startup

“Good investors don't want Unrealistic or silly projections either. You know, I know that everybody thinks we want that slide that has everything up and to the right, but a good investor, especially one that's thinking about sustainable, profitable businesses, …”

“And I think at some point we had more podcasters and more slots on podcasts and actual products.”

“Once you've launched, once you're in market, it kind of becomes a different path and it becomes highly segmented depending on what business you're in, but getting up to the launch point is, is pretty uniform.”

“I would not be investing in things that are illiquid, personally, until I could literally write that check and not worry about it.”

“One of the powers of running a small company is that we have enormous amounts of options. Think about competing against the 900 pound gorilla, the slow moving, you know, whoever it is, Salesforce or QuickBooks where, you know, it's a big company and they're pl…”

“That's going to happen again in eight months. You're going to look back at today and be like, what were we thinking with X, Y, Z? Maybe it's not pricing and positioning, but it's going to be something else. And then eight months from then it'll be the same. Yo…”

“I feel like Google being in all these areas and being, having its fingers in everything is slowing or preventing some amount of startup innovation in those spaces.”

“If you have a team at a startup and you're going to get them together, like I found a really nice cadence is to have about half the time be work and half the time be not. And that's, or it's even like two thirds not work where you have a work session in the mo…”

“And transparency is something big in that startup in the SaaS space, but I find that most of it is bull transparency. It's fake transparency for marketing purposes of like, we're being transparent, but they're actually not. It's only they're being transparent …”

“I still think that kind of asynchronous remote is a, is still a kind of a rarer thing. There are a lot of companies that would only do remote in a certain time zone or would only do hybrid. So you can tell they're not truly okay with letting people manage thei…”

“I think it's tougher than ever to hire. I was gonna say for worse, for, you know, any startup trying to hire who used to be able to use remote and location independent as the big sell. That's not the case anymore.”

“It's pretty rare. Honestly, the big, the, you know, the launch parties and the yachts, like it is so rare. So few companies do it.”

“Getting an office in this day and age as a startup is an anti-pattern now.”

“In your personal life, money can save you hours in your startup. Money can save you years.”

“And particularly with ChatGPT, it became very evident to me that this was like probably one of the bigger shifts in terms of a technical capability that would impact startups. [189] Einar Volset: I think at the very least, the biggest comparative change that I…”

“What would take a week at a startup will take two months at a big company and it's infuriating.”

“Everybody sells eventually.”

“I am predicting that the term AI will be used in fewer H-ones one year from now, because it will just be assumed that AI is built into everything.”

“At around 10 people, you are now an organization, right? You can't just have 10 people in every meeting, in every discussion, on every Slack channel. You need to start differentiating it. So you're organizing your team and organization maybe sounds like someth…”

“I think the common problem is not enough structure and process, which is a funny thing to say, right? Because, but if you think about it, there are two pathways that a founder has gone through. Either, like you say, they've worked at a really big company. They…”

“The biggest threat to your company isn't gonna be competition. It's gonna be you. The potential for burnout, self-doubt, loss of motivation, destroying your relationships, mental health. These things kill more companies, I think, than any external force.”

“Because if you're effectively working for free, and I know they're paying for your developer, but you are doing whatever it is, project management, and hiring, and training, and, you know, keeping folks on staff, so to speak, and that's for free, there needs t…”

“It takes many, many things that are all an, and so probabilities that get multiplied. And that's very bad because even if the probabilities are reasonable, like Yeah, but if it looked like 10 of them, that probably is really low. And by the way, a lot are not …”

“The idea, I don't really weigh it that much. I don't think any idea is really worth equity, but what if someone brings a significant audience, or they bring significant financial assets, some cash, or they have an amazing network, or they have, you know, somet…”