founders

“I'd say that's the, that's mandatory. There's no good reason not to have vesting equity for founders.”

“I, whenever I hear that, I just go, okay, the founders just didn't, they didn't have the guts to sit down and have the hard conversation about who was going to do more, who was going to lead, so they just put it down the middle.”

“In every round, regardless of it's a serious, if it's a seed round, series A, series B, founders should be expecting to lose anywhere between, I would say, 25 to 35% of their company, including some options for the ESOP.”

“If you're a startup owner, if you're a founder, Floripa is for sure one of the best cost effective places on earth.”

“So like, money is immaterial. At some point, like when you, I think like when every founder breaks, breaks like, Three million dollar AR mark. It's like, doesn't matter. Like whatever you do, you're going to be wealthy.”

“The ones that go all the way and succeed, you know, you can pick your favorites, maybe Mark Benioff, very, very rare breed. It takes certainly a lot of skill and sort of a unique talent. So I think it is, you do need some self-awareness to know when someone el…”

“You look at Crunchbase you know, you see typically the transitions happen six to seven years in at least the ones you hear about the ones that, you know, the company goes out of business, obviously, you transition into oblivion but typically it is a little bit…”

“Because of the peculiarity of a small deal and the nuances and the needs and demands of investors in that small deal market, the speed at which they work and the requirements they have, one or two potentials in my view is not enough to close with. Or it's not …”

“The people that like bootstrap and want to brag about the bootstrap story do it because none of their other stories are working, right? So that's what they lean on.”

“Cause you really only have 15 years or so to be a founder. Cause at some point, you know, you're sick of eating ramen noodles and you got kids and all that other good jazz that catches up.”

“As VCs invest, they get the next, they get the top priority of share class. And as you go down that ladder of Priority with VCs, you find that the founders are the second to the bottom, and the team members are at the bottom, and that's ridiculous to me.”

“We were targeting at that point in the beginning, it was like founders you know, CEO, CTO. It is mostly that. And then as we sort of continue to grow and scale and expand you know, we went into the HR job title, the idea admins and so on.”

“Founders will just lie to themselves and make up a story that says they're going to be a big business to get the VC dollars. And that happens all the time.”

“I felt like, unless I could do it again, that I was a one-time hit, that I was a fraud, that I just happened to be lucky, I was in the right place at the right time, and I have to do it again. This is a completely unwarranted, idiotic feeling, That most founde…”

“For a lot of early founders, the most important thing to them is their time. Effectively the time is what either makes or breaks their company. And if they're trying to save a couple hundred dollars by hiring someone directly, it eats up a lot of focus.”

“Actually, it's funny you say that a lot of our early clients have been non first time founders because They felt it before and now they know the need. Whereas first time founder, you know, it's just not something that you think about very much.”

“Like seven percent of the business that you started then, and everybody else has the full control and you ultimately have become an employee. You're no longer the actual founder.”

“Founders have all of the power, but none of the responsibility or accountability. And so, you know, you can do whatever you want to do, but you're not really responsible to anybody in, in, in, in bootstrap world. You're not accountable to anybody. Except maybe…”

“What founders also have to do is they got to realize that their reps are never going to be able to close at their ratio in most cases, because they're the founder.”

“1000% founders need to do the first part of sales. I don't know if it needs to be a number, like a million, like it depends on sort of what the, you know, they need to do it so they can understand the motion at the early stage, right? It's the pre series a or …”

“No. The big thing on micro acquire is it's not, well, I won't say that it's, I would say it's not so much in favor of the buyers unless they have a plan to grow it and want to flip it on the backend, but the multiples right now are ridiculous in, in favor of t…”

“So it's just basic rules of founders that there has to be one final decision point. So you never split equity, 50, 50. One person takes more majority and the other person takes less.”

“I think there's a ton of founders that undervalue, the majority of founders undervalue what they've built. And they're so nervous to ask For the contract value that they deserve.”

“A lot of people, in my opinion, founders at the beginning, they're lazy. They don't want to have tough conversations. So they split it evenly, right? If you have a tough conversation, usually someone ends up with a little more, a little less.”

“A lot of founders use is they'll just move their start date to more recently. So the growth sounds way more impressive, but nothing wrong with that.”

