founders

“Part of learning how to automate your company is also upskilling yourself as a founder so that you can understand what the hell is going on in your company. Especially on the tech side, because so many, I I've heard of so many people building something and lik…”

“You take ten million dollars from a VC, you know, you better be talking about, you know, a hundred million dollars at a minimum, you know, if you think you're going to get rich off the deal.”

“And again, a lot of times companies and founders and, you know, CEOs try to scramble. They're like, okay, wait, what's going on? Maybe we need to put more people on this. Maybe we need to do more marketing or more SEO or bring on some of your web design and al…”

“And it still surprises me to this day that there are a lot of founders who built without Ever speaking to their end user. And I think that has to do with fear. We are inherently really afraid of speaking to people and getting feedback. So we dupe ourselves int…”

“What's been really helpful for me and how I did this and what I recommend is to do an audit on how you're spending your time. What are the most time consuming tasks that you have in your role? And then analyzing those things. So is this something that I need t…”

“And to be honest, until a business makes one million plus, I think the most important things that a founder or CMO or CEO has to do is marketing and sales, because without marketing and sales, there is no revenue.”

“Being a founder and running products as you grow is not a good idea. Because one side of the business is going to suffer. You're either going to get not as much time on products or not as much time on, like, you know, stakeholder management and everything else…”

“Solving problems Is the hardest thing you can do in the company. It takes the most brain power. So if you come in in the morning and you get straight into emails and you get straight into stakeholder management, you get straight into hiring and everything else…”

“Personally, I think you should charge as soon as possible. I've never seen a founder charge too much of a product or charge too early.”

“It's generally good to control the board as long as you can. So, you know, if you have, control it with either founders or friendlies.”

“As a founder and also as a product manager, you are so ingrained in your products and that's all you see. So you think that everything's obvious to everyone else.”

“Now, if it's a matter of dilution, or if it's a matter of wanting to cheapen your cost of capital, that cost Savings. Typically it's to the founder and not to the company. If I, as a founder raise equity, I'm diluting my shares. If I, as a founder raise debt, …”

“We get more introductions from VCs when there's a specific utility, a specific use case that they want us to explore. So for example, if a B to B SaaS company has a growing receivables book, or if a hardware company needs, you know, more financing to for inven…”

“Actually when you're the founder of something to network because everybody actually secretly wants to know you. So I think there's some power in being the founder of some sort of a platform.”

“When you fundraise through venture capital there's generally a lot of caveats tied to you getting that money. And as a founder, you can give up a significant amount of control of your company. You generally have to give away board seats. You will likely have t…”

“I mean, when speaking to a lot of investors, if you don't put your stakes in, people won't believe you.”

“As a VC, you should support your portfolio company a thousand percent, but you should also not enforce You know, your thoughts or your DNA or what you think the business, the direction of the business should be heading onto the company either should be driven …”

“The older the founders are, the decision makers are, the more resistant they might be to change despite being interested in knowing that change is possible. The, and the size of the company, Will determine how long it will take to actually get buy-in and imple…”

“As a founder, you're focused on one thing for a long period of time. But as a VC, you have thousands of companies coming to you every year and you get to see what trends are happening before they become a trend.”

“I think all VCs should be forced to start a company before they're allowed to be investors, because I think a lot of VCs who are just money people don't know what it's like to run a company, and so it's hard for them to align themselves emotionally with us, an…”

“Because at the end of the day, you still don't want, even if you're trying to grow somebody, For them to have 300 things that are gonna take them a year for you to teach them through when you need them. You know, productive or investable in 60 days or 90 days.”

“So, you know, 99% of people are ignoring ads in the world, which kind of transposes to when you're approaching interview investors and any sort of new thing in general is that you're supposed to have like a 99% failure rate, and so this concept of volume, goin…”

“Burnout is not a function of time and energy like a lot of people think.”

“One of the greatest things that people struggle with as founders is the need to manage what oftentimes is a huge gap between confidence and reality.”

“Every time you play hardball, you are You're virtually guaranteeing that the person that you have played hardball with will have an opportunity to return the favor.”

