startup

“I see so many examples with small startups, where, you know, they get ruined by early angel investors, who are, you know, spending all their time challenging the company, and like, have their own agendas, and like, don't focus on just making the founder great,…”

“How many of you ring a bell every time you win a deal, right? It's a big thing in a startup, but they were ringing a bell when the customer became referenceable, and their early goal, they were an A-round company was to get to that 60 customers that were not, …”

“Starting a business is so much easier, ah, than it's made out to be. It's so much easier than, it's like all the complexity is invented complexity. It's a complexity, I would say, being sold to you by Primarily with people who profit from that complexity. Who …”

“What startups, my recommendation as a rule is don't ask people to take salary cuts. I know you're the hottest startup that there's ever been that no one's ever heard of, but don't ask people to take salary cuts unless you have to.”

“Deploy large amounts of money efficiently into your startup, but it's not that common. Usually people end up wasting it, and it is much more painful to have to fire people and contract as a company than it is to grow.”

“I have seen just hard fails from people who kind of like have that Silicon Valley passport that you're looking for. Oh, three years at Google, and then four years at Facebook. Fantastic. Not for your 20% startup. That person, especially people from Facebook th…”

“Great startups have a system to have hard conversations. Bad startups either bottle it in or get into constant fights.”

“I think that most of them fail not because their hypothesis or thesis was wrong. I think most of them fail because either their timing was slightly off, or because of some of these problems, they didn't have time to iterate their products so that they can find…”

“We've seen a long history of YC companies be very successful in selling to startups initially. If they're selling key components that if they work, they will not be ripped out. If your payment system works, you're not going to rip it out.”

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

“When success happens, it's gonna punch you in the face. And you're not going to be able to confuse it for anything else. If you're not getting punched in the space with traction, you're not succeeding, and you don't need all those people.”

“If you create the expectation inside of your company that you have product market fit with your employees and you don't grow, your employees start asking questions. And you really set yourself up to not be able to answer them well. So you want employees who ar…”

“One in 12, that is the probability of a startup that is growing at 20% right now to survive over the next decade.”

“You're, again, you're not trying to out Microsoft Microsoft. That, that's suicidal. Don't do that. So, think about things that are truly different.”

“I mean, no. I would have reps first to show that your stuff works, that customers are interested, that prospects are interested. You're gonna find a couple amazing reps, and you're a startup, and you're gonna hire for aptitude at first. So, I would start with …”

“When you're in startup mode, startup going to growth, and even growth mode going to scale, you want to find someone who knows how to actually figure things out. Not execute on a playbook that's been given to them.”

“I would guess probably eight in 10 startups probably fire or lose their first VP of sales inside of a year.”

“You can check that you can say these things, but if you haven't done it, you can't do it for the first time at your startup. It's asking too much.”

“So to come and say to startup, Hey, you guys need to have a knowledge base when maybe you have, I don't know, 50 or a hundred or a thousand customers. Maybe she'd be spending more time talking to them rather than necessarily deflecting them.”

“In terms of agencies, it's really about not outsourcing your strategy, right, and the ideation. What they should be doing, let's just take messaging, for example, or product marketing, or even PR, right? They have the relationships. They can help up level your…”

“Being fast in general is probably the only advantage that you have as a startup going after bigger companies”

“If some people look at the door and want to buy your product, but yet are too small or too big for you, I would strongly advise you to build trust with them by recommending competitive alternatives.”

“And so, like, if you raise now, if you can avoid it, you're gonna be getting a lot of bottom fissures.”

“Startups are about elevating into the information flow. Once you're in the information flow of the market, it's actually not that hard to figure out what to build, what people are reacting to, what to sell. Elevating into that market information flow is how it…”

“We're cutting too much in marketing. And I'll tell you what I think we should be doing. We're cutting too much and it's going to hurt everybody, not this week or even this quarter, but it's going to hurt everyone's going to not going to have enough pipeline at…”

“If you do a brief strategic retreat as a startup, it's fine. Take a quarter, get your house in order, right? Get rid of that terrible VP, cut your burn rate. But if you stay in strategic retreat for a year, you never pull out of it, right?”

