The Wisdom Wall

“So if you just rely on your experience from 10 years ago, even though you may have been successful, I think that's actually makes you like really dangerous because now you're like credible and wrong. It's one thing when you're just wrong and you don't have credibility that people don't listen to you anyways, but…”

“Well, once AI is better than an average human judgment, we should stop using the humans and use AI systems.”

“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, a misdiagnosis. Like when, when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to reach for this like person explanation, like, oh,…”

“For us, what we see is that the willingness to spend money on software has significantly changed because of AI. AI is not seen as a tool the way that any software application has been seen. AI is seen as value and return on invest because it can do work. So the way that these companies look at it is they don't ask you…”

“whether you're trying to hire an employee or whether you're trying to find a CFO or whatever it is you're looking for, if they are not already using AI and promoting to you the fact that they're using AI, you probably shouldn't hire them because you're not going to get the best service.”

“So now I'm also going to chart besides per seat, you know, charging you dollars per seat, but now I'm also going to charge you per token. This is a no, no. Uh, I call this showing your customers your underpants. You don't want to show your customers your underpants. The underlying cost model is your problem, not your…”

“And you're actually risk on by not having any exposure in your portfolio.”

“So right now, um, these systems are sycophantic. They are, they're based on our prompts. They're going to take what we say and give us back what we've asked, and then we're going to iterate.”

“The only reason why there are so many chips factory getting back to the US is because war is chips and chips is war. Like, if you put chips on a drone, you basically have something that is better than airplanes. And so, We will be forced to change our production model because of that.”

“when I talk to my team, it's there in a I'm boss, I'm God culture, and you have to really pull things out of them.”

“Instead of trying to sell to the base, which is probably your late majority, if you're looking at the innovation adoption curve, you know, crossing the chasm, or your even early majority, the majority, the biggest part of the bell curve, It is just asinine. It is so difficult to stand out. But if you sell to rich early…”

“somebody who can do the systems, like there's a lot of people out there who would do that. They're usually not, they don't always have to be an equity person in your business. Um, and oftentimes making them an equity person in your business is a mistake because there's not equity to go around to these other power…”

“in my early years, I had an advisor who once said, you need to, um, Basically be, be losing 75% of your deals, uh, based on pricing. And what that meant was a good measurement to show that you're hitting the threshold, right? But if you're, to your point, if you put something in front of someone and they sign right…”

“letting people go is just really one thing I, I don't like to do. I cannot do right. Unless it's unmerit of poor performance. I just, I just don't think it's right to let the people go just because you don't have the money.”

“And you can go from an offer doing zero dollars to doing half a million to a million dollars in 30 days.”

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

“And now if you get VC funding, this is only new phenomenon, maybe last, maybe 10 years where you can actually buy customers. Think about you build, like I do, I built, um, Products for consumers. I can go to Facebook, and TikTok, and Meta, and I get influencers. I can find thousands of people who buy my product, even…”

“ChatGPT and all of generative AI that does text is optimized to give responses that are satisfying for humans. So then it, it doesn't care about truth or doesn't care about preciseness of information, but that you feel that what it's saying is very smart and that what it's saying is compelling to you.”

“What a US small customer wants is very similar to what a Indian mid-sized customers want. What a U S midsize customers want is very similar to what an enterprise is solving for in India.”

“once you get moving and you know, you get over eight figures, then you, you got this team doing things and, and quite frankly, some days might be boring because you got a really good team around you and they're, Kicking ass and, and doing what they're supposed to be doing, and you're kind of just monitoring it, and you…”

“It's also very common to see corporations or large teams who fall into the group thing trap because they're in large organizations. There is a lot of culture around not upsetting people and being nice to each other, which is of course great, uh, in terms of getting on with everyone. Um, but you can easily degenerate…”

“whenever you feel hurt by someone's feedback, or what someone says about something you've done, it's your own problem. Even if it feels like they're being a jerk to you, it's your own problem, as long as what they say is sound conceptually.”

“You know, once Apple gets in, frankly, You know, I, I would really push the gas down when Apple gets in, because if you look at what happened in phones, you know, everybody was doing phones and then Apple did the smartphone and then phones just went crazy. When Apple gets in and consumerizes a device, then, you know,…”

“Because the book said, like, good leaders should never have to fire someone. If you have to fire someone, you're the one who has done something wrong. Like, as a leader, it's my responsibility to make sure that my staff are performing, and if they aren't, I'm the only one responsible.”

“product marketing should not be the ones that are setting the launch date, um, as much as possible.”

“And for most creators, then what I think is better is to start with a one-time price, get really everything like dialed in and optimized and then decide like, okay, is this right to move into a subscription model in the future?”

“I think the problem with that is the AI wants to skew you towards the means. So it's going to possibly tell everyone the same thing.”

“And I, I feel we should look at models as interpreters rather than someone who's analyzing. Analysis is still going to be on the consumer side.”

“often people are thinking about layers of management as layers of tasks. And really you have to think about your organization as, um, as layers of time horizons. You know, your frontline is working on today. The things, the things that are happening today, you know, if you add a supervisory layer above that, they…”

“What we've seen right now is that taking a horizontal approach to the problems we solve, like RFPs and proposals, that's really challenging. We need to go vertical. We need to be really specific in the problems that we solve in those use cases.”

“that's great when you're building a more technical product, but for us to go to like a head of sales and try and sell on a token based costing model, it's such an unfamiliar concept for them to get their minds around. So there's a, there's a transformation that's going to need to. To take place here, um, especially…”

“if you're a scammer bank, your bank's going to be the most beautiful bank in town. And if you're a scammer VC, wow. Are you going to have a nice website?”

“The reason why I always outperformed every other rep that I sat alongside is I just had eight X of pipeline of everybody else. And so for that, in that scenario, you don't have to be an excellent seller. You just by a factor of numbers, you end up performing better than everyone else.”

“It's the equivalent of being at a cocktail party, seeing a pretty cool girl across the room at the bar, you walk straight up to her. And the first thing out of your mouth is, can I have your phone number? Like that's insulting. Like doesn't work. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's just the wrong approach to build any sort of…”

“I think the commenting thing is the one where you're reaching out on somebody else's turf. You're the one who's looking to build a relationship and that's something that in my view shouldn't be automated or AI.”

“Don't buy a house in a country you don't live in.”

“in my opinion, I think there's only maybe three ways to build a venture firm. Uh, the first way is to have extremely strong brand and be a leader in the market. So thank Ponzo, Sequoia, Uh, Andreessen, funds like that, where over decades they build a moat that is their brand and their track record, and that certainly…”

“I think a lot of other things people talk about, like networks and things like that. I, I, I just don't think they're sticking off or sustainable enough, uh, to really build a long-term differentiated, uh, strategy.”

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

“it was basically something around taking, like giving cloud code or any of these tools or codecs to like a non-technical founder. It's like giving a bazooka to somebody who could never shot a gun. And it can work, but it can create a bunch of damage in between.”

“just cause someone is a little different than us in their personality, just because we might not enjoy an hour. Over a beer or two with them doesn't mean they couldn't be a great asset for our company. So, I mean, I get the idea. I get the kind of the energy behind that. Uh, but we also have to be careful not to just…”

“You know, a lot of people that have climbed really high in their career are just great imitators. They just take a playbook that they saw somewhere. They don't always fully understand it. They don't always know how to change it for changing circumstances, but they know how to implement it.”

“One of the things I've learned having built companies that sold to like sales and marketing people and companies that sold to IT people is like your comment on, well, you can't give things away for free for people who don't value it. Um, very true in the marketing and sales world, very not true in the IT world. Like…”

“The reason you wanna do that is because when you're in a big market, you know, you can make a lot of mistakes and still Come out on head. You could be the seventh biggest player in the industry and still do really well, you know, um, whereas in, in, in, you know, in markets that are hundreds of millions of dollars or…”

“When we think about self-improvement, when people are obsessed over self-improvement, they get further and further away from who they actually are. So when we understand who we are internally, what makes us tick, what does our programming look like growing up, all these things, then real improvement begins.”

“The problem, Sean, is if you have a podcast where you're interviewing, you, you figure out the target audience, you've outreached the people, then you bring those people to your platform and you show their expertise. That's not really building your personal brand. Like it's not someone ending that, like, if you're…”

“And I think they're probably in all honesty, more people that are cut out to be investors than there are entrepreneurs”

“I would not discount the fact that there is, um, a race among VCs to know who, who is investing in what, because there's a lot of, a lot of signals and not just noise in that.”

“Is this, uh, is the calculation of the shares, or how did the company determine, um, how much shares they're going to issue or award their, this employee? Is it based off of, um, their performance? Then good, but if it's always, and if, if it, Ultimately ties into, um, how much capital is raised, then there's like a…”

“usually going to X means you do more of the same and it's exhausting. And doing 10 X means you stop doing 80% of the things you do and you focus on the 20% that are actually getting you to a 10 X result.”

“A team like Real Madrid, 11 players are on the field. Every one of them has to perform. And if you cannot perform, you're on the bench. If you're on the bench for a season, you get sold. I think companies can learn a lot from that.”

