founders

“I think when you start a company, it just doesn't feel real. And I think people print business cards and they make a logo because somehow that makes it more real to them. And when you tell someone I've started a company and you hand them a business card and it…”

“And what I tell the founders, particularly young founders, and it's not specific to them, but the earlier you can get started on this list, the better. Is make that list first.”

“There is a freak anomaly about the age of 37. I can't tell you how many founders at the age of 37 specifically Have hit this bizarre life-changing event. The life events are all different, but it's always at 37. I can't figure out why.”

“There's a danger of, I want to keep all my options open all the time and I'm never going to commit to anything that might reduce optionality, and that's not good either. It can be too extreme and you can be too much a Jack or Jill of all trades because you don…”

“I think we're always looking as founders for validation... And so when people say things that are complimentary, they just tend to really, I wanted to say weigh on us, but that sounds bad, but they really put wind in our sails, you know, pick your metaphor. Li…”

“Most investors, and this is not true for us, will make the founders pay for their legal fees.”

“So when they go to the table with buyers, they're at an advantage because right now they're at a disadvantage, both from an educational standpoint and experience standpoint.”

“In the early days, you're building a product. Once you've built something people are willing to pay for, which is no easy task, you work on building a business. Once that flywheel is going, you move on to building a company. Very few founders excel at or even …”

“I think the best way to be as a founder is when you're marketing, pick a side, be super, you know, like out there and opinionated, opinionated. Exactly. But when you're making decisions internally, Be rational. Do cost-benefit analysis. Figure out what it is t…”

“I think one of the best things you can do as a founder, if you really want to stick with what you're doing, which is sort of necessary for succeeding, is to surround yourself with people who you feel accountable to. Even if like you're their boss, you still ki…”

“Level four is sales. Now I actually think most founders should keep those conversations. If you're buying companies, that should be you. If you're selling, that should be until it becomes 50% of your calendar. If you're spending 50% of your calendar on sales o…”

“One of the things we ask is that if you're accepting the tiny seed that at least one founder in the company is full-time in the business by the time the program starts”

“Knowing thyself is such a big part of the game because managing your own psychology is the majority of being a founder, I believe. And you can't manage your own psychology if you don't understand yourself.”

“Most of the best founders I know, they either directly know this about jobs to be done or they intuitively do it Without knowing they're doing it. They, they're talking to customers and they're just in their customers' heads because they're so close to the met…”

“A lot of times I'll be on calls with founders and I'll ask who are your best customers and what led them to sign up? What was that moment that your ideal customers decided that they had to solve this problem or that they couldn't go on with life anymore the wa…”

“So at 20 employees is where you sort of start to have, you can't have everybody reporting to the founder anymore. You've got to have some layers, right?”

“And here's what I tell anyone who asks me these days when they say I'm going to exit, I say, take three months off, maybe six, don't do anything. You can write in a notebook of all the ideas you have. You can maybe buy domains. If you give yourself a 48 hour c…”

“I think that much in terms of success for founders, I think a lot more of those successes will come from the companies that are able to steer in a more sustainable path, get to break even at, you know, at best, something like that, maybe with a small bridge ro…”

“The only thing I would add is it's not just your company, it's about you. Because the most interesting thing about what you do is who you are. So there's plenty of developers who can code like the wind, but you and your specific story and why this problem and …”

“Wireframing helps you figure out the ideas you want for the way that your website works, whether that's the front end or the back end, allows you to try different concepts in a faster way, allows you to take those concepts to folks who may give you feedback or…”

“If I were to take the top 10 say fastest growing tiny seed companies, without exception, all 10 of those, the founders either head up the marketing or sales or they learned enough To get them to the point where they could hire someone really good, and they had…”

“I think really experienced founders who know what they're doing are probably in the 80 plus, 85, 90 plus, you know, like it's like eight or nine out of 10 are at least in the ballpark.”

“An exit is phenomenally successful. Someone walks away with a pile of money. Everybody's happy. That founder is often in the midst of a great deal of emptiness and lostness that is very, very difficult to voice. So anyway, exits are way more difficult than peo…”

“And so I talk a lot with founders about hobbies, about passion projects, about legacy work, about having a cause or a thing that you think matters and having that be really important in your life, not to take away from your primary focus on your business, but …”

“If you're bootstrapping and you're hiring your first 10, 15, 20 people, And this person doesn't already know how to do the job and you're going to train them up from scratch, unless you really, really need to save on budget, that is a case where you are going …”

“The main problem isn't trying to figure out what's working. It's doing enough experiments so that something is working. And like, look, if they make a bunch of, if they do. 25 things and then two or three of them are working, but they're not totally sure which…”

“If you come to us, and we're typically the first money into a company, and the founders own less than, you know, 70%, like that's not a good sign. And sometimes we are the second money in, so there are exceptions to that, but certainly you want the founders to…”

“Where's the risk or uncertainty That's what the founder should be working on. It is so easy and tantalizing, and it's like a big bowl of ice cream to work on certainty, because it makes me feel good, makes me feel like I'm getting stuffed. It is entrepreneuria…”

“The most successful founders across the Tiny C portfolio of a 192 companies. Are those founders that do a lot of things relatively quickly. They put a lot of things into the world, and they're right enough of the time.”

“Even when an exit is going smoothly, the untold story is that many founders experience a significant mental implosion during and after the process.”

“The tiny seed founders we see succeeding. They do a lot of things, they ship a lot of things relatively quickly, and they're right the majority of the time. And by majority, I say it on this podcast over and over, it is not 90%. You know, it's some number. It'…”

“The more you can hold in your head, the further you can go before it all starts crashing down around you, right? Maybe you can hold a hundred folks worth of context in your head because you're very clever and very hardworking, but every person hits their limit…”

“Two co-founders at two million, if you're thinking about selling at some point, there's just, there's not much of a business there without the co-founders, and so you're saddled to it, right, where you, like, can't step away, and it's like, then they really ne…”

“Most of our investors are founders themselves or were founders who have exited.”

“Given that founders operate with incomplete information all the time, and that as a founder, you have to make progress without perfect clarity, like, that's a core skill of being an entrepreneur.”

“So if you're a stage one in design and you hire a really good designer, you might need to get out of their way and put your opinion aside.”

“I would say you are going to have a superpower of being able to prioritize and delegate ruthlessly, and most people don't have to learn that. Look, if I was single and I was 24 years old and I have infinity time, let's say I don't have a day job, I'm in colleg…”

“You don't solve uncertainty with more thinking. You solve uncertainty through action. The founders who keep moving, they try to stick with momentum, keep executing, and that's how the emotional regulation happens in the best way and the fastest way.”

“I haven't seen a company be started by a founder and then part-time focused and just have it magically find product market fit. Team members, employees are not founders unless they are founder level, right? They're, if they're founder level thinker and they ar…”