startup

“If you want to garner real media impressions, go to regional papers in towns with a 100,000 to 500,000 people in them, and if you tell them about your product, I guarantee they'll run a story because they're desperate for content.”

“Well, there's not, well, obviously, salaries it's nine, 95, 98% of any startup costs, right?”

“The problem when you start selling to enterprise customers is that they don't, Really like to deal with small companies, you know, two guys in the garage, like they don't like it. So they're like, well, well, we're going to sign this three-year contract. How d…”

“The only correlation I found so far between Sleep and startups is the more money you've raised, the less sleep you get. That doesn't correlate back to revenue at all though.”

“I think a lot of the ICOs we see right now is people who do not understand what they are doing getting convinced by marketing people to put money into something they don't understand, and then those startups raise much more money than they actually need.”

“Because people, same reason as any startup team cannot deliver what they said on a business plan or white paper that they will, you know, then they actually didn't have the market that they thought. It wasn't real need. You know, it wasn't real problem. They t…”

“First of all, two years ago, this whole opportunity of raising money in millions without giving away equity didn't exist. So this is all new thing. This is, you know, new amazing thing, you know from the crypto heaven that comes to startups, that they can rais…”

“They all, all those things, those deals always unravel because the companies are, you know, so it's funny.”

“I think people, the LTV number is not a, I don't think it's a good number to focus on. We calculate it and it's in our metrics and everything, but it's I think, you know, again, you know, you have 95% logo retention or dollar retention. You know, that customer…”

“I think the magic in Israel is actually the army. If you think about it, the Israeli army is taking young people, putting them in high stress environment for a few years, making them solve big problems very quickly together, and then they finish the army and t…”

“You know, the average stay for a developer at a startup is 10.8 months.”

“When you're a company that's not a fortune, 500 business, trying to sell two products is very difficult. And you really have to, you really don't have time as a company to sell even one of them, let alone multiple products.”

“And so as a startup, you need to recognize that your advantage is always, always, always speed and ability to do stuff that makes people happy immediately without the burdens and shackles of a legacy business that you need to build and protect.”

“What I've witnessed is a lot of very suboptimal decision-making as far as spending goes. Very common to get ahead of your skis ... Very common to just hire too many people. I think just being deliberate about how you grow the team is just critically important.…”

“What's happened in the ecosystem is that just the external optics of raising, you know, millions of dollars look so good that people like, okay, I'm just going to do it just for the heck of it. And that, that puts you in a trajectory that is not natural to you…”

“Within that three, that first three years of you starting the company, you kind of know at that point whether or not that hockey stick's going to occur or whether it's not going to occur.”

“It takes 10 years to build anything worthwhile, and I think if you can afford yourself the opportunity to take that time, your chances of success go up dramatically.”

“Startups don't go out there, you know, no one's out there looking for this platform that we offer. Startups are looking to solve their immediate need, whether it's they need to send an email campaign or they need to start charging, you know, a customer or what…”

“We are interested in taking small sips of capital and small sips of outside leverage to grow the business rather than, Kind of take the traditional venture capital approach. And we want to build a business that is aligned around disrupting this business and bu…”

“So if I learned anything, your timing has to be right. Doesn't matter. You have the right team, right idea. Doesn't work.”

“Very rarely do companies get their first customers from inbound marketing because you have to have a team of writers and you have to be putting out content.”

“But the second you take a million dollars of investor money that you've got to be growing at your stage way more than a hundred percent year over year. I mean, you should have taken three grand a month up to 30,000 dollars a month in a 12 month period.”

“In the way that traditional VC works, as you well know, is that you know, you're kind of always pretending you're going to be a billion dollar company. You have to, the problem is not every company is meant to be a billion dollar company.”

“I feel that that's one of the biggest mistakes startups do, because they kind of try to hide the fact that this big company exists, you know, while all of their potential customers know that there is this company that exists. So why not help your potential cus…”

“And so we actually took them to my former big four and they couldn't service us. We were just too small. Some of our companies were pre-revenue and, you know, the, You know, the labor intensity and the bill rates were just too high for the startups to actually…”

“If I am starting up, And you have those flagship accounts. I would say leave all accounts with an AE for the first year. Let them expand those.”

“If you look it up, actually from the three top reasons that startup fails number three is not having a financial business model.”

“Startups are a bad word. You know, when we were first doing demos with judges, and court clerks, and administrators, and IT, that's one of the first things we'd say. We'd say, you know, we're a startup working with court reminders, court notification system. I…”

“If you do startups for too long, you are not, you are, you become unhirable in the marketplace.”

“So actually these large companies for, since a few years ago, since actually five years ago, they have people in the company who are basically tasked with finding startups, which can up their game.”

“One ratio that I like to look at, this is independently, so this isn't from, you know, any particular firm that, that pushes this agenda, but I like to look at it like a one to you know, one-third on debt and two-thirds on equity.”

“Typically this process should be done 30 to 90 days before the start of your fiscal year. Oftentimes I see startups doing scrambling to do this in Q one. And it's not ideal.”

“When you see somebody who's taking a lot of L's, like, you know, hey, I was at a startup, it failed, my prior startup had this problem, and you look at their resume, and it's just like a string of losses, like, don't hire that person.”

“If somebody says no to your offer initially, just let it go. Like convincing them. You're always gonna be, if they do come, you're always, they're always gonna be wondering, did I make the right decision? You're always gonna be wondering, are they happy? There…”

“We used to sell the startups in the early days, and maybe this has evolved, but, you know, they die, they churn, they require lots of support, they don't have a lot of money, so it's kind of like the perfect SAS hell.”

“Where things go wrong is the big companies, they don't want to sell your stuff. And I've tried this a bunch of times. They want to sell more of their own stuff.”

“Where I've had the greatest success has been working with the number two, three, four, five, six on down, because they're normally gunning for the number one or number two companies and trying to take, take clients from them.”

“Literally every release of from open AI kills hundreds of startups, right? Every single feature.”

“If you're in a, at a phase that's a startup and you really need the trailblazers, you need to be able to understand that if you bring in bricklayers, they're going to be very frustrated.”

“So a lot of companies, what they do is they'll make a startup and then they'll try to find distribution. So they'll start with the product and then try to find the people. My thing is to find the people have fun creating the content and then figure out what pr…”

“If you create a successful startup I believe that you should make millions of dollars every year, and not just be waiting for this maybe exit, or like maybe secondary, that maybe will happen, but maybe will not, probably will not.”

“Pre-COVID, Y Combinator saw that 16% of their startups were started remotely. Today, this cohort, 82% are partially or fully remote.”

“Understaffed is better than overstaffed all the time. You know, I absolutely believe it. And I really think that's the way especially startups should be functioning.”

“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…”

“Is it logical to calculate unit economics? The answer is no, not really at that point. But once you get past 10, 15 paying customers, you're approaching a million in recurring revenue, then it does become useful and important to calculate them.”

“I'm fairly confident to grow very fast in this day and age, depending, unless it's a highly technical aspect, you need somebody to be the face.”

“I think that's a mistake when started do, they never activate retargeting was the cheapest ad as of today.”