more subtle than this, but every much of the collaboration in venture did not benefit founders, righ…”

“I saw countless careers that were ended by 98, 99 by learning the wrong lessons. Yeah. And I think we have an entire generation of investors and some founders That need to learn new lessons about how hard it is to actually play this, you know, startup ecosyste…”

“As founders, your job is spend at least 20, 20% of your time recruiting, half if you can, but meet all the great VPs, and if you think you need a VP of sales, but you find a great VP of demand gen, just hire her. If you think you need a great VP of product, bu…”

“During the journey of the growth, we do a lot of mistakes, and very interestingly, the first mistake is not accepting that we are mistaken.”

“Like an ownership of 10, 20% on the founders is way too low for the beginning because it's going to keep getting diluted.”

“Because if you work with one of those folks, and they have a bad reputation in the industry, they can absolutely sink, sink your fundraise on the spot. Because there are people in the business who are not trustworthy, who run around with shitty deals, who gene…”

“The loser-ist thing as a founder you can say to a VC, right, they make you sound like a loser, and I literally never use the word loser, right, it's terrible, but it's true, is we didn't grow that fast last month because we were fundraising.”

“If there are two companies growing from zero to about a hundred million in ARR, one of them has a burn multiple of four. The other one has a burn multiple initially starting at about three and then decreasing to about .75. Then just because you have to raise s…”

“I think we'll see the death of many of the micro funds, the funds that raised from founders, public market founders who now have had their net worths crushed.”

“The mature founders, the fathers, the, and the mothers, and the more mature minded are weathering it well. They know that if their child gets sick, it's going to be much worse than a recession. But the young, young founders, their volatility is very extreme. I…”

“You know, you have been getting a check that is way lower than usual check. So they may be paying to learn. So you're not in the same category that a core deal or deal that have been going to put way more than usual.”

“Like many other companies, VCs also have their own CRMs. So, if you meet an analyst or another partner, and if the answer is no, and if you go to another partner and don't give that context, the other partner, the chances of that other partner knowing that you…”

“Founders including accelerating bookings into one number. Like I have a one-year deal, I have a, you know, a 120 K deal, it's 10 K a month, well I'll just book it as one 20 this month. That's fraud.”

“So many of the best founders at the best companies spend a high percentage of their time customer facing. And that happens on day one and it happens on day 1000.”

“Which I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to optimize for dilution early on. Instead, what I think people should be looking at is just how much money do you really need in order to get to that stage where you get product market fit.”

“The power it holds when like a founder, a CO, CO, RCRO, like reaches out directly to a candidate just holds so much more weight.”

“They're tough on all of us, and I really think as founders, we should do everything humanly possible to have no non-performance layoffs. I mean, we have recurring revenue. You should be able to predict the next quarter or two. You should be a little embarrasse…”

“Any founder you talk to can remember every single investor who said no to them. And they hold a special kind of, I don't want to use the word hatred, but they hold a special something for those people and they desire to prove them wrong.”

“One of the things that founders don't understand is that if I don't know what your company does, I can't fund you. The number one barrier to not knowing what your company does is you.”

“The whole thing falls apart when you have some vision as a founder, CEO, entrepreneur, or even if you're a functional leader, and the people underneath you don't believe the same things, it's all a house of cards.”

“The advice I give when asked this question is find a company that you admire, and then hire the person one level below. Somebody who has something to prove, who is probably doing a ton of the work, and think about where you are as a company”

“And I know it's tough, and a lot of founders are going to quit this year. A lot of founders are going to quit this year, not because they're out of money, but because they fell out of product market fit, right?”

“And obviously you've been aware that this is like a clear shift in what the boards and founders are asking us. And it's no longer like growth at all costs. It's low CAC at all costs for better or worse.”

“It's always your fault when someone doesn't work out... It's you didn't do the work. You didn't figure out if they were the right fit. They never know. You can never know enough about a company before you join. It's impossible.”

“As founders, I'll tell you, don't build something that might work in five years. You always need to say what works today.”

“Almost all founders find that fewer of their customers are onboarded as quickly as they think. Fewer, they're often shocked that they sign a customer and they just assume their team's gotten them up and going and they find out what, it's been 60 days, it's bee…”

“No, it's a frigging, it's a sales business and a hustle business for almost everybody. And the only folks that don't have to hustle like that, have massive inbound. And there's only a handful of folks where the founders pick them. It's only, it's very rare.”

“The frickin' founders who are starting the company and trying to do something impossible and move a rock up a mountain ought to be available at eight p.m. Sunday night for an hour and a half to plan out the week.”

“They expect their valuations to be the same as in 2023 and the same as in 2022.”

“So for the founders in the room, I would say the number one thing I would say is completely think about the workflow you're intercepting with your AI. Don't think about the AI. So if there are 19 steps to doing something in the world today, and you as a founde…”

“When you hire a great sales leader, assign it, you don't get any time back in sales. It's just used differently. You'll just be more efficient.”

“I firmly believe that even if you do raise VC for most folks, a one and done is the best approach. Raise a little bit of seed money and then call it a day. Don't take the stress and pressure.”

“Our founders did a couple million dollars with founder led sales before hiring anyone.”

“Founders will see a decline in market share before VCs can see it before anyone can see it, you'll smell it. You'll go walk into that deal and you'll start losing deals. But you're still growing at a hundred percent or 80 or 200%.”

“Founders, you are the head of sales until you have a repeatable motion. You must own it until the motion works, and then you can hire to scale. So essentially a repeatable motion means that a non-founder can sell and close.”

“This is, you will get more benefits, but you do not get time back. You lose time. You lose time with these agents.”

“If we think about all the blogs that you read and all the shit about here's how to go do this, it's all predicated in a world where your product kind of changes once a year. But what happens if your product changes every 30 days, which, oh, by the way, if you'…”

“I tell founders today or anybody in startups, if you want to do this, you have to go through cringe valley for a bit. You're going to put stuff out there that feels just terrible, but that's the whole point. You learn, you put yourself out there, you build the…”