Michael Seibel
155 statements across 33 episodes · 45 bullish · 41 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jun 21, 2017 by Michael Seibel · said 32 times in 19 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Michael Seibel's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Shola Akinlade (6), Geoff Ralston (5), Craig Cannon (4), Paul Buchheit (2), Dylan Field (2), David Rusenko (2), Chas Englander (2), Tikhon Bernstam (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School · Y Combinator
- Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders · Y Combinator
- What Shutting Down Your Startup Feels Like - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy with Kat Manalac · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 18 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- Helping African Businesses Get Paid, Shola Akinlade of Paystack · Y Combinator
- Paul Buchheit - Startup Investor School Day 2 · Y Combinator
- David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit · Y Combinator
- A Conversation with Ooshma Garg - Moderated by Adora Cheung · Y Combinator
- Carolynn Levy And Panel (Jon Levy, Jason Kwon) - Startup Legal Mechanics · Y Combinator
- Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil Shares Advice from the High Growth Handbook, a Guide to Scaling Startups · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil and Pejman Nozad - Startup Investor School Day 3 · Y Combinator
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Michael Seibel, oldest first
Jun 21, 2017 neutral
Mar 7, 2018
Seibel: Y Combinator frequently helps incoming startups fix damaged cap tables
“Interestingly at YC, oftentimes some of the work that we have to do when we ingest companies is help them clean up their cap tables and help convince their previous investors that the way the company is set up right now is actually harmful. So that, that's act…”
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018
Seibel: His 4.5-year angel record includes 50 deals and one billion-dollar exit
“I've been angel investing for 4.5 years. I've made 50 total investments, invested in four angel funds, 47 companies, ah, only three of them were not YC companies. 46 of them were early stage. One was, ah, late stage. It's a little company called Reddit. I hope…”
Mar 7, 2018 negative
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Seibel: Angel investing is a form of charity, not money-making
“I'll tell you straight away that I'm not doing it to make money. In effect, I feel like where I came from on the East Coast, when people want to give back, they give money to charity and they go to Gallus which I never understood. And strangely, here in the Va…”
Mar 7, 2018 negative
Seibel: Founders with under 20% equity post-Series B lack exit motivation
“So, in terms of how much equity the founder should have, I think the way that I think about this is I model out a series A that's gonna be between 20 and 35% dilution, and a series B that's gonna be between 20 and 35% dilution, and I look at where the founder'…”
Mar 7, 2018 neutral
Aug 7, 2018 positive
Ralston: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and Michael Seibel to speak at Startup School
“Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston will be taking part in the course and giving some of their wisdom, which is also broad need to founders everywhere in the world, but we're also going to have other YC partners. Sam Altman, who's the president of Y Combinator,…”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Founders should ignore product feedback from investors and friends
“The kind of community of startup people and or investors usually don't have the problem that you're solving. So if you're using investors as a trigger for, am I solving the right problem? Or like, Do they find this useful? It's almost never the case. I'm almos…”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Solving a startup problem typically takes two years, not months
“So, if you're not thinking that the process of coming up with a solution for this problem is probably more like a two-year process, you're doing it wrong. If you are unsatisfied with significant progress in under two years, you're probably doing it wrong.”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Pivoting changes the customer or problem; iterating changes the solution
“So, I define pivot As changing the customer or changing the problem. This should be rare. This should happen infrequently. Many times this means you should start a new company. I defined iterate as changing the solution.”
