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Greg Zen

Founder, Startup Heroics · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderoperator

Greg Zen is a U.S. Navy veteran and serial entrepreneur who advises early-stage startup founders on product development and investor readiness. He is the founder of Startup Heroics and mentors founders across multiple platforms.

9statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 3.89/5average certainty → 1.78/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 2 opinions · 1 insight · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Greg argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Zen: Less than 5% of startups receive venture funding annually
“Less than five percent, though, are getting VC money every year. That means that the vast majority of them are chasing after something they're not going to get.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 34:47 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Greg Zen on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Greg Zen said on We Live to Build that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Zen: Y Combinator does not offer the right education for $10M businesses
“So with like Y Combinator, yeah, their content and their approach is applicable because they're going for billion dollar companies. And so if you are trying to build a. Ten million dollar company podcast or something like that, they don't have the right educat…”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 37:45 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
What-if
Zen: Velocity acquisition price would be 10x higher with .com domain
“Had I been velocity.com, I could have easily gotten an extra zero.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 14:41 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Insight
Zen: Six-figure IT staff require less babysitting than $50k workers
“What I was strategically going for was six figure IT people, partially because I understood that the people that are making 40, 50,000 dollars, you tend to have to babysit them a little bit. They're not going to show up to work on Monday morning sometimes beca…”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 20:16 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zen: Dot-Com Crash Contracted Venture Capital but Spurred Grassroots Entrepreneurship
“Venture capital, especially shrank up. But you know, and the markets were really rough there for a little while, but it actually forced more people into entrepreneurship than you might expect.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 28:21 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Assertion Supported
Zen: Less than 5% of startups receive venture funding annually
“Less than five percent, though, are getting VC money every year. That means that the vast majority of them are chasing after something they're not going to get.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 34:47 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Greg Zen predicts AI will become vital for marketing within years
“I think what we were going to see, and especially over the next couple of years, we should probably see is like, AI in marketing and customer development is going to be a really important factor.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 43:30 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Opinion
Zen: Bill Gates was not the best writer, but his tech vision was mind-blowing
“I remember business at the speed of thought by Bill Gates. It's a pretty heavy read. It's, you know, he's not the best writer at least back then, but at the same time, it blew my mind what he was talking about, what you could do with technology.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 5:17 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Disclosure
Zen: Walked Away From 2000-Era Startup Due to $30M Series A Requirement
“And so to get the developers and like the team involved to make that happen was going to be an unheard of kind of series a, like a thirty million dollar plus series a, which for, you know, something where you don't have anything yet back then it was really unh…”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 11:38 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know
Disclosure
Zen: Lost Most First-Sale Proceeds in Wall Street Post-Dot-Com Downturn
“Most of the money that I got from my first sale was tied up in Wall Street, so I got sank as well.”
Greg Zen Dec 8, 2020 ▶ 29:50 The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know Dec 8, 2020 34m
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