“My, my business in itself, if you look at my forward deploy motion, um, with a little bit of funding, our, our revenue recognition is a little bit backlogged. But that model in itself can be profitable. You can run that without any venture funding. You could bootstrap into it, and then you could just build recurring…”

“I'm just finding that that profitability is not a, it's not a math problem. It's a human problem.”

“you got to get a third party trainer. You got to get somebody to come in and help you train your whole team. Because when it comes from the leader, it's like, oh shit, you know, my boss is telling me to use it. If I don't use it, I'm in trouble. If I use it well, not, not well, I'm in trouble, you know, so, so there is…”

“And I say semi-automate because I still don't believe in like when AI, when large language models are involved, I'm not into full automation yet.”

“I think that's a pretty dangerous thing to do. The only reason that's relevant, if you are doing something really shady and any proper legal system would come after your assets and now you've parked them in the Cook Islands, but you know, one, that's probably not ethical to begin with. Second, you're then trusting the…”

“I am usually of the mind that a pre-A round startup should not hire a PR agent or agency. Maybe after you get past that A round, it's time to kind of think about it, particularly if you're in specific industries, consumer facing industries, but B to B as well in some instances.”

“Saying we've grown organically. Doesn't mean anything for a B to B SaaS founder that's trying to raise money from investors because those investors want to see that you have the potential of being a billion dollar company, right?”

“the thing about investors is they will change your business, whether you like it or not.”

“And if someone is not willing to pay you, you should not be taking advice from them. Because the people who are using it for free are not your customers. They are people who are not willing to pay. So why should you give them any sort of customer support and or why should you be building features for people who aren't…”

“the problem you're going to have if you don't have a technical person on the architecture side is that you may not have bugs, but you may have glaring security problems you're not aware of. You may have glaring database problems that you could lose your customer's data. You could have problems that you're not aware you…”

“Don't, don't have an intern do your documentation. You're the business owner. You're the product owner. You need to do your documentation. Because, because you are setting the standard. This is your company's culture that you're building right now. And if, if your culture is I'm going to hire an intern to do this, then…”

“all my tech companies that I worked for, we hired internal staff, even at executive recruiting, because it was just a more efficient, better model”

“it's actually like a typical thing to, to, to, to, to like, to do prototypes fast to experiment, to make, to like, see what works, what's not, how it looks, how it's, how to implement it. But then like the final production version actually like still needs, uh, real developers to take care of everything.”

“Being a founder is so much harder. Investors have their own worries. We've done both. You got to raise money. You got to create a product that invest, that entrepreneurs like, but the existential dread of being an entrepreneur, of waking up and not knowing where your next client is, who's going to quit, how you're…”

“because we're entrepreneurs, we show up, we shovel shit. Like there is no, like, just do the thing you love. You also have to tend to the store and tend to people and be present.”

“That is the wrong mentality. Do not go AI first. Uh, it needs to be AI second. AI is the co-pilot.”

“Inherently the way AI approaches it is wrong in the sense where value for online is generally going to be telling people something they don't know. Whilst tools like Opus, they score based on their perception of value. Well, it's going to be things they do know. So the AI needs to know about it to perceive it as…”

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

“But to think of exit while you're executing your plan, I think it's, uh, it's just the thought process that takes you in another direction and somewhere the focus on building the product and building the company and, and a clear focus on the customers, you know, it gets diverted a bit.”

“If you, if you're earning a hundred dollars, uh, figure out way to spend a 110, because there's no point profiting, you know, you need to invest in growth, right?”

“It's good to be conservative while you're presenting, but be much more aggressive when you're Actually delivering. Uh, so obviously you need to have plan A, plan B, plan A to, you know, present it to the investors and obviously doing much more than that, uh, as your, as your real plan.”

“And that can be, you know, if you're, you know, if your business is relying on it, it may be a no brainer because you're like, Hey, we're, I'm using this to write code, that code I'm able to sell for, you know, 10, 20 X, whatever I'm paying, you know, open AI. And this is effectively, you know, replacing a junior…”

“a lot of companies who are starting in startups or, you know, founders who start their business, they just put CEO as a title on their, you know, resume or on their business card because they're the owner of the company. But in reality, there are specific job descriptions of the CEO. I think the CEO is responsible to…”

“doing cold calling is harder than ever before, but it's still the best way to get someone and fastest way to get someone to say yes to wanting to, to, to, to meet or do more, uh, discovery.”

“the longer it takes you to earn them a return, the lower their rate of return is. And that's what they're driven by. And so the, the, the, the venture capitalists instilled this idea of you have to work all the time because it's good for them because it increases their rate of return.”

“by the time you have another campaign to set up, those interfaces will have changed. And someone who's doing it every day is always going to do better job, even if you do a great job learning.”

“the easiest way to focus for me Is to be sure, to be absolutely sure that whatever I'm doing at that very moment maximizes my profit for a minute. If I know that there's nothing else I can be doing to be making more money right this second, it's a lot easier for me to zero in and be like, all right, I'm knocking this…”

“you are never going to make More money than the guy next to you. If you read the same 20 business books and you do the same stuff that's in the business books as all of your competitors, right?”

“I would say the paradigm that we are given is all about evolution, uh, more, better, different. So we're doing X and we want to do it. We want to do more of it. So we try and do more. If that doesn't work, then we do it better. If that doesn't work, we do it differently. And that's just the paradigm we're given. That's…”

“Uh, I think you either have it or you don't. Um, can you learn to become more resilient? Sure. Through experiences and adversity. And things like that.”

“As you put the energy into talking to investors, you're not thinking about growing your business. You're not thinking about how you can make better pictures, how you can have better posts, how you can get a higher percentage of people that, that, uh, that stay with you to leave a nice review, blah, blah, blah. You're…”

“Many people think we sell products and brands. Which is actually the second truth. And they missed the first truth, which is we sell data to an AI engine.”

“When the money comes from that, you know, selling 10,003 thousand dollar courses a month, it's pretty hard to turn it down and you want to do it more. Greed and factors play into that more so than helping the individual people.”

“we don't recommend moving it out of the, the crypto sphere. Like we, we say like you should keep your capital on chain unless you want to buy a house or a car or something. Um, keep that capital on chain and then move it into products that are going to pay you yield or give you some sort of exposure to benefit while we…”

“I don't think that's true for crypto. I think that these cycles are super predictable. I think that they follow the M two. I think that they follow the, the having cycle.”

“Like, all of that last mile of interaction, it's, it's not there, because there's no rule set against it. Like, there's too much emergence that happens between an individual when you, Uh, or between two individuals, uh, when you're talking together, and then there's emergencies happening within you when you're talking,…”

“I'm not really worried about AI becoming so smart that we have our, you know, AI overlords. I'm worried about us becoming so dumb That we are just reliant upon something to make any decision. We're reliant upon something to just tell us the answer.”

“there's more than enough data at the individual level to run these very, very powerful algorithms. I don't need to commingle my data with yours just so I can run those algorithms.”

“whatever to come in recommend is not to hire an external firm that will effectively, um, replace inefficiency with inefficiency. But rather to adopt software, and then to start considering hiring people that are AI enabled already.”

“whenever possible, Manufacture your product. Produce your product where you sell it. And if you can follow that principle, you will never go wrong.”

“There are not moments of conversion where somebody tells you, wow, I was totally wrong about this and you were right. These don't happen.”

“And then on certain things which are high level decision making, I always trust the guy having done it like two or three times. On certain topics like go to market, top of funnel, or product thinking, I like to take newcomers and people with fresh ideas, but when it comes to like technical challenges, like, nah.”

“Cause you know, the LLMs are looking at Google results. We know that you can slowly but surely like train it on what is best and you have control that entire process. It doesn't have to be reliant on actual third party people. It can just be you on third party sites.”

“There's a drag on your portfolio, but having, you know, you keep 10, 20% in cash or something like that, treasure bills, you know, there's going to be a drag on your portfolio, but if that drag lets you purchase when things crash, or even more correctly, probably said, it keeps you from selling when things crash, like…”

“the highest offer is not necessarily the best owner. The person you trust the most, the person you like the most, the person who references the best, that's probably the best owner.”

“It's one of the reasons I think sometimes like true entrepreneurs, operators are not always It's good investors because the secret to operating and being an entrepreneur is you just run at the problem. The secret to investing is sometimes you take a step back and be like, hold on, let me actually think about this…”

“For, for an individual investor like yourself, the percentage ownership isn't really that important. What matters is, is the share price increasing in value? Are the people the kind of folks that will take care of minority investors or will they steamroll them or railroad them?”

“you're just figuring, look, you know, there's gonna be 20%, hopefully it's only 20% illegal usage, and you just gotta let it go.”

“down in the follower count and what we call like the nano and the micro and these people with like two, three, four or 5000 followers and above, um, you know, that's where you're seeing the highest performing content, the best, um, return on, on investment for, for brands.”

“Our limitations are not concrete barriers, but they're consensual hallucinations maintained by our agreement to believe in them.”