“Initially you have somebody focused on serving the customer. That includes both mitigating churn, making them successful, and also increasing the revenue because especially at an early stage as a startup, having this like concept of over specialization where y…”

“At least until maybe 50 or a hundred people, everyone should be technical, and I'm, I mean that by, like, a very broad definition of technical, which is they're a builder, so they're a designer, engineer, really good at sales, things like that, but you don't w…”

“With a few exceptions, I don't have any empathy for startups that had decent growth during 2021 and have slowed to zero. Ok, I don't have any empathy. You really have no customers? Really none? No. What it really means is your product wasn't valuable enough. I…”

“Why startups win is that corporations end up saying no a lot to really good ideas. You actually have to probably get yeses all the way up the chain, whereas startups only need one yes, one percent of the time over the course of a year in order to build somethi…”

“I think what happens is the companies that start with one thing with like this plan. Yeah, yeah, but someday we're going to build like the next thing. They very rarely get to the next thing. Like the first thing just sucks up more and more time and energy and …”

“I see the majority of startups I meet between 1,000,010 million want a true VP of CS and don't have one. They want one. They can't find the person.”

“Your first 50 employees, your first 50, have to be pirates or romantics. They have to be pirates or romantics. You know what I'm talking about. These are folks on your team that for reasons that almost don't make sense, live in, lead startups.”

“If you're a VP of sales and a, you know, you go to a startup or a growth company, you should have a good idea about who the people that you want to hire before you actually take the job. And if you don't, then you probably did something wrong.”

“I think there's some statistic that like, 90 plus percent of first VPs of sales hired at a startup turnover inside of 12 months or less than 12 months.”

“In 2002, there were only two types of startups in existence. Those that had raised a large amount of money at a ridiculous valuation prior to April 2001, or dead. There was no other type of startup in 2002, when the internet bubble burst.”

“There's still, I think, you're still gonna see over the next year or two a lot of companies, you know, Run out of money and die, or have to take down rounds or, you know, restructure.”

“If you hire someone from something that is great, but easier to sell and yours is harder, they will fail almost always.”

“I think that's kind of the world we're gonna be in again. Like, the multiple, the public multiples are at six X. Startups don't have to be at six X. But everything's outside of, you know, some great stuff in the YC batch. That's the world you're gonna live in.…”

“I think there's a decent chance that whatever you're working on as a startup, as a use case, as a problem, It might be irrelevant. It might be like it's 1997, and you're working on a client server, on premise piece of software, and you're about to get the rug …”

“I personally believe the number one failure reason for startups is they choose the wrong time to scale and they choose to scale at the wrong pace.”

“The thing that actually is that people struggle with when they lose, when they leave a place like that is when you work for a company that's really well run and you have first party experience of things being done right. And then you go to a startup where thin…”

“You don't scale either of those channels or people until you are happy with the efficiency of those people and processes.”

“Even if they're doing okay, if people are only okay, but they show up In the bottom of your stack rank, you just gotta move them out because the talent market is really good right now for startups. There's a lot of, there's less companies competing for talent.…”

“I think that this sort of stuff is, is not quite moat level. I'd like to believe that it's moat level. Yeah, I don't know. You know how it is. A lot of startups don't care about that. Don't care about following those rules. If everyone had to force, everyone w…”

“The number one reason I see startups struggle at your stage. In today's world is they hire a VP of sales that either doesn't want to sell. Or doesn't ever want to learn the product.”

“Mostly hiring agencies is the fastest way to flush your money down the toilet as a founder.”

“There's lots of products out there in those thousand companies. Not all of them are standalone companies. And so making sure you think about how do you make that leap to that?”

“Unless your business plan is predicated on price model disruption, do what everybody else does.”

“Your ability to win as a leader is your ability to change the behavior of your teams. Startups win or lose on speed. Can you change and adapt and iterate faster than your competitors and keep ahead of the market?”

“Just remember when you do have M&A discussions with companies, you're being bought to solve a problem. The problem might be a feature gap. The problem might be, I got three years behind. The problem might be, I'm going to miss the quarter. The problem might be…”

“Often there is an investor on the cap table that's been there for a long time, and their model, it's like the tail wagging the dog here, their model is they need to see some liquidity for the next fund, so they're often very problematic reasons.”

“It used to not be like this in 20, 21. Now it's just a grind. I feel like if you feel like yours is a grind, you're truly like. 99% of companies were all in the exact same boat.”

“I've seen a lot of startups for growth stage companies where their net retention rate is down 1015, or 20 points year over year.”

“Startups are going, as they scale up, have ARR per FDE has gone from 182 to 237. Again, once you're public, it's more like 400 to 500. But this is materially more significant while operating expenses has remained flat even with inflation.”

“I think we're now probably on a, like a bit of a, the start of a downturn in terms of people perception of agents. And I think later by like Q three and four, we're going to see another major capabilities jump and the tools will get a lot better. And I think w…”