startup

“You know, really big markets are bad for startups, not good.”

“When the summer was over, we were just planning to fund startups asynchronously, as all investors did.”

“All of the most successful startups we found, we funded, grew the same way we did. Out of an initial group of fanatical early adopters.”

“In 2005, it was a lot cheaper to start a startup than it had been a few years earlier. Servers and bandwidth were cheaper, there was more open source software, and the internet had become a really good vehicle for getting attention, so you were no longer depen…”

“It often takes startups a while to figure out exactly what they should be doing, and if you spend too much money, you won't have enough time for the necessary evolution to happen.”

“In startups, if you're the non-technical founder, your job is basically everything that's non-technical.”

“And a framework that I have for when to give up and when to keep working is it should be an internal, not an external decision. If people aren't Using it or if people are saying it's bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to…”

“I think most people give up on things way too early. So the mistake that most people make is they try something. It does not immediately work. You see this particularly in young entrepreneurs. It does not immediately work. After seven weeks, they say, you know…”

“So the thing I don't think works that often are the startups on their 11th pivot that are totally unrelated.”

“As a seed investor something you have to keep in mind is that the median startup is ultimately worth about zero dollars and probably 95% of startups are a bad investment.”

“So if you shoot cold emails to reporters, I would say, you know, nine out of 10 times you're gonna get no response at all.”

“At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to. Later, you need to learn how to hire fast and scale up the company. But in the early days the goal should be not to hire.”

“And you should be extremely suspicious if you're ever talking about, we're not focused on growth right now. We're not growing that well right now, but we're doing this other thing, you know. We don't have a timeline for when we're gonna ship this, because we'r…”

“In fact, a lot of the companies that I've been very involved with that have had a very bad first hire in the first three or so employees never recover from it. It just kills the company.”

“If someone's choosing between like McKinsey and joining your startup very unlikely that that person's going to work out at the startup.”

“In the early days of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done and the willingness to work hard and aptitude matters more than experience. As the company starts to scale, and at about this time when you have…”

“Cracking the Coding Interview has a pretty good list of questions. It's, the other advice in that book I don't think really applies to startups very much but the questions are good.”

“Smaller companies Do show a slight preference to local candidates. And so if your goal is to work at a small, let's say sub, you know, 20 person startup you're probably at a I don't know, 10 to 20% advantage if you're based in the Bay Area.”

“I could say that if you're not going to a top five school, You are not technical and you want to get into tech startups. It makes no sense to me why you wouldn't try to get a job in an early stage company in a startup city.”

“Everything's going to be in just a few, maybe four clouds or so, you know, there's not going to be that many of them, because like, we spend about ten billion a year in infrastructure, and so it's not going to Get disrupted by a startup, unless they invent qua…”

“The way that I look at it, like my mental model for building a startup, is that essentially your whole goal is not to quit. I saw a really good tweet the other day that was, here's the secret to success. Pick any idea, work on it for 10 years. You know, you wi…”

“Some of the most successful startups really are like until year five, six, seven is when they really are taking off.”

“You know that if you don't have the resilience you need, the toughness you need, the determination you need, the belief you need, it, none of the other things matter. Nothing else. How big the opportunity is, how much of competition there is or isn't, how much…”

“Angel investors can, in limited cases, have substantive impact on the companies in which they invest. Mostly their impact is marginal, minimum.”

“There is something culturally important to us about frugality, because we want that reflected in our startups, and our startups have the kind of bond with us where they reflect what we do.”

“And if I disagree with anything, it would be how quickly that will spread outside of Silicon Valley. I think it may happen relatively quickly. So there's still a question of how long, there's still a question of how long does Silicon Valley Remain the absolute…”

“The same way that there's no good time to start a startup, there's no good time to have kids. You'll figure it out.”

“If you're gonna take venture money, And the max you can do is ten million a year or something, then like you're kind of, you picked the wrong game.”

“Almost all of the value in a startup is the, you know, revenue, the earnings it's gonna generate in years, 1011, and 12 from now.”

“There are increasing number of people who just, like, want to be around startups and go to startup parties and talk about being a founder. Treat that as a red flag.”

“The companies that could be giant are at this intersection of sounds like a bad idea is a good idea. And because That's a very narrow intersection. And because they sound like a bad idea, the best investments are the ones that are easiest to talk yourself out …”

“If I think about all of the most successful internet and mobile startups I heard about those because, this is like true for enterprise and consumer apps, I heard about those because they were so good that, ah, one of my friends spontaneously told me about it. …”

“Being a startup employee is actually a lot like being an investor except you can really only do one at a time.”