“The rise of AI based no code solutions has made it possible for people like me who have business experience to develop and launch a software that can provide a service to businesses without having a single developer ever look at the code. So I, I think what this, these tools have effectively done is if you have the…”

“Psilocybin at both the macro and micro dosing level moves the brain in a beneficial direction. Whether you're cognizant of it or not, but if you're cognizant of it, it will move the brain in a beneficial direction even more rapidly.”

“there's techniques and a good coach will coach you through that, you know, allow, allow, allow, surrender, surrender, teach me, teach me. And you'll have a compression and it'll be terrifying momentarily. And then you're going to burst through and there will be a spontaneously spontaneous rewiring Of your brain, where…”

“generally when AI products, uh, sell human in the loop, what they're selling is the customer becomes the human in the loop, which is the customer still self-servicing the AI, which may make sense in a lot of, in legal industry, customer generally doesn't know what they need to do. Uh, like as a founder, you don't…”

“within the legal domain, uh, data by itself is open source and data in itself doesn't become the model. It's the application of that data set. Uh, it's the application of how you tune the models and the fact that you're building a tech layer between the customer and tech abstraction layer between the customer and this…”

“count on other people being lazier than you are. You can count on that. There are a lot of lazy people. So just, just, just go do it. You'll be, you'll be ahead of a lot of people.”

“there's this, this business experience knowledge gap that 99% of people who are vibe coding lack.”

“Now with ChatGPT Pro, I'm able to use that, you know, deep research button and tell it to go out, get real time market data that used to be reserved for, you know, Fortune 500 companies. This information now is able to be, you know, gathered and processed and simplified Uh, for business owners, small business owners,…”

“If, if you charge more than 1500 dollars, you're gonna need a sales team. So by, by, by just charging 1500 bucks, that's, you know, a sweet spot that people will be, like, willing to, uh, take a risk and invest into that without you getting bogged down with, uh, you know, needing to expand into a team.”

“I mean, e-commerce, you should be sub eight percent at all times”

“I don't think it's a Big thing that you need to have from an external vendor. I think this is something that you can easily build internally. It depends on how much time you have as an operator or who you have on your team, but there's many tools that pull data from different sources, puts it in an Excel sheet,…”

“In the seventies, it was very different. It was, it was symbolic AI. It was theorem proving. It was inference engines rather than giant matrices. But the problems we had, well, there wasn't enough data. The data wasn't good enough. There was confusion about what it meant. The problems have remained the same as the…”

“So there's, I think there's less change than people think other than in very shallow differences in the tools, other than everything's become cheap. And so you can do things that just would never have been cost effective before.”

“Counting them as wins and losses. Uh, 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.”

“I believe sales is on, I believe sales is a 75% framework in science, 25% kind of individual attributes, how you say the thing, whatever, which AI could figure out pretty quick, is it harder than I'm giving it credit for right now? Yeah.”

“If you have, uh, more than 20% of your business is dependent on one customer, That's, uh, for, for private equity buyers in particular, if the company is big enough to be acquired by a financial buyer, that's one of the first questions we get asked when they call us about a company we're representing and they're…”

“And I say, if you can't ring up 200 people and get them either interested in buying your product directly or know someone who would like that product, then you shouldn't get into it. You shouldn't begin.”

“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, and then figure out whether you're going to plug products…”

“Just take them outside their comfort zone, take them to an escape room, take them to, I don't know, a meditation, something that they're not really used to and just see how they are as a human being.”

“You don't need your own chain. You don't need to have an ICO. You don't need to distribute tokens to people because they've performed some action in your system. You don't need any of that. You can have a profitable business in the blockchain industry. That's not an exchange that can do it.”

“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.”

“Part of my argument is if you're, if you raised four or five million from a VC, your seed raise, whatever, and you can get an extra one, one and a half million dollars, it increases the likelihood that you'll survive to raise your A round. Because chances are you'll waste some of that money that you've raised. So this…”

“Uh, assign them like very high salary, like just would imagine like very big amounts just compared to the finding the raised and just, yeah, let's spend this money. And, uh, uh, and feels like the, like most of them lost motivation. And yeah, I know that one, the setups failed, uh, because of this, uh, the, the…”

“in our experience, so when you're doing your third business or fourth business, yeah, I think that, uh, starting from these numbers, you're doing pretty much, uh, Like understanding of how to run a successful startup because yeah, that's a completely different story.”

“There isn't enough money in the world to take care of their decisions. Do you follow? Cause if, even if I paid for this or paid for that, they would still have the same mindset and the same decision making, the same behaviors that created that situation.”

“Nobody spends your time. Right. So we got to get out of it using my time. Well, you're allowing you follow. You got to take a hundred percent responsibility. What happens there, right? So instead of being victimized by these people that they don't know what they did, right? Got to look within on your own…”

“anything beyond like, 10% growth over where you're at right now is just not gonna happen. There's no way that that's gonna happen within a quarter. And that's a young startup.”

“If we had a bug in, in anchor, um, it's not the first thing I do is not call my, my investors and tell them I, I had a bug, I fix it. I understand what's, uh, you know, what's, what's happening. And if it's interesting or important, and I think it may have long-term effects, then, then I will call and actually ask how,…”

“the most expensive recurring theme is not, is working with safe people Rather than people who are real experts and have done that thing in the past, and then continuing to pay for that with time and money until it completely falls apart.”

“that push for productivity and efficiency, um, it's a neat concept, but it doesn't work for most people. That's why you, that's why people are hunting for apps all the time. It's like, well, I need this new app to manage my productivity. It's like, no, maybe you're just a dreamer, and maybe you should Go find somebody…”

“improving what you're good at. One percent is not gonna make as much difference as improving what you suck at from 20% to 50%.”

“that's how you can start and scale quickly is by leveraging your credit to invest in things that are going to produce cashflow.”

“a blog has an SEO piece to it, and a lot of times that's the main primary goal of a blog is just to make sure that we're serving Google, as it relates to SEO, organic SEO rankings. That's real. It's not, we're not writing blog articles for you and making sure that you like it. I'm not really concerned whether you like…”

“what I had learned really early on was, you know, if I start and I say a hundred dollars for this thing to you and you say yes, well the next person I'm going to say 200. You say yes, all right. The next person I'm going to say 400. You say yes, fine. The next person I'll say 800. You say yes, next time is eight 16. So…”

“Because you also want to change the culture, maybe. So you need someone who kind of fits in, but not fully. So, so that person or that leader can change the, so there's, there's a lot of, Um, discussion around what is now the ideal success profile of that specific, uh, leader.”

“Because, you know, in the life cycle of a company, you know, if you're doing anything worthwhile, you're going to need to raise money unless you're just one out of a million that bootstraps it and hits, you know, the big time, uh, from, from, from the start, that's very few and far between.”

“I don't think making money is that difficult. I think it's actually an easy thing to do. Um, but what I do think is difficult is managing that money and then having a plan for what that money is going to do. And that's a very difficult thing for most people to handle.”

“the security industry is a commodity and a service industry where clients are usually just looking at the bottom dollar. Rather than the quality of the service they can get because they see us as a shield against lawsuits and that's how they want to use us. So they get the cheapest company so they can get our insurance…”

“making an offer that's successful is, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it doesn't require a lot of skillset. You just need a video guy. You need a webpage guy and a great copywriter.”

“A lot of the ad guys in the affiliate space basically have told me it's, it's gambling and it's an addiction and they don't want to do it anymore, but they can't stop.”

“You instinctively want to build from the bottom up because you don't want to spend money because you would think it's all yours, even though it's the company's money and you're robbing it because you shouldn't be paying yourself what you're being paid because your company's not doing as well as you think it is.”

“You need an operations person, you need a money person, and you need a, a salesperson. If you have those three things, then you can truly be a CEO and the team will start being built underneath you.”

“If you measure salespeople only by their output, how much they're converting and selling, as opposed to how much input they're making, it makes a whole lot of a difference because you teach them to control what they can actually control and let everything else take care of itself. And don't judge it. And then that way…”

“I bet, I mean, it would be very interesting to know this, that anxiety and panic attacks and everything is just trapped energy trying to get out. Because remember, we're We're energy. At the end of the day, we're energy. And if there's creative energy and ideas that want to get out there that are not finding the…”

“I try to tell people if they're going to start a business, they're best off doing something that doesn't require other people's money, even though people love other people's money.”

“Franchises are best owned by lawyers because it's all contract.”

“In California, that same exact model that that franchise built, you need six people to do this volume in this place would lose money due to our cost of labor. So I'd have to figure out the franchise or model, but with maybe four people where they say I need six because I very simply can't afford to have six people and…”

“if you're good, if you want to be a photographer or a violin player and you are going to be independent, get a degree in accounting. It just helps the language of business. It generally speaking, it's a very useful tool. Like I said, it's like learning Spanish.”

“35 seems to be that magic number. You, the society says you don't know enough until you're 35 and you certainly ran into that. And that's not true. That's ridiculous. But that's what And, and I said, you watch when you turn 35, it'll be almost overnight. And he did. He noticed it. He goes, wow, people who weren't…”

“well, if you are concerned about people working, you have a hiring problem.”

“until you go read 20 to 50 books on investing in various different, you know, markets and industries and so forth, um, don't try to go get passive income. I don't think you're going to. I think you're going to go make stupid investments.”

