startup

“Everyone knows that you can attach like dot AI to your B to B SaaS company and double your valuation. That never really happened in ESG just because I think the money that was actually flowing was mostly in the public markets. From these funds that, like, need…”

“And so I could imagine this, but for a lot of startups, like the liquidity is just not going to be there because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some series A company that like is got some VC platform teams have entire”

“And I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces.”

“This is the advice I give to startups is like, even if you have something that feels relatively minor that you already announced previously, announce it again, make it a big moment.”

“I think illiquidity is a feature, just like, you know the fact that you can go and do your job every day and not be constantly getting marked is, is a great blessing, because it allows you to focus on”

“At a certain point, like once you have the formula dialed in and you are the power law company, the competition is actually beneficial to you.”

“Great things oftentimes have to sort of skirt the law.”

“I feel like Google has been in this position where they can plan things across decades and multiple years. And if you apply that style of leadership to a startup, like you probably will never Get off the ground.”

“If a startup had to hire a thousand people in three months, you would make, I would imagine, you know, I don't actually know what, like, great, sort of, like, hiring success rate looks like. I would imagine if nine out of 10 people you hire turn out to be grea…”

“The people raising the most money, both funds and startups are the ones that are best at storytelling. They oftentimes back that up with great, you know, products But it matters matters quite a lot.”

“If you're doing anything in startups and venture and you start asking for people to sign NDAs, it's like a very negative signal.”

“The companies that cut their burn, like the same day that YC issued that letter saying, hey, this is going to be rough. They made it through just fine.”

“I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market. And I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard probably are still underwater.”

“My business is picking up the roadkill of the venture industry. The startups, the founders that have triumphantly built Heroic and wonderful businesses and have gained 1,000,010 of millions of revenue and built incredible teams and have a wonderful product and…”

“The cost of capital of the people that own you makes a really big difference for like what they expect and what they demand of your business.”

“AI is going to make the big, big, big platforms a shit ton of money. And it's going to be really good for small businesses, but it is a terrible place to hunt for startups, right? It's a great way to lose a lot of money on startups.”

“So that unbundling of the, one of the largest companies and information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes”

“Definitely startups are actually easier, right? Like, people have a pretty big digital presence they have better websites, they have a LinkedIn, they have X, et cetera and, you know, their descriptions, their VCs, like, if a, you know, if a Sequoia funded comp…”

“Counting on either support from your existing investors or a next round materializing over the next 18 months if you aren't just like absolutely crushing it and putting up insane numbers like I'm sure most of your audience does. But in that case, unless you're…”

“I actually think the horizontal, like, experiences are addressable by startups now, because I think the big tech companies are just going to be too conservative.”

“There were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category. I think unless you've worked at a startup.”

“We actually need the platforms to allow other people to enter, but if we do that, we can actually have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies, each of which can get to a billion dollars net revenue each, you know. And like, you could do it pro…”

“There's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters and the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracked. We don't…”

“In fact, I'm on the board of Y Combinator. Almost all the startups we are seeing are enterprise. There are not a lot of companies doing consumer.”

“Like a lot of venture capital and startups is, is vibe based, right? Is qualitative.”

“At least in startups, the best advice that I've ever gotten and would typically talk with founders in my portfolio about is, like, if you need to do cuts, cut deep.”

“I can see a new meta of startups just recreating iconic movie scenes to promote their products.”