“Oftentimes the bad ideas, I mean, the good ideas look bad. And the reason for this is that if the idea were obviously good, like, the opportunity wouldn't exist. Big companies are not that dumb. They're capable of executing. They have lots of resources. They h…”

“Too much money is a huge liability, because when you have a lot of money, you start doing things the right way... Having a giant mountain of money enables the founders to insulate themselves from reality to an unhealthy extent.”

“There really literally is no such thing as value investing in startups.”

“If you move slow, you're going to get adverse selection. Like, the companies that you can string along for months, and, you know, give a hundred different meetings, and like, you need to talk to this person, probably aren't going to be the best companies.”

“You can almost define, predict the, I think success of a startup just based on how quickly they're able to iterate. And the really great companies just like iterate really quickly. The ones who, you know, do a release every two years fail. Do zero.”

“And also one of the things that was present in the survey was how you wanted to dive in deeper on the knowledge of that particular stack, at least for a startup because of course you have very low or pretty much no bandwidth to train somebody on the new stack …”

“The one thing that the startups or the execs cared about the most, because at least in a startup, you may be, you might have a recruiter or not, but most likely you're doing the recruiting on your own. They care more about your contributions or your open sourc…”

“The onus is on us a little bit to explain how we're doing it, how that works, and the way they speak, just like I mentioned about scientists, is they speak in data. Like, you can't just say, like, oh, no, no, no. Like, trust me. Like, I'm the good guy. Right. …”

“I've noticed that many of the most transformative companies come because the founder sees some, like an intersection of two pretty different, but really important trends a few years before everybody else does.”

“Compensation at startups has gone up a lot as well. And so I think we may be closer than they think, but there's still more that startups have to do on that front.”

“While working at any individual startup may not be as secure as working at a large company, hopefully working for startups in general can be even more secure, because if the startup that you're working at now doesn't work out, there's going to be 20 other star…”

“One thing I've learned from Y Combinator is that the most successful startups grow organically out of the founders' lives”

“And the most successful startups do tend to be weird. They're usually such outliers that they seem preposterous at first to everyone except the founders because the company has grown out of their own experiences.”

“In general, if you want to do best from a career perspective, and you didn't join in the very, very early days, the best time to join is when a company is probably on the order of 40, 50 people, and is worth, you know, somewhere between fifty and five hundred …”

“Another thing that startups need, at least one evangelical founder, usually the CEO. Someone at the startup has got to be the person that is going to recruit, sell the product, talk to the press raise money, and this requires someone who can infect with enthus…”

“In fact, I think in 2018, at least in Silicon Valley, it's easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup.”

“If you think about the most important startups, They are the ones that I start in small markets that are growing very, very quickly.”

“Startups, especially in their early days often win by moving very quickly. You never get as much data as you'd like. You never have as much time to deliberate as you'd like. And you want people who will, are willing to act with much less data than they'd like …”

“Startups survive on their own momentum. If you have momentum, people keep Delivering results beyond what they think they're capable of. If you lose momentum, it's very difficult to get it back.”

“And you want to optimize the number of those decisions that someone has to make to compete with you because a big company will make them on average worse and certainly much slower than you do. So the speed of market evolution gives you a lot more chances to co…”

“We have seen many of our startups do incredible things because no one told them it was hard, or no one told them they can't do it.”

“For those ideas that sound bad but are good because of this phenomenon, this one no versus one yes, startups can win. In fact, startups usually do beat big companies in that category of ideas.”

“And then finally, startups usually win on big platform shifts. Many people have observed that startups come in these clusters. Those clusters usually come after a big platform shift.”

“If your startup is a Delaware corporation, there is an annual tax you have to pay to that state, but if you calculate it correctly, the tax owed is really minor for startups.”

“You just keep going out there and doing things manually, and as long as your growth rate is good, it doesn't matter how small the number is because a growth, a constant growth rate means exponential growth, and that means The base number will soon take care of…”

“There are plenty of high school students who could start successful startups but they shouldn't.”

“The outcomes of startups are hard to predict. I think to some degree they're actually indeterminate. There's a huge amount of luck involved, you know and so I think even if Y Combinator were as good at picking startups as you could possibly get.”

“Every time there's new startups coming up, the grass is always greener, because the investors know all your problems, and they don't know any of the other problems.”