“genuinely wealthy people, like we're talking billionaires, they don't sell their assets. They hold them forever, forever. And so when you look at Bitcoin, you look at any other crypto, you look at real estate holdings, you look at holding companies with other, you know, with a portfolio of businesses in them. Um, the…”

“Like one of the things I've learned over the last 12 years running my own business is that there's no one, like advice is kind of terrible, uh, because people bring in their own bias and they forget to ask and understand like where you are at.”

“only a human has the ability to understand the emotional context behind why that clip is being generated, and that's where the AI fails.”

“we can still be, you know, really strong women in business, strong entrepreneurs, strong business owners, and I feel like it makes us, um, more approachable. And I feel like it makes us more successful in certain areas of the business because we approach things with a solution based mindset as opposed to why we're only…”

“That's why when I was hiring people with my last business, I, I didn't like make it a requirement that they were married and had kids, but I found that people who are married and had kids would be a lot more stable. They were less likely to disappear or to quit and find a better opportunity because they were focused on…”

“what the whole aim of Finnish and schooling system until people are 1516 is that you are brought on the same sort of, not on the highest level, highest performance, or yeah, but it sort of, um, if the If the grading is from one to 10, the, the objective of the schooling system is that most it's successful when people…”

“The reason me being entrepreneur, uh, is that I believe that we have so much, like that the foundation is so safe and sound that we should be able to do more, much more. Because we don't have to worry about these things.”

“And Silicon Valley will look all over the world because Europeans, since they have a lower, not a lower, since they have a different concept of money, they might be able to invest 500,000 in a company and get a 30%, you know, equity. But in an American company, half a million will get them five percent at the same…”

“I think there's certain personality types need somebody to be pushing them every single day, but I honestly don't think that those individuals become successful entrepreneurs anyways.”

“this is one of the benefits of search, investing in search over investing in kind of traditional private equity is that the searcher really cares, right? Because it's their career. They've only got one shot. If you've got a fund that's going to buy 15, 20 businesses, you know, um, and, and you're not a principal…”

“it's much, much nicer on the buy side to be doing a deal with a client who's got a proper M&A sell side advisor than it is With just a broker, because the brokers, and again, not to be disparaging here, but sometimes you will find that some of the brokers set unrealistic value expectations for their clients on the…”

“I think that I've seen actually, as I've, as I've kind of, um, gained experience and worked in professional services for longer and worked with lots of different businesses over the years, the deadlines often are nonsense, right? Um, and it's a, it's a, you know, best endeavors type situation. So whilst we always…”

“I mean, open AI, for example, right now, now allows you to upload a PDF file, right? Those are the upload PDF, uh, and talk to it. How many startups did that just kill? Startups and businesses, right? There are so many that came up and said, Ooh, we're going to parse the PDF and yeah, and we're going to let you chat…”

“entrepreneurs do not belong in a corporate environment. It is completely illogical to have an entrepreneur, creative, free thinker in, in, in an army of drones that have no soul, right? They just, you know, they shuffle around doing their job and they don't think they're waiting for someone to think for them.”

“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.”

“service businesses have to be profitable within their first year. They must be otherwise, or at least break even at the very least break even, right?”

“I think the companies that have, have not done very well is those that look at creators as, as a customer base.”

“what we figured out quickly was that The, the relationship that we as fans want with a celebrity or with a creator is actually really with the public persona that we see of this particular creator, creator. And the creators confirmed that for us as well. They said, look, they, they may want to know who I am behind the…”

“a lot of people become founders and they really, they've never really led anything. They, they have been managers. They may have even been people managers, but they've never actually been entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial, uh, inside of a large company.”

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

“a maxim of psychotherapy is that if you, 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 that in, in being an entrepreneur, being a founder,…”

“my experience with very large Fortune 1000 CEOs and CFOs and people like that are that they are chess players. For the most part, I mean, there's always going to be some variance and all this, right? But in general, an entrepreneur is not a chess player. Right? Um, an entrepreneur is a full contact, um, pick your sport…”

“so often I say is that it's not a sales training challenge often. It's about understanding the clarity of our value and baking that in to how we operate as a business.”

“What I, what I know works better, not my, not my view, it's scientifically known in psychology, is You want to run what I call empathetic objection prevention, meaning if I'm about to partner with you, the better you could read my mind, the more I trust you.”

“in China, if you went on a date, they made the assumption that you were potentially interested in marriage. If you went on a second date, it meant that you wanted to be in a relationship and you wanted to see what was gonna happen. If you're on a third date, you are almost definitely now in a relationship with that…”

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

“It's, it's crazy how, if you get really good at media buying and sales pages, you can actually get over fifty million and, and you're in the top six percent of companies and, uh, and you still don't have repeatability or investability.”

“for me, product market fit is you have profit. And bootstrap to profit businesses have discovered how to profit. That's why they are alive.”

“it's very difficult to use the vehicle of entrepreneurship and building a company and really have a true impact in the world around you in a big scale, because the big scale impact is done by the big companies. And for you to found a big company like Google or Facebook, you know, that's one in a trillion or one in a…”

“my experience is there has never been a company that has gone from high low pricing to everyday low pricing that, that succeeded.”

“There were times when I was in venture capital where we'd be making investment decisions, but I'd be conflicted as the board member representing the fund on certain decisions because, you know, I, you know, let's say we put in a million dollars and the next round because of circumstances was going to be a down round…”

“There's a lot of leaders and business owners who they, you know, I'll just use it. They lie and they pretend, you know, and, and they're trying to avoid the thing that's right in the way because they don't want to name it.”

“You, you don't really ever want to give any kind of proposal, you know, like in an email. You always want to do a proposal over the phone if you can't do it in person.”

“People who are good at zero to one million may not be good at the one to ten million and people who are great at one to ten million won't get you from 10 to a hundred.”

“people who are neurodiverse, they, divergent, sorry, they, they have such an extreme ability in that area that their volume is turned up to like a thousand. Whereas the rest of the world might perceive on a volume from say one to 10, they perceive from one to a thousand. So Those things are very, very loud to them,…”

“when you're doing an affirmation, How often are you trying to convince yourself of something that you've already decided you're not? And that makes it very difficult to come out of. You know, it's like, if I've got to tell myself I'm lovely somewhere, I've decided I'm not lovely. Otherwise, why would I, I'm not sitting…”

“Everybody just talks about fail fast. So that's bullshit. How about we win fast? I'd rather win fast. Failing sucks.”

“If you're working on intellectual property, Don't put it in a Google drive, an Amazon drive, anything else. You need to keep that local, right?”

“There's a lot of movements right now that are people getting together and buying homesteads and creating communities of two, 300 people living off grid, farming, doing all those things. Unfortunately, that never has ended very well either in our society. Right? Somebody always ends up being the authority, and then…”

“You know, the excuse of I was just doing my job really doesn't fly in any of those roles. You're, you're always making decisions of whether or not to continue to support whatever endeavor you're a part of. And it always takes courage to walk away and say, I'm not going to help you do that.”

“the more human involvement that is necessary to filter and analyze data to make sure it's fit for consumption, the more you've opened the opportunity for human deception, because all of us humans have parts of us that are less than a hundred percent pure.”

“So I think venture builders need to have GPs that are more technical and operational and not so much financial. And that's, that's not as easy.”

“GPT-IV is not good because it's large. It's good because it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback, which was discovered in the StrapGPT paper two or three years ago.”

“We have a hyper-optimization culture that knows no limits to ethics or capital, you know, like, uh, we're always optimizing something.”

“theoretically you're trying to build something in product that hasn't been built before. And yet the generative tools that exist out there are all derivative because it's trying to predict based on what's been seen already.”

“whether it's chat GPT or any other, these other kind of like generative models, they, or, or, or AI systems, they don't have an underlying model of what the real kind of like good, like they don't have a model underneath of what A great product is. They're just trying to predict the next content that you would put out…”

“And I would say most of the time, no, I would say all of the time it is our fault at the end of the day, because we hired them. And if we would have done a good enough interview, we would have been able to find the red flags that would have let us know. Hey, this person will not be a right fit.”

“So people aren't necessarily greed mongers. They're, they're, they want to be challenged. They're bored. And, and so those that can do more, do more.”

“we want them to follow instructions first, because if you can't follow instructions, then your creativity doesn't matter. Right? Because there's a hierarchy. At some point, you're going to have to listen to what someone else says.”

“A startup probably shouldn't use AI in the hiring process, right? The, the choice and the impact of the individuals at that early stage is too important.”

“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 implementation and change.”