Sep 5, 2018 positive
Seibel: Justin.tv reached $24M in five years, then $1B in three
“And if you look at the history of Justin TV, in the first five years, it went from being worth nothing to being worth about twenty four million dollars. In the next three years, it went being worth twenty four million dollars to being worth a billion.”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Sep 5, 2018
Sep 5, 2018 positive
Sep 5, 2018 negative
Seibel: Justin.tv's biggest product mistake was spending months swinging for home runs
“Our mistake was that at JustinTV. It was thinking every time, we've got the home run. Let's only swing for home runs. And of course, it would take three months to do it, because we gotta make it perfect, right? And then the whole spike, spiral of death.”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: MVPs are bad, so startups must target the most desperate customers
“It's an MVP. You know you've made something bad. Like, that's the definition of MP. It's bad. So the real question is like, how do you find people who are willing to use a bad product? Right? They have to be the most desperate. The most desperate. And so a lot…”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Steve Jobs released a 'shitty MVP' iPhone and iterated every year
“Real Steve Jobs released a shitty MVP that was revolutionary, but still fairly shitty, and every year iterated it. Until you have the thing in your pocket right now, which is pretty damn good. Real Steve Jobs iterates and talks to customers. Fake Steve Jobs ju…”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Car buying websites are built for dealerships, not car shoppers
“It turns out a lot of the car buying websites are not built for the person who's shopping for a car, because that person doesn't have a problem very often. They're actually built for the person who's selling a car. That person has a problem every day. Every da…”
Sep 5, 2018
Seibel: Founders unable to state their problem in one sentence lack understanding
“The first thing I ask founders, can you state the problem clearly in two sentences? If you can't, you don't know the problem, right? In fact, it should really only take you one sentence. So if someone asks you a problem you're solving and you find yourself del…”
Sep 5, 2018 positive
Seibel: Building an MVP in two weeks prevents problem and customer drift
“Typically, the longer it takes, the more you're going to have MVP and problem drift or customer drift. If you decide to only build your MVP in two weeks, it's a lot easier to stay on task and make sure actually solving that problem for that customer.”
Sep 5, 2018
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Resolve co-founder strategy conflicts with time-bound empirical tests
“Ask him, okay, what's the test that would prove that the direction we're going in right now is a good one, and what is the time period that we can all agree with to go after that, and then bam, we're running an experiment now. If we don't make it, we'll switch…”
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Needing a polished MVP means incumbents are doing a good job
“If you can find a small population of people that have enough of a problem that the other folks aren't solving, that they're willing to use something that's pretty bad, that's a very good sign. If the only way you can find any group of users, even 10, even a h…”
Jan 24, 2020 positive
Jan 24, 2020 positive
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Time-bounding startup attempts to at least six months clarifies pivot decisions
“I think the best strategy for this the one that's easiest to execute is to time bound it. So what I would say is like, Hey, we're going to try everything as hard as possible to make this work for this period of time, probably no less than six months. And if we…”
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Founders in crowded spaces must know why previous products failed
“Make sure that you're studying those products and you have a strong opinion about why they suck. It's going to help you two reasons. One, it'll help you figure out what to make as a good product. And two, A very common investor question, if you ever want to ra…”
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Digitizing paper workflows alone does not guarantee a billion-dollar company
“If something's being undone on paper, There is a business in putting it into the computer, and like, by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper, you could build a billion dollar company and bring it to the computer, and that's actually not true. Like,…”
Jan 24, 2020 bearish
Seibel: Subsidizing unit economics creates artificial demand that vanishes when prices rise
“If you're into a situation where you're providing a dollar worth of value and you're only getting 75% cents back, you're gonna get a lot of demand. But you're gonna lose a lot of money, and when you actually equalize the demand and the price, you'll lose a lot…”
Jan 24, 2020 positive
Jan 24, 2020
Jan 24, 2020
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Early B2B customers should value founder access over polished software
“You're looking for An early customer who is excited by the opportunity to work really closely with the founder, to be able to give feedback quickly, to be able to get changes quickly, and is not intimidated by something that's going to be broken.”
Jan 24, 2020
Seibel: Founders should establish demand benchmarks that convince company skeptics before continuing
“Identify a critic in the company. Identify a sign that would either, that would even convince the critic that there's something here. If you can't hit that sign within a period of time, you should move. So, like, don't trust The faith of the optimist, like, tr…”
Jan 24, 2020
Jan 24, 2020 positive
Seibel: Scaling and raising capital is easier when building proprietary software
“If you have seen demand, and you're thinking to yourself, okay, I want to make this a company, if you want to make it a software company that can scale, that can raise money, it's a lot easier if you're building your own software.”