“You don't have lots of fraud problems. You don't have, you probably don't have a lot of people spamming your service. You probably don't have a lot of, like, fake actors in the system trying to sign up. So if you don't have those problems, don't optimize for t…”

“If it's a startup, you can have things like a hundred to 200% growth. If this is a existing company with already has tons of organic traffic, maybe it's more manageable to have 10 to 20%.”

“It's hard. You should stop wondering about it. Just a given. It doesn't mean anything about the health of your company.”

“And the, kind of, the growth curve or adoption curve is just, kind of, a function of that go to market apparatus. But basically, it's not some, kind of, cosmic trajectory. It's something, kind of, very much of your creation and under your control.”

“Honestly, the best investors will want to see a small market, because a small market at the beginning means you can identify who's in that market very cheaply, versus having to boil the ocean, saying, well, there's like, Two percent of all people in the world …”

“So it's very rare that startups build a successful moat using patents. This happens much more in, like, biotech”

“Startups, founders think they want to be the way to network, like the way to get out there is to network and just be everywhere, you know, but the way to build a strong network is to build something impressive”

“I think that, ah, the most successful companies in 95% of the cases are successful despite their investors. I shouldn't say despite. I should say irregardless.”

“So I think every startup needs at least one miracle to succeed, because if it was obvious that it was going to work, everybody would already be doing it, and so you wouldn't have an opportunity. So in some sense, startups only have opportunities in markets tha…”

“And I think the way you should think about your startup from a hiring perspective is it's almost like a light, a life raft. You know, your boat is sinking and you're on this little raft and there's five spots. And who are in those five spots? And if the people…”

“Focus is one of the most important things, because, like, as a startup, it's actually, I think, your most powerful weapon, right? Like, the reason that you're able to take on, like, these big companies or whatever is because they're doing a thousand different …”

“And so there's like all this history, so it's pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and make a thing that appeals to everyone. And if you try to do that, what you end up making is just like a mediocre product that nobody really loves. And so my phi…”

“If they get a huge round of funding before they have product market fit, it kills the company. Like it because it's just too hard for the founders to resist That, because actually going out and dealing with the fact that you don't have product market fit is re…”

“I think the only way, if you actually build your new business without security in mind, it will be very hard to retrofit it into it. Yeah, and so, you will have a nightmare, let's say, two, three years down the road, when you become successful and you grow, an…”

“Early on, sure, you're a tiny team, maybe you're like three or four people, and people sort of dismiss the idea of, oh, we don't really need structure, we can just talk to each other all the time, but having regular checkpoints, like weekly meetings, and you k…”

“When we started as we said, listen, we have a lot of business experience. We work at great companies. We've worked at great companies. We can just apply that knowledge and start this company. And it's the furthest thing from the truth. I mean, we, you know, ju…”

“And that's a huge pitfall for startups is that they don't know how to manage people. They have a lot, you know, they implode because You know, because they don't know how to deal with conflict.”

“And so, if you have great managers, good process people, they will work against allowing the company to become great. They'll take, take a great idea and turn it into a good one, And execute a decent idea at lower risk that's more reasonable, more sensible.”

“I think there's a lot of advice that's going to say like, oh, you might learn so much more at the startup. And it's like, maybe that's true. But I think you should be asking like, am I going to learn the right stuff? Am I going to learn good habits and good pa…”

“The general viral channels have been in many cases saturated and not It's not a good way for startups to grow anymore.”

“At some point you get enough people that you need to really coordinate work Amongst people who are not just like joined at the hip talking to each other all the time, completely on the same wavelength. And that's when structure and hierarchy and some kind of m…”

“When you have a lot of people who have seen success at these very small stages and they're, they believe incorrectly that the thing that made them successful was just like, well, we just got these smart people together and let them do what they thought was rig…”

“You have to have an unfair advantage that explains why you're gonna grow quickly. If it's not related to that, then it's not gonna be something that an investor is gonna find valuable.”

“For us at YC, the definition of a startup is a company that is designed or created to try to grow very quickly. So if you're not trying to build a company that grows very, very fast, ah, then you're just building a normal company. It's a small business.”

“I think in the early days using paid users is actually cheating growth and you should avoid it as much as possible.”

“Very few people have the self-awareness to say, I'm not the right person for the job at this point. And the reason, what I'm suggesting here, this long rambling Set of thoughts on startups, children, and writing is the emotional part of that ownership is so fa…”

“The best thing startups can do is don't wait eight months. Just have a much lower Like a much lower target on what your CAC is going to be. Maybe one month, two months, three months, first, first transaction, something like that.”