“unfortunately sometimes they, they, they just misguide our clients because there are some very simple, particular answers to our clients' questions. But, uh, if we deal with human beings, we all are creative and we want, want to enhance, we want to add something new. So, and I believe in this case, um, when it comes to…”

“when you deal with chat GPT and through him, uh, this kind of situations, he tries to avoid firing as much as it can. It's impossible, you know, almost impossible to make him, um, you know, type something like, okay, you have to fire this person. And I believe It happens because, uh, they have some, let's say, hidden…”

“in some cultures, business people, they take advantage of each other. And instead of one business person who has been taking advantage of, who has been screwed over, feeling bad about it, he will say, wow, this guy, you're really good at screwing me over. I'll get you next time. Right? And now I learned how to, how to…”

“sure you're making 20 grand a month. You're taking all of it home. You're a freelancer. You're not a business owner. You're just, you're, you're a well-paid, you're a well-paid freelancer. So, uh, you know, those are some of the, the stumbling points for people is that they're, they're, they love to design, but they…”

“I've, I've encountered investors that are just money and investors that want to add value. And I prefer the investors that just have money because I can do the rest of myself with a team. But if someone is interested in, in nerding out and being on the board and trying to be helpful in the longterm, if I don't get…”

“the person that sits there and makes the same mistake over and over again, and apologizes each and every time, they're a con artist. They're an absolute con artist.”

“prompting and controlling the system to give the output that you desire is a skill that is going to heavily differentiate how much you can get out of it. Um, eventually maybe also how much you're being replaced with it to some degree, or how much you're replaceable with it, because if you cannot use it in your favor,…”

“People talk about mission and backing into core values, but it starts the opposite. It starts with your core values and that really leads to your vision and leads to your mission and your, your purpose.”

“if you grow a company to one, uh, the next million is, is inevitable. And I think the same thing is true. You get the 10 and the, the next 10 is inevitable because it, it becomes, uh, you get that, that flywheel going and, uh, and you're, you're continuing to, to grow and grow and grow.”

“The bar for quality that they have for a product or a software product specifically is really high. Whereas in India, the mentality is that, Hey, I mean, I'm okay with a half baked product, as long as you bundle a great service around it.”

“a role as an investor makes you extremely pessimistic cause your daily job is to say no to ideas.”

“the investor's responsibility is to steward the investment. You know, the key word is like the investment, not the company, although they're very, you know, intertwined obviously in the success of the company is the success of the investment investor. Investor most of the time, although, you know, in some key times…”

“They try to do everything themselves or they hire a team And then they complain all day that the teams are not good. The staff members are not good enough. The staff are rubbish, but they've not given them the right support. They haven't put the right systems in place to enable them to do their jobs to the best of…”

“if you start from the basis that Anyone that you hire or anyone you bring into your business is really just here to do the paid hours and need that support. If you start from that base level, then anyone above that is a bonus and you still covered all basis so that anyone that comes in has the right support, has the…”

“I feel like a little bit women are, From an evolutionary standpoint set up to be the main caretaker, unfortunately, because if you're nursing”

“The, the guy, the, the men who it's hard for them because they feel, you know, guilty as well, because they want to be with their kids or, but you know, with women, it's like, you're literally thinking about your kids like 24 hours a day too, because, so you have to somehow figure out how to have those two parallels…”

“my husband goes to work and he sometimes he has his own business so he can be at home too, but he has eight clean hours of unpolluted time. And even though my kids are 10 and 14 now, You know, I still have all my days are like, okay, you have set up your appointments and you have to make sure that the teachers are…”

“And we had a lot of benign neglect, which was great, you know, because I think we need more of that. Um, but now everyone's so hyper parenting and like they're on their kids, yet the kids are always on screens and we're always on screens. So it's like this cauldron of anxiety that the family is Part of”

“Um, and so it's really, really hard in Asia to make a life for yourself that's outside of the education sector, unless you start a business, and even then, it's hard as a foreigner to start a business and run a business, unless you've got a local partner maybe that's got 51% of the business, or you've got, um, you…”

“From my experience in a lot of countries that I've been to, being a foreigner and opening a business in that country, focusing on that economy is a really bad idea because you're just going to get destroyed by other companies that know the language and have relationships.”

“reading another 30 books isn't going to get me to this next place. It's reading one book 30 times to pull out the 20 or 30 incremental nuggets and actually seeing them apply and change my thinking will help Progress me that way.”

“So if people are working hourly, they're incentivized to work as slowly as possible. But if they're on a salary, they're incentivized to get the job done well, because if they do, they got a job the next month.”

“So you can hire a bunch of Indians and Filipinos to do your development work and your software testing work. But you may not want to hire them to do your sales and your marketing. If you're targeting a North American audience, because they may not have the cultural understanding to be able to fulfill that role.”

“our overarching thesis is that the environmental responsibility of an organization should not be limited to simply reducing its negative impact. There's a much more aspirational goal to be found in working with companies to create a positive impact in the world. That appeals more to employees. It appeals more to…”

“it should not force the customer to make an additional payment because this is unlikely to work and actually it's more likely to backfire. It might create negative impact.”

“The tokenization of impact itself is not necessarily something you want to do on a blockchain, um, because it's going to create quite a lot of friction, especially in terms of corporate adoption, right? So unless if you can make it really opaque, So that companies don't even know it exists on a blockchain and they…”

“I wanted to make sure that they passed me before they could pass everybody else, because if they pass everybody else and then they fail me, I've wasted the team's time. I would rather waste a little bit of my time first and not the team's time. Cause I think their time is more valuable than mine.”

“The risk in this kind of approach is that, um, it's like this idea that it comes from the Bible, right? So you should treat people the way you want to be treated. That's like a biblical narrative. Bullshit. Because that assumes that people are the same as you. You should treat people the way they want to be treated.…”

“And when we talk about perfectionism, that's usually what it looks like on the surface is perfectionism and what, um, usually makes people very unproductive. And taking too long to do something and making sure that they cross every T and dot every I before something goes out of the door, you know, and just, and not…”

“if you want to learn about yourself, start a business. And if you want to really break through all of the bullshit in your life, Start a business because if you refuse to deal with those things, your business won't succeed. And so you have no choice but to deal with those things if you want to succeed.”

“For most roles, you don't need a full-time employee.”

“One thing that a lot of people don't realize when they're running a business is if anything goes wrong, it's always your fault. Even if someone else made a mistake, it's your fault because you didn't give them the support they needed or you didn't give them the training or you didn't hire the right person or you didn't…”

“So I always make the argument to, Institutional funders or donors of you actually want some overhead because that's how you ensure that your dollars are being properly spent.”

“you really find one of two types of people in nonprofits. It's either people that are, uh, you know, able financially at a point in their life to now give back to the community, or it's people that are entirely passionate about the cause and they don't care what they make because they live and die by the people that…”

“what I would always, always caution is take a strong look around and see if anybody else is doing what it is that you want to do, because unlike entrepreneurship, where you can elbow somebody out, um, you know, if somebody's already doing good in that space, See if you can join forces with them and, and be a part of…”

“99% of the market. It's not R and D it's just like gluing different things together. And developing something new.”

“The problem that I see with many startup founders is that they want to outsource everything that they can before they make it predictable. And it will just not work out. Like if you find an agency that like will do certain things For you, they will not probably not bring you results that you want.”

“when I'm looking at pricing of a startup, uh, I love to say like, encourage abuse instead of limiting the usage. Uh, and I actually mean that because like, if you, if the person will on the other side will see the value out of the tool, uh, and will abuse your tool, that means they're using the tool. Like the more they…”

“in Taiwan, especially in Taiwan, actually, I think a lot of these KOLs have so-and-so called agents. And the reason why it's plural is because there is not one single agent that binds them. And these agents are essentially just job referrers and these job referrers don't do anything. Aside from saying, Hey, I have a…”

“one of the trends that we were able to observe is that people that were, you know, more natural looking per se, They were able to get a lot more fan engagement and traffic without posting any kind of explicit content.”

“If you told me that we're working with a North American content creator who has statistics on, let's say Twitch on Twitter and YouTube. I think, yeah, that's should be collated because all of those three platforms can be directly linked together to look at certain trends. But in Taiwan or actually most of Asia that…”

“in most businesses, if you can improve retention one or two or three percent, it's like the same as increasing signups by a hundred percent.”

“you hire people, you know, generally within the first month that they're not going to work out, but I have like a soft spot for people. And so I, I hope that they change. I hope it's going to get better. So the big, I know it may, Cliche, but I guess the, the biggest part for me is just like, you know, hire quickly,…”

“the community is always more important than the technology.”

“So kind of deprogramming them from this belief that somehow, giant air quotes, we can get all the requirements up front when the people who are asking for this thing to be built don't even know what they want.”

“the thing about a scrum team is everybody's equal, but this, you know, on his scrum teams, when he acts as a team member, he's like a unicorn and everybody else is a quarter horse. So that is, that doesn't feel that great to the, to the quarter horses.”

“when you fundraise through venture capital, uh, there's generally a lot of caveats tied to, uh, 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 to give up a lot more equity than you probably want…”

“No blockchain is going to create value out of fucking thin air and everybody's going to get rich. You need people to put money in So that people can earn that money from them. That's how an economy works.”

“I think the sort of absence of innovation, um, is the result of, I guess, how bold the mission is, but also I think we have this sort of mentality in the West where it's been like this sort of lean startup approach where it's like pick a niche, monopolize in that one little thing. And then one of these big companies…”

“forwarding and sharing are two of the most important features on, like, in social communication that exists today, and without them, it would be an enormous amount of friction to be able to get things done, so I, I think we also just have to become more trusting and optimistic in these scenarios, and there is good,…”

“if the user can hack it together, like if they wanted to share company information and they can copy and paste it, or they can screenshot it, If they want to, they can do it, right? So like, what would be the advantage of feature stopping them in that sense when they could just bypass that and do it their own way?”