Jan 24, 2020
Jan 24, 2020 negative
Seibel: On-demand car repair startups struggle because frequent break-down customers are price-sensitive
“The population that has the most problem with their cars tends to also be the population that is extremely price sensitive about fixing their cars. And so make sure that you have some insight on how you can be offering the cheapest option. Cause if you're the …”
Jan 24, 2020 neutral
Seibel: TechCrunch originally seeded Crunchbase profiles using media reports
“Before people cared about their Crunchbase profile, TechCrunch just built the profiles on Crunchbase. With media reports and so on and so forth, and then after a while, people cared about their profile, and so they tried to keep it updated.”
Jan 5, 2022 negative
Seibel: Comfortable founders often default to abstract, immeasurable global problems
“I think there's a whole set of other people who don't have very many problems in their life. And I think those people kind of reach for like the UN problems or the global problem, right? The problems that like they are told they should care about, but they don…”
Jan 5, 2022 neutral
Seibel: Justin.tv reached 30 million monthly visitors while struggling financially
“Even though the company wasn't doing well for years, we always had a lot of traffic, you know, like the company wasn't doing well and we had like thirty million monthly visitors, like, and we were streaming like years of video to them.”
Jan 5, 2022 bearish
Jan 26, 2022 positive
Seibel: Genius is often mistaken for discipline in startup execution
“Too often, genius is mistaken for discipline. It's just like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, this person out executed all their peers because they were smarter, and it's like, that assumes the peers were actually working on the thing they said they were …”
Jan 26, 2022
Seibel: Founders start with the false belief they know what users want
“I think that every founder starts their company with the lie in their head that they know about what their customer wants and they know how to solve the problem. And the more you build before putting your product in front of a user, the more you just let that …”
Feb 2, 2022
Seibel: Startups building HR software must accommodate corporate recruiters
“You aren't going to get rid of all the recruiters. Even though you don't believe they should exist in the world, they are going to exist in the world. Either you're going to accommodate them, Or they will kill you. Like they tend to actually have way more powe…”
Feb 2, 2022
Feb 16, 2022
Seibel: Justin.tv secretly delayed celebrity streams to scale video servers
“So what happened now in this setup is that some celebrity would start streaming, they would think they were live, no one was seeing their stream, while we were propagating their stream to all the video servers that are needed, and then suddenly the stream woul…”
Feb 16, 2022
Seibel: Justin.tv used a manual button to turn overloaded pages static
“So we actually had a button that could make any page on Justin TV a static page. All those features would stop working. Your name wouldn't appear, the view count wouldn't update, like, literally a static page that loaded our video player, and You couldn't touc…”
Feb 23, 2022
Seibel says pre-PMF struggles stem from wrong hires, not missing executives
“More often than not in this pre-product market fit phase, the mistake is that there's the wrong person in the company, not there aren't enough people. The mistake is like, you've got an engineer that no one wants to work with, or no one's measuring any of the …”
Feb 23, 2022 positive
Mar 31, 2022 positive
Seibel: Talking to customers and launching products best de-risk startups
“The thing we keep on saying over and over again is like the two things that ridiculously de-risk your startup, three things, and we'll get to the third one in a second. First one's talking to your customers. The second one's building and launching product. And…”
Mar 31, 2022
Seibel: Programmers avoided starting code before lunch due to midday interruption
“Nothing got done before lunch. Like, getting to work was all about, like, getting in, answering your email, doing a couple meetings, like, it was just, like, no one who was writing code even wanted to start writing code before lunch, because lunch was the big,…”
Apr 8, 2022 neutral
Seibel: Microsoft Wins by Copying Startup Innovations Years Later
“A structural advantage with a product that's good enough can win. And man, it really helps when some startups specs the whole product for you. Right? Like Microsoft's move is to not innovate the good enough product. It's to copy it. Maybe five to 10 years late…”