“A maxim of psychotherapy is that if you start, you move down rapidly into the valley of the shadow, so to speak, and if you stop at that moment, stop the therapy, you're actually worse off Than if you'd never begun. And I think that there's a lot of truth to t…”

“Founders tend to be of above average intelligence. So rationalizing stuff is not hard for the average founder”

“They have felt like that if there was any crack in their armor, any reality in what they had to say, That they lose support, investor support, team support, whatever. Right. And so they oftentimes not only found themselves drifting into a lot of not so great m…”

“Your boss, your job as a boss, as a founder is to keep the lights on. Right. And always see the worst of what might happen. Right. Predict what the worst part will be.”

“Cause startups don't need like a leadership hierarchy at the beginning. You don't need directors and managers and whatnot. You need developers and then you need the founders. That's it.”

“Founders who go and take a bunch of venture capital in the beginning, it's amazing because it's a lot easier to grow quickly in the beginning with that. You can hire the right people. You can start off on a good foot. You don't have to Bootstrap. There's a mil…”

“Often the founder is the limiting factor to growing the company because she thinks that she can do it all.”

“I've spoken to several hundred founders at this point. And what I've learned from them is the majority don't have investors. A lot of them are doing three, five, 10, 20, thirty million dollars a year.”

“From what I understand talking to VCs is that they are also not trying to burn bridges. So even if they have some feedback for you or they don't think you will be able to take it positively, they'll hold it back.”

“People want money or they want advice. They don't usually don't want advice with money or they don't want money with advice as a caveat to it.”

“And oftentimes when you do that, you find that most founders are unfundable.”

“And are they rushing into the answer because they want to try to show that they're, they know things and why are they going to be honest and say, maybe I've not thought about it. Can I get a few minutes to think about it? So just how they approach the answer i…”

“If the founders only cared about what is my exit, I want to get rich. And it wasn't so much about the customers or the problem they were solving or their core values didn't align with mine. No matter how attractive the deal looked like, I would just politely d…”

“I like to do the podcast as well because it's a really great way to get people very quickly to go into a mode of vulnerability that they may normally have their wall up and not be willing to do.”

“However, there's many that I could have learned from others, and so if someone is not open to receiving, for me, that's a bit of a red flag, because I know they're going to make mistakes, and I certainly don't want them to make too many mistakes on my diet.”

“So sometimes it's about make sure you've got a set of questions, powerful questions in your toolkit in, in your hat, I mean, that you can pull out and ask these founders which are completely random to them at least, but it enables you to better understand them…”

“I think it's the single greatest thing that a founder or entrepreneur can do is become a channelpreneur first. What I mean is develop channels, own those channels, own the audience, have the email addresses, be on the multiple platforms, make that bulletproof,…”

“Counting them as wins and losses. As a founder, I think it's a very bad mindset. It's probably an okay mindset if you're a salesperson, but otherwise it's a mindset that I think would slow down growth.”

“It's very easy for a founder or an invent inventor to have a brilliant world-changing idea, but not a pathway to bring that into the world.”

“I'll get used, I'll buy 80% of the business, not 100. Used to keep 20. And so, for during this transition period, they're really involved in helping me grow this business. That takes a lot of the risk out for me, and it reduces my learning curve because I'm ri…”

“Sales is something that the founder will always do better than most other people in the early days of the business.”

“Most investors say they hate the idea of a middleman who's taking a success fee, but then they still go and take all of those messages from the middleman and instead of the founder who wouldn't have to pay a fee if they didn't need a middleman.”

“I actually think the best founders have just as much called outreach that they ignore from VCs as VCs have called outreach from the founders that they also ignore.”

“In fact, it's very rare that VC wins, but founder doesn't. I actually don't know any, I actually don't know many situations like that, like where.”

“So if you're counting on liquidation preference, then probably nobody's really making money. Maybe founders doesn't make anything, but VC is also not generating much returns.”

“A lot of the times you'll have founders who say, oh, like my original team can't scale with me, which, you know, sometimes that's correct, but a lot of times it's just a misdiagnosis. Like when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to …”