“think of like how an artist like sketches a piece of paper. If you watch like a, someone who's good at sketching, they sketch like the bigger picture and you can start to see like the outlines of the product. And they do like the sort of like shading and detail last, uh, in that sense, because the big picture…”

“Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg just wear casually, but they, they already make their, you know, they're successful. This is why they have the right to dress casually or t-shirt. But if you're not there yet, I think it's quite important for you to, um, just impressed for the location.”

“with WordPress, you had long development times, you had maintenance, and then you can kind of scale the agency pretty easily. Whereas as we are here kind of just on a runway, like the longest client is around three to six months.”

“you cannot avoid it just by hiring a particular type of people. Of course, there are people for whom sort of the wellbeing of the group and the positive feeling while you're together is more important than for others, but nobody is immune.”

“It helps a lot to develop a culture that encourages being critical. So that means that you might prefer having people who are too critical or maybe criticism being phrased too harsh in terms of how you communicate it rather than a culture where you cannot tolerate any, any sort of tension in the group. Or anyone who…”

“if something relies on a lot of complexity, perhaps the product is a conglomerate of a ton of features, and for some reason we say that they all have to work together at the same time, otherwise users will not like it. These types of things are actually a way of masking the own insecurities that we have.”

“I think it definitely helps creating little silos where the product or any kind of challenge can be looked at from different perspectives is useful because obviously you, when there are fewer people around, there's less to worry about in terms of this is going to upset someone and you.”

“Just like with when you put three experts together, they can perhaps quickly persuade each other to do something in the way that it's always been done, because they all know that this is how This thing is done. So that again means that critical thinking just goes away, and thus you, you get into this spiral of just…”

“We don't get to call ourselves an ally. Somebody who represents or comes from a historically marginalized group will so bestow that upon us.”

“One of the things I've learned to do when someone speaks to an experience that they've had at the hands, not literally, but as a result of the experience of the man is the one thing you don't want to do initially is defend, invalidate, make light of their experience.”

“So if you think about a psychedelic trip, you can imagine that the psilocybin breaks apart those neural connections and then follow on psychotherapy Will reconnect them in a, air quote, healthier way.”

“We believe that lithium ion is amazing, but whenever you can avoid it with a simple and clean means, you better avoid it, especially inside buildings.”

“the idea that you can crypto tokenize some legacy business, many of those have not been successful, but OpenSea has been very successful because it's sort of native and sort of Using all of the levers and all the amazing things available in the crypto environment.”

“you can teach an American how to be fluent in Chinese, but if you don't teach them how to also adopt the cultural aspect when you do it, like it's basically useless to learn the language.”

“Again, keep in mind, Sean, you need to pay how your business works, not how it's convenient for them. They would love to get paid every day. You actually set up the rules. You're the employer and you set up how your company is running, not how they want to get paid.”

“Only for sales positions where actually bonus is tied to the specific performance of the sales. It's hard to tie bonus to any like admin work, something that it's not sales specific because you can throw money at a problem, but it's not going to fix the problem.”

“Your virtual assistant is a reflection of your business, of how you are running the company. If you think your virtual assistant sucks after working with you for a certain number of years, you need to look at your business model. You need to look at your organization. What went wrong there? Even if that was a wrong…”

“Sometimes we've been creating positions just for the right person. Right person comes along. We like him. We want to hire this person. We want him to be part of a team. We create the position for him. And guess what? Most of the time, it's actually right decision to do that.”

“If, if anybody has ever experienced the state of flow, it is like the state of flow multiplied by a hundred times. Like you, you can sit there and focus on something and nothing could ever distract you away from it. You have tunnel vision in what you're doing.”

“One of the things that I think actually made the program as successful as it was is that we were often recruiting demonstrators through our brokers from people that worked at the store in general anyway. So when they were on off hours, they were now educated on how to sell the product. And then when they go return to…”

“Because even though six months could be a long time, that first six months when you come into a company is a critical period where you really get to understand the business. And once you understand the business, the decisions you'll make, Will be much more rooted in really what will support the company's long-term…”

“That's just, that's just a clock. That's not a driver here. It's just an outcome.”

“Millennials are more likely to analyze like data analytics. I mean, numbers, right. And they need more time to analyze. If we talk about Gen Z, they are more about emotional marketing and like emotional purchases.”

“most agencies and consulting types of businesses, or their whole business model was predicated on getting into a client, Getting the client addicted to them, pretty much making long-term agreements and trying never to leave. That's how those businesses thrive.”

“the person that they may need to hire for the next six months may not be the same person they need to hire in the next 36 months. And what I mean by that is sometimes when you get inside these businesses, especially if they're Again, going through these kind of periods of intense transformation, or massive sea changes…”

“this kind of attention to detail is what separates juniors in the mid-level from the senior people, because it says, I take my craft really seriously, and people put a value on this. People out there are selling their services to other people on an hourly basis or a project basis. You want to know the difference…”

“I don't believe that companies should be outsourcing a lot of these digital muscles into agencies. It made sense 10 years ago when a campaigns or digital type, you know, engagements, people say, Hey, look, I'm going to do my one this once or twice a year. Well, once we hit a place where companies needed to have these…”

“You just don't understand it, and you need to build up that shared history together to understand, is this something to be trusted? Is this something to be feared? And just like a I mean, a machine learning model, you're gonna see different things that you did and how this intelligence acts, and then you're gonna build…”

“You have so many people making independent decisions, which is massively inferior to one thing guiding all traffic, right?”

“Make an AI as smart as you want, does that mean that it can figure out, again, how to defy gravity, how to travel through time? Some of these things are just physical challenges. You can't do something that isn't physically possible. So if you design a system where the AI can't physically do something, I think the risk…”

“the number one rule is you have to work directly with the developer, no intermediary, no project manager. So if the project manager is a great communicator, but the developer isn't, or you don't even know who the developer is, that's the biggest disaster that I've ever seen.”

“Hiring fast and firing fast is, you know, really important. You really only find out if someone's good on the job”

“if somebody says, Hey, I'm working on my own side project, don't get defensive and be like, well, what about me? You got to work for me full time. And, you know, think it's a bad thing. It's a good thing because anyone who's good is going to be Working on something else. They're going to be contributing to an open…”

“having your video on, you know, most of the time is, in my opinion, a requirement, and having good audio and good internet connection is just Those things are not negotiable, and if you have to buy the hardware for them, that's just part of the hire.”

“I'm a big believer in the sort of contract to hire model where you start off with someone contract. And then from those guys, you actually hire them full time.”

“Even in the early days, like, if we don't have any customers, like, if we don't have anyone who is paying for your technology, that would kind of tell you that, you know, your technology, your product is worthless.”

“There's correlation between the least glamorous and sexy and appealing the space, the greater your chances of success.”

“my philosophy is that you're better off in most cases self-funding it, at least for the first three or four years, because it forces this kind of like self-constrained and like this clarity of thought and this clarity of strategy, because necessity is the mother of invention. If you got a bunch of extra money, it can…”

“If you try to like tackle all of the challenges associated with the multi-sided marketplace with no domain experience, It's gonna be really, really tough. Most of the time, these, these things go to zero.”

“In, in a way, it was very unfair, because actually, when you have kids with the lockdown, you need to Take more time at home with the kids and you are much less productive for your work. And on the contrary, your colleagues are also locked down at home without kids and they have nothing to do. So they are working much…”

“I think the best thing Is that kids force you to stop working and then look at the big picture.”

“In my career, I realized, uh, several times that the amount of time you're spending on your work, especially on technical work, Is absolutely not related to the quality and, uh, yeah, the quality of your, of the, of the job you deliver in the end.”

“There will be some formula to how they decide to invest, but they will consistently override it if they want to. Like, like they can be sold just the same as everybody else.”

“Don't go build all the processes in day one. Don't make your product manager your first, your first hire, muddle through. It's like, you don't make your sales go into the first hire.”

“the total value of me doing stages one and two on two features versus doing stage one to three on one is going to be higher for the end user, and therefore they'll stay along when they spend more money and will grow faster.”

“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.”

“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 that comes in.”

“One it's like new marketable features. That's what drives your business. Like everything, the existence of your company growth, et cetera, is going to be driven off of like new marketable features, basically.”

“I see a lot of people like they go and just try to get anybody like, oh, this person was good at some big co, right? Like, oh, this is a Nike executive and they'll like, for sure they'll be affected in my tiny little startup is probably not the case.”

“Every investor that we've ever trained, we've said never sign an NDA because you have no idea what you're limiting yourself to, and that will preclude you from being able to look at anything else in the future.”

“as a married couple running a business together where you, you're both alpha dogs, A-type personalities, you cannot work in an environment where one person is submissive to the other person. You have to work in linear types of relationships where both people have equal footing and both people are working but not…”

“I really believe that there's a huge difference between like clicking on a button where they are uploading things, which is an indication, but the ultimate validation is, are they're changing their spending behavior based on that feature?”

