founders

“At some point, your success is the velocity of the org, not your own personal velocity, which is a transition that you have to make around 60 to 80 people.”

“When you reflect on your experience building companies, you really romanticize it a lot. You kind of remember all the glorious achievements and fun times and like milestones, and you suppress all the terrible shit that you've endured and all the fucking trauma…”

“Like all of those are implications that I think actually when venture firms don't consider and they just raise more money and then figure it out as they go, like are bad for LPs and bad for founders and thus bad for those firms.”

“It's too easy to get VC pilled and be like, oh, well, like if I change my story a little bit, I could raise a bunch of money.”

“I generally agree. Most founders don't work hard enough. A lot of founders I know work like 40, 50 hours a week, which I think is kind of crazy.”

“When you invest in these people that are really independent thinkers and they end up in interesting companies and start great things, they tend to have friends like that. And so it really compounds on itself.”

“I would advise every founder Before you start your company, think about the higher purpose that you want to serve so that when you are finally successful and you reach that end point, you know exactly what that money's for. And that way you're like, yep, that …”

“I do think, like, and people say this, and it's cheesy, and it's, like, also true, is that the founder really matters, and, like, there's definitely a midwit curve on that that I've written about before, which is, like, You think founders really matter and the…”

“Many, many times I have heard something that is not predictable, that is not recurring, be described as error. And that, you know, historically, you know, traditionally error is, is predictable. It's recurring. It's like signed, you know, contracts, usually th…”

“I think the truth is that even with your board as a founder, I'm not sure your incentives are completely aligned because it's back to, well, first of all, what is the price on the table, right? Is it a nice two or three X for the VCs on the board or not? Becau…”

“When you get to this stage, what you realize is your job is still to build products and sell them. That, that is the most important thing you do. But your job is also to build a company that can do it for you. And that's actually really hard. It's hard enough …”

“Every company that's ever done that hasn't, hasn't done so well. There's this old documentary, which is a great movie called startup.com. I do not recommend this to founders.”

“Early in technology waves, that's when you have all the low hanging fruit. And so one of my pieces of advice to founders is often who are doing really hard things right now in AI. I'm like, why are you doing the really hard thing? Just go do the dumb, easy thi…”

“I think that there's a number of circumstances where people think something's, I'd say, 90% of the time founders think that they're going to compete and they don't. They tend to grow in very different directions, especially if it's two early stage companies.”

“You could think of them as a distributed search function, right? You have thousands of people exploring all the space of entrepreneurship. And so how can any one person or small group of people come up with better ideas and thousands of people in a distributed…”

“As a founder, for example, you project the way that you act onto employees if you haven't managed before, and founders are perfectly fine with chaos and uncertainty and risk, and, but most people aren't. Most of your employees want a stable direction. They wan…”

“I've talked to so many founders that started, that scaled, that sold, and are unbelievably depressed, or unhappy, or realizing that was my best idea. I'll never have an idea that that's good. I have three and a half decades of life, four decades of life ahead …”

“There, there's a multi-billionaire right now that is asked to get on the podcast, and I started researching a guy, I thought he was a little creepy, and I said no.”

“I think that one of the best things to launch off media is more media, like I just did with launching the new show off of Founders”

“Some people also over-raise because, you know, founders get secondary when they over-raise. So that's just the whole other topic. Generally, really poor incentives in the Valley. You know, we've seen that happen. We've heard rumors about all sorts of things wh…”

“So I think the right words to use is not whether the founder is working at the company or not. The right words to use is the founder chair taken or not. Is someone sitting in the founder chair or is there at the, around every single meeting table in the compan…”

“It's a multifamily office for the principals here and a number of founders, not necessarily been backed by the company, but many in fact backed by the company.”

“Mostly the person who built a business, nine to nine percent is the business builder. Maybe a hundred percent.”

“B plus is the enemy of an A. B plus often, if we stick with the B plus, is taking up space. It's distracting us from unlocking the A, and to fail or to call the ball that that idea isn't that good, it in itself is really powerful”