Apr 20, 2022 negative
Apr 20, 2022 negative
Apr 20, 2022
Apr 29, 2022 neutral
Seibel: Ignore investor rejection reasons until hearing them across 15 to 25 pitches
“When founders are fundraising, it's like the first thing, the first time they tell me there's a rejection and a why, I ignore it completely. If they've gotten like 15, 20, 25 rejections, I then ask, are the whys consistent? And only if then the whys are consis…”
May 6, 2022 neutral
May 6, 2022
May 6, 2022 positive
May 6, 2022 negative
May 6, 2022 negative
Jun 8, 2022 bearish
Seibel: Hype cycles harm startups by making hiring and acquisition harder
“In the middle of the hype cycle, hiring is harder. Getting access to customers is harder. Like, 17 of your competitors are gonna all get funded. Like, you know, it's weird because on the surface, the hype cycle looks good, but when you actually get into the di…”
Jun 8, 2022
Jun 8, 2022 positive
Jun 8, 2022 negative
Jul 22, 2022 positive
Jul 22, 2022 positive
Jul 22, 2022 negative
Jul 22, 2022 neutral
Jul 22, 2022 positive
Jul 22, 2022 positive
Jul 22, 2022 positive
Seibel: Founders do not need to sacrifice relationships or incur extreme debt
“What I think that this is what's tricky is that I think someone needs to be out there saying that these aren't the things you have to put on the table to win. Yes, when you're working hard, you're gonna probably have to spend less time with your family or frie…”
Jul 22, 2022 neutral
Jul 22, 2022 neutral
Jul 22, 2022 neutral
Seibel: A startup founder's salary should not allow for personal savings
“If your startup salary is allowing you to save money, it's probably not good, right? You shouldn't be sitting here, like, with Google employee level savings running your startup. However, if your startup salary is giving you the lifestyle that allows you to be…”
Jul 22, 2022 negative
Seibel: Startups often punch themselves out by manufacturing crises over unrealistic expectations
“It's funny because in some ways you're saying sometimes these companies punch themselves out. Right? Like they don't even need external forces. They set a stupid expectation. They don't hit their own unrealistic expectation. Then they feel like something's wro…”
Jul 22, 2022 neutral
Seibel: Unhealthy founder sacrifices made in your twenties fail in your thirties
“You probably can sacrifice these things for five years, like maybe even seven years. The tricky thing is that like the best companies last multiple decades. The tricky things is the shit that you can get away with in your twenties. You can't get away with in y…”
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Seibel: Many wealthy people just extracted money from others and regret it
“There's actually, you know, a large number of rich people who are kind of not in that building society group. You know, they made their money by taking it from others who are dumber than them. They look back and they're really concerned and you kind of can't w…”
Sep 1, 2022 neutral
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Seibel: Downturns reveal the tiny group of smart players extracting capital
“When everything's going up, it's easy to think you're the smart person. When things start going down, you start realizing who the real smart people are. And it tends to be a way, way smaller group than you might think. And it turns out that they're taking mone…”
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Seibel: Financial regulations exist because zero-sum finance harmed ordinary Americans
“And it's funny how many of the financial regulations today come from people in the finance world basically doing zero sum games and like harming normal Americans and harming them so much to the point where they're like, you know what we should do? We should li…”
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Sep 1, 2022 positive
Seibel: Failing at positive-sum games still builds valuable skills
“Cause like our friends who tried and failed to do positive sum games, they almost always learned something or advanced in some way. Like they almost always took something from that game with them that made them better off, even if they didn't win. Whereas like…”
Sep 1, 2022 negative
Seibel: Gambling exploits human desire for disproportionate wins without work
“Like, I would almost say that it takes advantage of an inherent flaw in our programming. And I think that flaw has something to do with getting disproportionate wins Without the perception of doing disproportionate amount of work.”