“I believe that in a bootstrap startup, you should be hiring bottom up and looking for really eager young people who have already shown that they got some knowledge, but they're also willing to learn.”

“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.”

“And I think sometimes I've tried having like no schedule, like just call me whenever. And then I find like when they call me, the progress is like next to nothing. Even if I initially thought they were hungry and self-motivated, like I just don't feel like the progress has been as impressive as when we do set a…”

“When you challenge people's fundamental, socially ingrained beliefs and see how they react is, I think, a pretty good measure of their ability to be teachable.”

“An early stage startup frequently can't afford that cost, and I don't recommend incorporating in Delaware from day one. It's a capital expense that you don't necessarily need to operate on.”

“If the lawyer doesn't ask you what happens when the place fails, walk out the door and find a new transactional attorney to write your agreement, because if that question isn't asked, your attorney is not protecting you from what really, really matters.”

“I actually think your best case scenario is doing that third thing, because I gotta tell you, if you are spending the kind of time that most founders spend when they're founding a business, you are talking to your spouse, you are getting ideas from your spouse, You're bouncing things off of them, even if they're never…”

“If you are a really successful tech company or startup, you will need to go with one of those firms when you are getting ready for your IPO, or when you are dealing with the deal that you finally cut with a venture capital company, and not before. Because those companies are all going to charge you four figures an hour…”

“We have such a visible bias that I might be like, oh, I really like Sean. So I like what he's saying, even though I'm not actually truly fully listening to what he's saying. So if we're trying to make sure that all of us are consistent with our messaging, we're going to be more observant or, or better able to listen if…”

“How can I intentionally leave out some information That they will immediately jump out and be like, well, wait a minute, what about this? Or wait a minute, I know some other company's doing this. Those types of obvious questions that might arise, sometimes it's better to leave that information out and get them engaged…”

“Don't start by hiring an HR person. No. Hire first technical person. Hire first persons that you can incentivize and make them interested in your project.”

“HR has two parts, recruitment, retention. Those are the two big Rs. You must always focus on retention and not forget about recruitment. Actually, there should be good balance. Today, looking back, if your company is excellent at retention, you're not getting new blood into the company if you're not growing. At some…”

“I would ask both because I want to know where they're, and then I would ask follow up questions around that, like tell me about your full compensation structure, what worked for you, what didn't work for you, et cetera.”

“It's also a way for us to actually distinguish between startups who are really interested and committed to the program, Rather than really just joining programs after programs, and quite honestly, there's a lot of startups who do that, um, in this part of the world.”

“The problems that you see in Indonesia, the problems that you see in Singapore, the problems that you see in Philippines or in Korea, they are all different. The market is different. The users is different. The habits, behaviors, everything is different. So founders that we come across here are actually really solving…”

“We noticed that when you are of a free or low tier plan on a SaaS product, you typically get horrible customer service because it's not cost effective to invest your employees time in communicating with these people because they're not bringing back the Financial value that you need to justify communicating with them.…”

“Instead, a referral should be a very targeted strategy Where you're looking at your gold or platinum customers, the ones who have already demonstrated that you are a fit. There's product market fit. They love your product. They're advocating for it. Things like that are worthy referrals, and you're much more likely to…”

“And you have more freedom because that's also another big difference from, you know, when you have business angels or private investors versus VCs that normally are more, you know, you have more limitations or you are, you have more rules to follow. And as an entrepreneur, you will always have more freedom just having…”

“Because it's easier being a female. At least they remember you, you know, and this is something I value very much. You know, at least you're in, you could be top of the mind because they know you.”

“it's a lot easier to start a company in the UK and then start doing business in the US or Australia or New Zealand, because there are very similar cultures. Whereas if you're starting a company in France, for example, you, you're basically looking to develop The French market. It's hard to move from France to Germany,…”

“I can't tell you how many Websites. I've had to migrate from Wix and migrate from Squarespace because the business gets to a point where it's like, well, we're big now. We want to do this and this and this. And it's like, ah, well, you can't do that on Squarespace. You can't do that on Wix. We got to move the whole…”

“I would argue, And we can look at data that that's probably one of the most important parts of a website, because there are websites that are just atrociously ugly that have amazing copy and convert really, really well. And on the flip side, there are gorgeous websites that can't convert a soul because they don't say…”

“I believe that no one is able to do this all by themselves. I don't, I don't necessarily believe in willpower as some people would call it. Some people might, might argue with me, but I think that most people need some type of support. I'm talking about those that are really struggling.”

“If I can't afford for this to go 10% as well as I'm modeling, I'm not going to start it. Cause it's probably gonna go 10% as well as I think in the beginning.”

“It's, you know, especially like these people that you're hiring. It's a, it's a vanity metric. Like it's, it's horrible. It's not, it does not sign of a company doing well.”

“But like there becomes a point That's like maybe above 30 where you've had to put all of the management layers in that you would, if you had like a hundred or 200 person company, bureaucracy and politics enter this organization that just suck.”

“We don't necessarily have to get along to get something done. You know, I'd rather, I'd like everybody to be happy, but in the absence of being happy, let's, let's do great work.”

“when you refer to a person as capital, you're basically thinking about them as property or as part of the process that helps you get to that profit or to that bottom line. You're not thinking about The heart, the soul, the brain that goes into it.”

“You know, I think I've read so many books that are about the fact that yes, there is a gender gap, um, and a glass ceiling, but actually more often than not, it's, um, the gap is with working mothers, not necessarily working women.”

“when you're really trying to grow exponentially, bootstrapping is really is not the The best way to go about it. You really have to have really more of a structured and detailed plan. And that first starts out with having a strategy.”

“hiring is not something you can delegate. It's your job as the CEO until you're a thousand employees.”

“In fact, you'll never grow in size past like three million in yearly revenue if you don't have somebody working on the inside while you're working on the business.”

“And I don't believe that hiring a salesperson is a marketing strategy and word of mouth about your company is not a very good marketing strategy. You have to have a variety of channels. From anything from social media to direct mail to email campaigns to, uh, SEO, SEM, you know, you have to have something that works or…”

“Actually in the world, other than celebrities and movie stars, no one is able to become really wealthy by taking a salary. The only way to get wealthy or to build wealth is to actually trade your salary for equity.”

“I feel like companies that tend to take big swings into other verticals, the conglomerations, they don't really work that well, uh, often anymore.”

“Whether she made 40 hours or 20 hours, that doesn't affect my bottom line. What affects my bottom line is, did she build the right relationships with the right companies and make them super happy so they come back and keep working with us in future?”

“It's quite possible to move a conference online and do a cool thing in the virtual world, but it doesn't necessarily take any less people to do it because the sheer amount of moving parts involved, most of which are human. Your sponsors, your speakers, your design stuff, the platforms that you're running this stuff on,…”

“A lot of times engineering, again, to move quickly, they don't put in even the tracking that I need to know how many people did the first thing, but didn't do the second thing or didn't do the third thing. And then not just the tracking, but now how do I target the people that did the first, but didn't get to the end?…”

“Claude inside of cursor allows you to build plans for your feature sets. And it won't put in deep links in the plan. If you don't ask, it doesn't put in error handling and logging and documentation and making sure the design system works. And like, it doesn't handle all of those extraneous things that you then have to…”

“This, um, product has an MVP. A minimally viable product. Uh, marketing needs an MMP, a minimally marketable product.”

“If you're going to make a large announcement, unless you are Microsoft or Apple or Meta or something, you're not going to get same day or next day coverage. You're going to need to reach out to reporters two to three weeks in advance to give them a heads up, to give it to them under embargo.”

“if I was a Entry level marketer today. That's the, the worry, the job that I'd be worried about. That's where I would say you need to go and learn AI so that you can be, um, you can be the one that's managing the AI, not learning how to do the work that AI is doing now, which is writing blog posts or social media…”

“One of the things I think is difficult sometimes is it doesn't know Like, it doesn't know how to, like, balance importance of things. Sometimes, like, if you just gave it the recording of 10 customer calls, it might, if somebody says something really passionately, it's going to take that and make it more important,…”

“And so a review site, for instance, holds a lot more weight than just one person's blog post, um, about this.”

“I need to make sure that I'm mentioning that we've worked with LinkedIn and we've worked with ServiceNow and we've worked with Twilio and I need to make sure that's consistent across the board because it ranks it as more Trustworthy if it is more consistent.”

“I think, um, I think I picked a, in some ways a challenging business because it's a, it's a software as a service where the customer has to like truly make a decision to become somebody in order to be using your product.”

“one of the best ways to do that, I think, uh, for people involved in some kind of knowledge business is with the online challenges. Uh, online challenge, I would define as like some kind of A fixed calendar date online course experience that like people are going through, uh, like a five day challenge that you have to…”

“in every, every product you have to think about what are the things where you can be providing some kind of value for the product to just exist for the person and which will like make it more sticky for the user.”