“A small amount went to secondaries for, as you just said founders some founders early employees some, they were the first business angels taking a little bit out for, yeah, for house or apartment or for savings.”

“And then we tried actually opening it up to founders. That didn't work well, so we went back to B to B and then we went ultra high, like B to B to E, I would say, or B to E to B, enterprise to business.”

“Some founders are great Going fishing in Cabo and doing whatever, but others, I would say more than half are miserable after selling their company.”

“That, that providers love to give you an umbrella when it's not raining and take away the umbrella once it starts raining. Perfect. So they, when times are bad, they'll often demand you pay back faster and they'll have terms in your contract.”

“Forget about your hobbies, you're not gonna be a good friend, son, daughter, mother. You gotta ruthlessly prioritize, identify the things that really matter to you, and only do those things. It's not a good time to have a work-life balance.”

“A lot of founders, when they're raising capital, they've never asked this question, and I think it's really important to know the money behind the money.”

“Because if you're a founder, not having the right team is a hundred percent your fault. Like, you are, you gotta hire the right people. You gotta lead them. And so, not the right team is a bit of a weak excuse for you failing in my opinion.”

“A lot of founders in China grew up being under a different, very different regime. Their mentality is that let me grow it and let me take control of it. The investors are just, you know, capital money. They're debt. They're not equity.”

“Look, the best person to sell Your platform is going to be your founder. It is. Doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer, you're the VP of sales, whoever you are in this room, if you're not the founder, I can tell you the best person to sell your produ…”

“And inevitably, we hear that people are spending almost all the time on that sales and marketing stuff, especially at the founder stage, right? Spending almost all their time, they mostly guest on their pricing work, and they're not really working to gather da…”

“And they're not your friends. You know, what they're doing is they're making money from your decision to go into business as an entrepreneur and make money. And that's a different thing, and you, my view would, oh sorry, my view would be, you know, exploit the…”

“And I think there's a mindset in B to B that says after five PM, no one's thinking about our business. That's BS. Right? What happens after the five p.m.? You just spend the evenings thinking about your day job and your problems. Well, you do if you're a found…”

“Product market fit. It's not even a framework, it's just a phrase. Some people like to call it a mental model. And I think, you know, it is a fraud mental model. I have not found a single entrepreneur who could look at the definition of product market fit and …”

“There's no one hire messiah. It doesn't work out. You have to have a fundamental understanding of the problem before you can just go hire somebody.”

“In a 30 minute conversation, if they're talking 20 to 25 minutes, that actually means I'm asking questions, I'm actually getting insights from them. So, don't dominate.”

“Whether you like it or not, you as a founder are the most effective recruiter for your company.”

“I think, you know, VC dollars are the best marketed dollars in the world. We only read about big VC rounds, but stories like this are how founders actually get rich. And it's what actually makes founders happy.”

“The best founders typically come from the space that they're then building for.”

“In the beginning, you're getting a lot of rejection, a lot of no's. You're like, I just can't fail. I just can't fail. And at some point, it has to, I think, Really become love of mission, right?”

“The people that built the business with you, the leaders that sacrificed everything with you, in the trenches, building the company, sometimes they're not gonna get you to the next step. Oftentimes that happens at different points in scale, and it is one of th…”

“I believe that founders have three jobs. Sell, corporate development, fundraising. That's what you need to do in life, right?”

“A wrong hire will set you back a year. So if you hire the wrong person, you'll end up doing their job, and then you'll have to get back here, and then you'll have to find the next person, and then you'll be gun-shy about hiring the next person. That person's q…”

“And then I do think it's actually a huge mistake to have a fifty-fifty split with your founder when you start a company, because even if it's 51, 49, somebody needs to be in charge and control the board.”

“So what he's referring to by Founder Mode is that we're told that we can run our company by hiring great people and get outside of their way. Senior, great people. That sounds lovely in theory, in practice, because we're founders and we're very particular abou…”

“The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders.”

“Don't do the move of like founders eat last. I also think that's old and antiquated. Like you have to understand your worth.”

“What I actually am saying is, if you're going to go give up control, get, take, Cash as well. Don't give up control and cash.”