Sep 9, 2022
Seibel: Overly optimistic founders lose all employee trust
“When you cross over being too optimist, your employees start questioning everything. Like you lose all trust. Cause they're like, oh crap. Like if the leader can't see this obvious thing right in front of their face oh, like what else have I not uncovered yet …”
Sep 9, 2022 neutral
Sep 9, 2022 positive
Sep 9, 2022 positive
Seibel: Overly pessimistic founders are easier to fix than overly optimistic ones
“I actually think I rather help someone being too pessimistic, strangely, because usually when I try to help introduce realistic expectations, they can adjust. You know, usually we just need to tell them what's reasonable, and suddenly they're like, oh, ok, I g…”
Sep 15, 2022 neutral
Sep 15, 2022
Seibel: VCs often fund repeat founders for internal firm politics
“What I've also seen for second time founders is that oftentimes for an investor, it's more of a catch. It like helps you build your reputation in your firm, or it helps you get the deal approved. And like, so oftentimes there's like internal political reasons …”
Sep 15, 2022 positive
Seibel: Resource Constraints Force First-Time Founders to Innovate More
“Because they're going to have harder times typically raising money or hiring employees, they tend to have to innovate more. Like they tend to have to, they're constrained into building something good. Whereas like the lack of constraints so often lead people a…”
Oct 28, 2022 negative
Oct 28, 2022 bullish
Oct 28, 2022 positive
Oct 28, 2022 negative
Seibel argues that misconceptions about Y Combinator are deliberately designed attacks
“What are some of the other misconceptions that you saw that were, you know, obviously, I mean, I would argue like obviously designed to try to convince people to not do YC. Like these were like designed attacks on YC.”
Oct 28, 2022 positive
Seibel: S22 seed investors committed in 1–2 meetings without board demands
“Didn't see any change on speed. You know, we saw investors going from meeting to commitment within one to two meetings. Didn't see any difference on terms. Like, you know, investors weren't demanding board seats or weird craziness.”
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Seibel: Monetizing startups should track revenue rather than registered users
“For companies who charge their customers money, somehow creating a goal incremented in something that's not money Hey, my product costs 10 dollars a month, but I'm measuring registered users. I want to hit, you know, a thousand registered users, and it's like,…”
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Seibel: Maximizing fundraising leads to lost control and impossible pivots
“Often you lose control of your company. So like when you confront the challenges, suddenly, you know, your board can fire you. Often you find yourself burning tons of money because all the people who gave you money expect you to spend it. Oftentimes you have t…”
Jan 11, 2023
Jan 11, 2023 neutral
Seibel: YC Evaluates Progress on Hard Problems, Not Arbitrary Goal Metrics
“First of all, we're not grading. We're not your teacher. We're not your boss. And second of all, like your job is to work on the hardest problem in your company like that. Like if you've made progress on the hardest problems in your company, you're doing well.”
