Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Zen: Six-figure IT staff require less babysitting than $50k workers

Greg Zen · The Founder-Fit Secret VCs Don't Want You to Know · Dec 8, 2020 · at 20:16

Startup mentor Greg Zen explains to Sean Weisbrot why he strategically targeted six-figure IT placements during the pre-internet recruitment era.

0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 because they had a bender that weekend. But when you're talking about somebody who makes 200,000 dollars, they don't do that sort of thing. You don't have to babysit him.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Greg Zen

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
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
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.