“If like, if you see somebody out there with like a, a 99 dollar or less product, that product is not like, if they're successful in their business, that product is not their flagship product. That is like, uh, uh, an entry level offer to capture leads and to the, the price of it is to help subsidize ad costs or…”

“And so I think most creators should aim not to compete on price and be the cheapest product, but instead, how can you deliver more value to charge more for your product? Because getting customers is hard, no matter what. And so I would rather take the approach of like, okay, how can we make this better by like, it's…”

“If, uh, if you heard the idea that people are talking about, it's not software as a service anymore. It's service as a software because of all these, these shifts with, uh, shifts with AI. Um, you have to think of, okay, not how can we use AI to slightly reduce our costs or, or do something a little bit faster to save…”

“the roles and, uh, responsibilities have flipped. It used to always be that like the marketing team is pushing the product, like, Hey, you guys gotta get this finished. We're trying to promote it. And now it's like the opposite. Now it's like, Hey guys, sorry, the product's done. Uh, like, do we have the marketing…”

“a lot of like builders and probably people like listening or watching a show like this, like we're like a year or two ahead of the average user, even if they're an entrepreneur, most cases, because there there's just such a quick advancement in how these things are changing.”

“In my experience, Fractional can work all the way up to about 20 to twenty-five million in annual revenue. Anything above that range in our experience, the idea of fractional starts to spread too thin. You really need a full-time operator at that scale of a company.”

“I know there's a lot of companies out there that are trying to break that seven figure threshold, uh, and we applaud them and celebrate them, but they often say, I want a COO, but in reality, you don't really need a COO. What you really need is just to do more of what you're already doing. Maybe you need a online…”

“So for them to feel like they can step out in some way, it doesn't have to be black and white, all or nothing. It could be somebody else bringing a mini me, bringing somebody that could do 80% and you bring in the 20%, right? It's kind of like the, like the The dentist visit, like the dentist doesn't clean every…”

“when you're pre-revenue, You have to do those sales. You have to do those demos. You have to learn from people so that you know what you're building and why.”

“every single person I get on a demo with, they all acknowledge instantly that they know they should be more visible on LinkedIn and they should be posting more often, but there's no sense of urgency to do so because they already have a profitable business. Okay. So they, there's no urgency to get them to commit right…”

“AI did the heavy lifting to put the number on the table to have the conversation. But the conversation is the thing that's actually more important than the number.”

“it would have to have access to the total sum knowledge of your company to know that you've already made that determination. Otherwise it will continue to give you that bad advice.”

“If the same bad quality data goes, AI is not going to fix it. No one can fix it. There is someone who has to check it.”

“The one thing that you have as an advantage as a small company is that you don't have the bureaucracy that's making everybody and similar to AI sort of gravitate towards the mean. You have the ability to be different. And so use that, um, and do it in a way that builds trust among your audience and you will, you will…”

“early companies tend to run on, like, founder proximity. Like, you're in every room. Decisions tend to happen by osmosis. Like, the culture comes from your actual physical presence. And none of that gets designed intentionally because it never had to be. Like, you were the system. And then growth just pulls you out of…”

“if you double your head count in a year, That means most of your company has never worked under the original conditions when you were, you know, bootstrapping things. And so there's this tipping point where the ratio of some people who are like acculturated, um, to newer to the organization just flips and the culture…”

“There's still tremendous amount of distrust when it comes to tech platforms that a company is deploying and the anonymity, the confidentiality of the interactions that you're having with that, um, which I think in, in some cases is unfounded and in others is well-founded and it's impossible for employees to know the…”

“I became a much better Executive. I was doing better things at the market level. I was doing better things at the strategic level. When I spent, started spending the majority of my time speaking to, you know, the guy that's making 25 dollars an hour on the shop floor, whose job is hot, heavy, and dirty, and, um, I was…”

“I think one of the hacks was to use, uh, ordinary phone call as an interface. Actually, that was our starting point. We don't use any applications, any software, and that was a smart move, uh, because obviously phone call is the, uh, Common routine for senior population.”

“And I actually think it's a better time than ever for smaller companies to be selling into the enterprise with agents, because if those agents can tackle one discrete problem and do it incredibly well, that frees up the humans to do other things, there's a real opportunity to do that.”

“So like the old way of automating workflow type tools, it was very Specified declarative in the way that those steps were laid out, and if anything deviated from that, it had to have exception processing. Now with agents, you don't need to be as definitive. The agent can operate within its boundaries to come up with…”

“A research document, you don't really need human in the loop too much because it's just an internal document. But when you turn that research and run it all the way through that process to the point where it becomes that capability pitch document that's beautiful with bios and experience in it, you need a human still…”

“Why don't you call their founders and find out and not the ones they tell you to call. Here's the trick I tell my founders. You, you have a VC like, okay, great. Give me some references. Great. Here you go. Okay. Now give me the list of the founders you funded, or you look on their site and you look at the founders…”

“LinkedIn is that feedback loop. Like if you're, Bringing in the wrong folks, then you understand, okay, is it something with my product? Is it something with my messaging? What's my strategy that can often, uh, inform like what you should be writing about.”

“something like a pivotal moment, like the, this city is going to play host to the world, has a wonderful way of, of, of, of motivating leaders to get something done.”

“I think the, the hardest part is getting people to tell you the truth, because at the end of the day, you know, their goal is to get the highest multiple possible, you know, most bang for their effort in the last few years. So they're obviously biased. We, we are lucky. Sometimes we, we meet amazing individuals that…”

“SIM and eSIM technology, it's separate from everything else. It's a secure execution environment. So if your, your ID, your representation of who you are, the private information, I argue should be there, not on all these cloud systems that can be taken and manipulated.”

“if you took the small pipe and put information through it, yes, it's very secure when it's in the pipe, but when it reached their server, it's an ocean of unsecured data, and that's where the vulnerabilities are. It's not the point to point. So, you know, you can say point to point encryption. That means you'd have to…”

“Well, obviously there's knowledge, but I think even bigger than the knowledge is the relationships. So they have a network, they have relationships, they can re-leverage those and, um, and, and grow really fast.”

“But because of the stage we invest in, like we invest in the seed stage and pre-seed, there's really no, like, database you can go and, like, find things. Like, there's no pitch book for, like, pre-seed companies, right? They don't, and oftentimes, there's not even company yet. There may be just, like, a human building…”

“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.”

“The only difference is, you know, when they, when the investors give money to the fund, it's a blind pool of capital. They actually don't know exactly what you're going to do with it. When you invest in the company, you kind of know what the company does and what you're investing in. When you invest in the funds, you…”

“referrals are often looked as kind of the icing on the cake, right? Yeah. I get some referrals. That's part of how I grow my business that I, I recommend for a lot of folks to consider it is the cake. Uh, it is how people want to meet you.”

“I just think it should be transparent. I think that's the most important thing. Um, because sometimes when clients or customers, you know, maybe didn't know that you would get compensated and then after the fact they find out you did, it can leave a bad taste in their mouth if it's not handled properly.”

“any kind of content like that, whether it's your success story, someone else's success story, your knowledge is sometimes you, you and I work, we're creators, uh, say curators of knowledge and information, right? So we're, we're helping the people in our community. By curating and vetting other stories and other…”

“So the mistake is sometimes in communicating our value is, uh, using references, name dropping, right? Of our clients, uh, that don't relate to the person we're in touch with.”

“Your, your messaging, whether the messaging is through another human delivering the message to others, like a referral source, or whether it's your website or anything else, your messaging needs to attract the right people and repel the wrong people. And I know repel seems like a strong word, but that's, it's not just…”

“Now you can have more than one persona, by the way, you can have two or three. I don't recommend having more than three, but you could have a splitter page that says, if you're this click here, if you're this click here, if you're this click here, not necessarily that language, but you get the idea.”

“Proper networking is like being a diplomat, uh, or, or if you want a spy, but is, is, uh, it requires planning. It requires knowledge. It requires studying what you want to pitch and what are your goals, but also who are the people that you are going to, to meet and identify the people that are most consequential for…”

“as you're delivering value, as you're curating meaningful content, you also kind of increase your thought leadership just by convening. People will associate whatever topic that is with the convener.”

“I think as an entrepreneur, and also I expect this of the executives that work for me, that they should constantly be cultivating talent. You know, a couple of times a month, like, you know, going to events or taking people out to dinner or having coffees with talented up and comers so that when I ask you, Hey, if I…”

“a lot of people think it's risky and the best way to de-risk it is for them to see your progress.”

“if you need a marketing person who's taken a company from launch to a million ARR, you should find someone that's done that to help you to do it rather than look for someone that's done. Ten million to a hundred million when you're zero, because they just may not know how to start something.”

“sometimes you don't have access to those people or there's not enough in the market that you're in. So that, that is ideal, uh, if you can find those people. Um, but you know, sometimes you can't, and you just have to give somebody who's really intelligent, like a shot at it.”

“somewhere when you hit that sort of like 20 to 50,000 dollars per month in inference spend, and you realize it's growing at 1012, 20% per year, whatever it is, that's when you start to go, oh, we should do something about this.”

“Most companies start with a monolithic code base, everything in one repo and one giant thing. And then they start to parse off the pieces that need to be optimized and make them microservices. And I mean, it's, it's, that's how businesses are going to go with AI as well.”