Jan 11, 2023 negative
Seibel: Overly aggressive startup goals demotivate founders and stem from fear
“When people set goals that are so aggressive, they aren't motivational. And they're basically missing the understanding of what the purpose of setting a goal is, right? Like you want to motivate yourself to act smarter, faster, more intelligently than you woul…”
Jan 11, 2023 neutral
Seibel: Successful Founders Spend Negligible Time on Angel Investments
“When you're a good founder, oftentimes you know other good people, and the opportunity you have to give them money requires almost no time or effort, and so you just, and like, if you're a good founder, oftentimes people are offering you Deals. And so like, yo…”
Jan 11, 2023 positive
Feb 5, 2023 negative
Conformist startup founders mistakenly treat investors as their customers
“You know, one of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that don't make the investor your customer. But a lot of these conformists who are getting into startups, that's what they do. Like they want an idea an investor is going to like, they want to act the …”
Feb 5, 2023 neutral
Feb 5, 2023 neutral
Feb 5, 2023
High-status careers like finance appeal to ambitious students by replicating school
“Finance, consulting, law, medicine, those were the like easy ones. And they had a lot of the characteristics of school. Like there was a clear application process. There was a clear steps. These steps were kind of imposed upon you. Like the, it was a very comf…”
Feb 5, 2023
Great founders bet on their learning capacity over their day-one skills
“What's funny is that like, once again, that's typically not based on the skill that they come in with day one. It's always based on their assumption that they can accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished or learn whatever needs to be learned or meet any ch…”
Feb 5, 2023 negative
Big Tech is now a conventional prestige industry like finance and medicine
“Today, I might argue that big tech has become put itself solidly in that list, right? It is amongst the finance and consulting and legal and medicine. You know, college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview J…”
Feb 23, 2023
Feb 23, 2023 negative
Seibel: Founders Mistakenly Use Advisors as a Shortcut for Customer Research
“One is this assumption that we are like godlike advisors with complete understandings of every user base and every problem in the world. And like, They can kind of like shortcut talking to users if they just spend enough time talking to us. And so that one is …”
Feb 23, 2023 positive
Seibel: Early YC Advising Failed by Prioritizing Fun Over Hard Feedback
“And I think as an, as a YC partner in the early days, I think I measured my effectiveness based on how much fun founders had talking to me. And only after a couple of batches that I realized that doesn't really do anything. And then when I started having hones…”
Feb 23, 2023
Feb 23, 2023 positive
Seibel: Great startup employees are motivated, not discouraged, by severe bad news
“I've been often surprised at like sharing bad news. Like, oh, we only have two months of runway. Right. I would think would be demotivating, but for great startup employees, they're like, all right, how the fuck are we going to fix this? And then you can get j…”
Apr 14, 2023 positive
Seibel: Customers Forgive Startup Mistakes If Founders Genuinely Care
“And I think you might find that with your customers, like, even if you screw up, like, if you really care and you're really helping them, they're not gonna fire you. They're not gonna fire you. It's, it is so rare to find products or people who actually care. …”
Apr 14, 2023
Seibel: Non-technical founders feel borderline useless in early startup stages
“I was the business guy who didn't know how to code and literally I would say there are many moments in the early stage of a company where I felt borderline useless, and certainly I didn't have the power to impact the product anywhere near as much as my other t…”
Apr 14, 2023 positive
Apr 14, 2023 positive
Seibel: Startups function because the ecosystem is a high-trust environment
“I think that the thing you should understand about the startup world is that a lot of it works because of honesty. A lot of the reasons why early adopting customers will use you is because like They think you're going to be honest. A lot of reasons why investo…”
Jun 30, 2023
Jun 30, 2023 negative
Jun 30, 2023 negative
Jun 30, 2023 negative
Jun 30, 2023 positive
Seibel: Investors funded Uber's expansion because of strong local unit economics
“People who were investing in Uber were looking at markets where Uber was doing very well in unit economics and purposely funding them to expand quickly. It wasn't people looking at Uber serving no markets well, burning money left and right, and saying, oh, let…”
Aug 1, 2023 positive
Seibel: Moving to the Bay Area is an easy startup multiplier
“Getting into the Bay Area is so relatively easy to all the other things you have to do to succeed. Choosing where to live is so relatively easy to all the other things you have to choose correctly. Why not pick up the easy wins? It's an easy percentage multipl…”
Aug 1, 2023 bullish
Aug 1, 2023 negative
Seibel: Building in Austin, Seattle, or New York is settling
“It's really easy to say, well, you know, I can be in the game in Austin. I can be in the game in Seattle. There are investors there. There are people there. I can be in the game in New York. And I wish that we were more honest that like, yeah, you can play bas…”
Nov 1, 2023 positive
Seibel argues engineers learn much faster at a startup than at Google.