“Most startups don't have product market fit. Founders tell themselves that they do, and they try to convince themselves that this is working. But the truth is, for most companies, it's not working.”

“You could have a great idea, you could have a great team, and also great investors, but sometimes the timing is just something you don't control, and you could have all those other things be amazing, but the timing is so hard, and that's what gives you sometim…”

“This is, like, one of those things that people who are not in the startup world think is a critical piece of starting a business, because they may have heard of, like, someone else who got screwed out of their idea or something like that. But if you're startin…”

“Again, that's a good tell. If you call it a project it's a bad sign.”

“95% of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated, and their startup's gonna die in the next two or three years.”

“I think if you haven't seen really successful startup companies, either personally, like where you were the founder of one, or you know people and you saw them go through it. It's hard to believe how silly these things are when they start. Like, I think unless…”

“The beauty of the midwit meme is the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot approach? Like that's actually how you can define the genius approach is you're like, what would an idiot do?”

“In our world, it's really competitive. And what happens if there's a team that's exactly as competent as you, and they're not hedging? They're always gonna win, you know? They're always gonna beat you.”

“A lot of what you learn is how to use the tools of the FAANG, which you don't get to use when you don't work there anymore.”

“A good investor can always tell whether the company's pitching them is gonna die and about to die or not.”

“So at any given time in your startup, you're being judged on the last six to 18 months. And so if you take this hit, you cut your revenue in half, but you get to default alive. And the result of that is you get to spend the next six to 18 months Building a bet…”

“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…”

“I don't think people are confused whether they're gambling or building houses. I think that they know whether they're gambling or building houses.”

“And so I think a lot of folks just, they don't realize that this stuff is hard and that even when it's working, you mostly get no's.”

“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…”

“If your idea for how you start a startup is to first create a pitch deck and go pitch VCs, you're setting yourself up to get screwed. You're setting yourself up to get taken advantage of by people who are gonna have 20 different ways to rip you off, versus if …”

“For example, it's become popular to say that you shouldn't start a company just to make money. That's considered a somewhat flimsy motivation, but I actually think it's fine to start a startup to become rich. Startups are one of the few ways to make life-chang…”

“It's probably going to take at least a year for you to have enough data to tell if the startup you're working on is promising enough to keep working on.”

“The reason I have conviction that your initial motivations don't matter so much is that I've seen motivation to change over time. I've seen founders who started out a company with a plan to sell it within a year, change their mind as they kept working the comp…”

“I think the best environment for this is working at a startup. You both get to see how a startup works from the inside, and your colleagues will be less risk averse than the average FANG employee.”

“For example, selling to plumbers or contractors is notoriously difficult compared to selling to startups. The first two groups just don't change their tools or the software very often versus startups are open to trying new things all the time.”

“Lower prices are not a sustainable advantage. Sometimes we talk to founders and they say, well, our product is just like our large competitor, except ours is cheaper. And that actually does not sound like a good idea. That's not a way to build a winner. All th…”

“You should not use ads as your primary business model unless you expect to be a top 10 site on the internet. Otherwise, it's too hard to monetize and build a huge scale to become a massive company.”

“So just that five percent difference in monthly retention can actually be the difference between life and death for a startup.”

“Selling to startups is the easiest category. And I've learned this on and on again. With YC companies, specifically the ones that sell software, it just turns out that bigger companies have more bureaucracy, more processes. They even have a specific department…”

“So much of the VC content is aimed at late stage founders, which is pretty weird. It's like putting out content that's like, you know, how to care for your Ferrari or something like, again, I don't really know who a lot of this. The majority of the people that…”

“If you're used to doing that, and that's how you think all things should work, when you start working for yourself, when you are your own boss, you are screwing yourself.”

“It just often means the folks who are thinking about it in startup land tend to be thinking about it too early. This is like another example of like taking later stage advice too early. When like the advice you should be taking is make your core business work.”

“Like the only way that you can keep score is like revenue for my startup. And if it gets big, there's no other way to keep score than that.”

“But if you're like most startups, you'll launch something and no one will care. And if it takes you six months to get the first version of your product in front of anyone, Your startup may be dead before you get another chance to launch. So in the same spirit …”

“If investors aren't investing, it's not because you didn't say the magic words. It's because your startup isn't good enough and you need to make your startup better.”

“See, most startups seem terrible at first. And in fact, the best startups seem the most terrible at first.”

“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. …”

“The average startup takes seven to 10 years to exit or IPO or sell.”

“Like, deferring a little bit of that satisfaction of getting started right now so you can upskill makes you 10 times more powerful Later.”