“I think most people don't realize that, like, you can learn at a startup pace or you can learn at a Google pace, and like, a startup is an amazing opportunity to learn. So if you're getting better, faster than your peers who are in big tech, You might be getti…”
Nov 1, 2023 negative
Nov 1, 2023
Seibel says essential scale-up engineers should expect life-changing upside, not bonuses.
“I would say if you're in the scale up, And you are the essential engineer. The test I would kind of ask myself is, is if this thing works, are you going to make a life changing amount of money? And, you know, I would argue that like, you know, that doesn't mea…”
Nov 30, 2023 positive
Nov 30, 2023 positive
Seibel: Aspiring non-technical founders should work at a startup first
“Sometimes the number one thing to do if you're in this position is to not start the company right now. Is to go get a job at a startup. Is to go change the people you know. And What's so interesting is that, like, sometimes taking that step sideways is the eas…”
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Seibel: Non-technical founders assessing engineers causes compounding team degradation
“And I think the even scarier thing about this is that, like, when you start with a team of business people assessing engineers, and they are naturally gonna start by hiring worse engineers, all of your future engineers are high negative effects.”
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Seibel: Using dev shops instead of technical co-founders ruins startups
“I couldn't find tech and co-founder, so I just moved to the next challenge. I hired some engineers, or I got a dev shop, and, like, nothing will keep me Well, hold me back. And what's so sad about that way of thinking about it is that like, one, the percentage…”
Nov 30, 2023 positive
Seibel: Great business founders stand out by recruiting top technical co-founders
“The best business founders Recruit amazing technical co-founders. And that is how they distinguish themselves. That is the number one distinction. So it's not what's on your resume, where you worked, the fact that you were some fancy executive, that you're tal…”
Dec 21, 2023 positive
Seibel: Major societal change agents were default optimists
“If you really care about those problems, you have to be optimistic to try to solve them. And like some of the people who are like the biggest social critics or the biggest revolutionaries or the biggest change agents in our society were default optimistic.”
Dec 21, 2023 neutral
Dec 21, 2023 positive
Dec 21, 2023 neutral
Feb 29, 2024 negative
Feb 29, 2024 negative
Feb 29, 2024 positive
Failed founders who learned remain motivated, unlike aimless pivoters
“Like, the folks who learned and didn't succeed are often motivated to go out and do it again, or go work in a company in that space. Like, this is an additive experience in their life, even if their shop didn't work. The ones who do the random walk, like they …”
Feb 29, 2024 positive
Feb 29, 2024 negative
Big tech alumni fail by treating startups like consulting projects
“I also think that if you come from a big company, either in product or engineering, more often than not, you've never solved your own problem. Like you're working on other people's problems. And so I think that your instinct when you start a company is like al…”
Mar 21, 2024
Mar 21, 2024
Seibel: Founders should unfollow accounts and media promoting investor-style thinking
“Diagnose why you started thinking this way, and if that means, like, unfollowing some people on Twitter, or not reading certain publications, like, to do it. We're susceptible to the inputs that come to our mind, and like, the easiest way we do this is turn th…”
Mar 21, 2024 negative
Seibel: Many Founders Pitch Contrived Views That Sound Like Investors
“You start having conversation with the founder, and you'll actually feel like you're talking to an investor, to a VC. And you're like, but what about your passion? Like, what, what's your opinion? Like, what do you care about? And it's all kind of like, contri…”
Mar 21, 2024 negative
Seibel: Many founders gear up for customer 100 before securing customer one
“I see a lot not even engaging in the zero to one, like, you know, they're hiring a bunch of people, getting an office, like they almost
Forget they have to get the first customer and they start gearing up for customer 100.”
Mar 21, 2024
Seibel: Founders cannot eliminate the high-risk, low-information nature of startups
“I think that we have to admit in the startup game, you're going after like a high risk, low information, And high commitment bet. And there aren't moves to change those core things, right? Like, yeah, you can invest in the margin, but it's still going to be hi…”
Mar 21, 2024 neutral