“And you're going to have a bias towards building a good enough versus the perfect architecture, because if you worked at a big company, you might have been rewarded for the perfect architecture, but not for a startup.”

“A technical founder is a partner in this whole journey of a startup, and it requires really intense level of commitment, and you're in just a dev.”

“So if you start with negative unit economics, you really, really have to have a plan to fix them. And I would really advise you don't scale your customer base. You don't try and grow as quickly as possible whilst you have negative unit economics. You fix them …”

“Trying to contact 25 people and be like, well, I guess we're done. I guess no one wants it. Is so low effort. As to be funny to us.”

“A company that will build something, learn over a period of time, and then pivot will often pivot from a place of knowledge and like actually continue to make forward progress.”

“Well, and I think what's interesting is that when we try to be smarter, we make mistakes. When we try to be smart about markets, or when we try to be smart about comps, We make mistakes because, one, we haven't studied those markets closely, and two, because s…”

“When we make an investment, often it does not become a big company for at least 10 years. And so, if you're trying to do market analysis and market trends for an investment that won't become big for a decade later, it's kind of flawed analysis versus if you're…”

“You've got to be great at micro to get something off the ground. Great. And no amount of macro experience helps you be good at micro.”

“And like, if you play the big company game, they will always beat you. You always have to be thinking about, what would you have gotten fired for at the big company? That should be your playbook at the startup.”

“The biggest problem that most startups have is they can't get users, and they're not making something people want. Not that their architecture is not scalable enough.”

“I don't think we've seen startups die because of that reason. That's not, that is actually a hundred percent solvable problem. And you're not gonna die from it because the incentives are so high to fix it, and you're on the path to build a large company at tha…”

“I think a secondary piece of pop culture knowledge is that if people try your product once and they don't like it, they'll never try it again.”

“And then founders think, oh, I did this at a big company. Of course, this is how my product needs to be done, because when I was an engineer at Apple, I had to work for, let's say, the Vision Pro project. I was like, I don't know. Eight years, a decade of work…”

“Companies like Apple and Google have infinite budgets. They spend years developing new products and millions of dollars on each launch. If you applied that to any of your startup, your company would die long before you launched anything.”

“So people at AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, giving out tons and tons of credits to startups. You should treat those as a cash cost. Don't assume you'll have unlimited credits forever. It'll totally mess up your margins.”

“Failed co-founder relationships is really the number one reason we see startups fail here at Y Combinator.”

“I think again, in 90% of the cases, you should really spend all of your efforts on trying to find a great co-founder to start a company with.”

“If you look at the most successful startups in history, they all had co-founding teams, and we don't always realize this because once a startup becomes successful, it's common for some founders to leave and one founder, especially the CEO, to become well-known…”

“And you really can't do that alone. Like you need someone else there who at a basic level can just get more work done with you, right? Two people is more working hours per day than one, but also having a good co-founder improves the quality of your work. So if…”

“Big companies have the edge when things are like moving slowly and not that dynamic. And then when something like this or mobile or the internet or semiconductor revolution happens, or probably like back in the days of the industrial revolution, that was when …”

“I think that's why I'm so excited for startups right now. It is because the world is still sleeping on all of this to such an astonishing degree. And then you have, like, the YC founders being like, no, no, I'm gonna, like, do this amazing thing and do it very…”

“Getting that pace and urgency, you know, just making it a part of the fabric of the company really early on is like a really hard thing to do when you're starting a company, because it feels a lot like being unemployed. Like you kind of start out and you're ki…”

“We came up with a bunch of ideas that sounded like good ideas, but were actually Terrible ideas, which is usually what happens when you decide to start a company and then try and figure out what you're going to do.”

“When startups get funded, every single dollar, every single energy effort should go towards trying to find product market fit, which usually is The two founders or the three founders, their computers, their apartment, and maybe one more engineer who's also pro…”

“It's very clear that, that what happened in those two years after summer, 20, 20 hurt companies. Like, it was much worse than just, like, more of the same. It hurt companies that otherwise would have been successful, because they would have had a level of disc…”

“It just feels natural that I should have an office manager, or I should have a really nice big office, or maybe two offices, or maybe a chief of staff, and there's, like, all of the things that, that just, like, you can look at other companies that are success…”

“If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, it is very hard to concentrate talent, and it's very hard to get people to, like, really believe in a mission, and if you're doing, like, a one-of-one thing you have a really nice tailwind there.”

“When the clock cycle of the industry changes this much, startups almost always win, and we've probably never seen it change this much.”

“If every time you talk to a customer, you totally change your mind, probably means you don't know enough about that sector yet to have a really high quality concrete idea”

“It feels like one bit of information can at most buy you a two-way speed up. And I think in some theoretical sense, that is true. But what I see in practice, if you flip the wrong bit, you're not twice as slow. You spend like 10 times longer chasing a blind al…”

“We're so powerful that by training a new model, we will casually wipe out thousands of startups. That's just not true. Yes, Jasper ran into trouble, small number of companies got wiped out, but it's not that easy to casually wipe out Thousands of startups.”

“Getting data for a lot of startups is a slow mechanism for making decisions. And a subject matter expert with a good gut is often a much better mechanism for making a speedy decision.”

“You might try to, like, build very polished or fancy websites very early on, but what that kind of, like, tells you is, like, it maybe sets the wrong expectation for the user, that if your product is just that, I don't know, you built it last month, and, like,…”

“Look, you might be building a business for the next five, 10, 15 years. They might not go any, go anywhere. And you've got to be okay with, you know, that reality. And ultimately you've got to be very passionate about what you're building. You've got to have t…”

“It's almost like open AI. Is the home product team and the startups are the FTEs out figuring out how to get adoption of the like research that OpenAI is cooking up back at the home office.”

“This is why Palantir has birthed so many other startups is because even as a very large company, it is still a company where everybody all the time is learning, focused on learning and, you know, always doing that same grinding motion that it is to be a new st…”

“Join startups as early as possible. Like, obviously, you can think of it as Sort of exponentially decaying curve or like being the first, being the founder, you get the most journalist experience being the, you know, first employee. And then by the time you ge…”

“There will be 100 startups that get created between last year and in three years from now that all become five, 10, twenty billion dollar companies because they're able to find the next set of nouns and verbs”

“If your market is not truly transformed by AI, don't touch it. It's not, it's just not worth it because you're going to be fighting against a headwind that is just unnecessary to fight against. Like go after markets where AI like fundamentally changes like the…”

“Because I think incumbents are only going to be the agent providers for their existing install base, which means that there's going to be tons of opportunity for so many more agents that those incumbents aren't already selling into.”

“The truth is, even if you have a perfectly aligned, you know, quote unquote, like intent aligned model, It's going to be used by a corporation or a startup to build an agent for that user. And then the question is, can you trust the startup that's building the…”

“If they go after the people who are not able to sell their own product, there is a little chance that they can do better, and this Customers are going to churn. A lot of revenue fast, but mostly churn.”

“Are they also interviewing with a big tech company? If so, that might indicate that they're not quite sure in which direction they want to go yet, and we'll have to circle back to selling on why should they be joining a startup in the first place.”

“Your main advantage is speed throughout the whole process. You can run this process within seven days, 10 days, maybe max two weeks. Big tech or even growth stage companies are going to move much slower than that.”

“And so in some ways, the risk that an early employee is taking on is somewhat similar to the risk that a founder takes on.”

“The thing I hate for like a lot of companies, what they do is like, they love talking in their own words and with their own concepts that they came up that nobody else understands. Like you just throw these like big words there, but then they don't really mean…”

“AI is going to reduce the cost of, like, producing the time to produce things, and so then the expectations from your users and customers will just go up, and you'll need to keep hiring more people to satisfy, like, the growing expectations. I feel like this y…”

“That's why you should start a startup, because people are going to be trapped in organizations with people running organizations that are very powerful and have all these resources and all this capital that do not believe what we just said.”

“If I were to start a company today, I would say, okay, the premise is why can't it be just me? Like, and then you start from there and your token consumption is probably going to be a lot higher than if you said, well, I'm going to have like three people or fi…”

“Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. The single most important technology in human history, the computer has been completely reset. An…”

“I think that nowadays, with modern models, there is so much product overhang that I, I'm not seeing startups capture. And I think there's people thinking about these problems, but there's just a huge amount, amount of opportunity to elicit these behaviors from…”

“I bet there's some future trillionaires sitting in this room, and I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past”

“I think this is gonna be the best time in the world to do a startup, and it's gonna be quite amazing to see.”

“I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness, and startups will continue to be important forever.”

“In fact, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that The power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society, and it's not just concentrated in a few compani…”

“And now I actually think with the power of agents and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like, I think, but maybe the startup is like a mecha Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI, and you know, the la…”

“If they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it, but not very well, That's maybe not a great sign because that's probably a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more tr…”