startup founder

“You have to save the vision speeches for when the company's winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back in small wins.”

“One question that people asked online this morning is how much time you should be spending hiring. The answer is either like zero or 25%. You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.”

“I think that as a rough guideline, you should aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.”

“The way to have a company that executes well is to execute well yourself. Everything in a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard and pay attention to detail and foc…”

“As the company grows, you continue to oscillate. The highs are better, but the lows keep getting worse.”

“I think that and the value of kind of this culture of always talking about, like, you know, what mission drives you, and we kind of are not honest about the fact that a lot of us are motivated by money and financial things. I think it's probably better for the…”

“Founders always sell too early, because you're like, wow, a billion dollars. I make the same mistake. I sell too early.”

“You've been trained to believe that you'll be judged by your credentials, but in a startup, it's the users who judge you, and they don't care about your credentials, they care about your product.”

“Strictly speaking, it's against the law not to pay yourselves although obviously this isn't a thing that That gets enforced.”

“And actually it turns out it's not that important to be smart. It's much, much more important to be determined.”

“We tell people the counterintuitive stuff, not the obvious stuff, and then what counterintuitive means is it sounds wrong, and so they go with their gut and do the wrong thing instead and then hopefully catch the mistake in time.”

“Sometimes you think you're protecting people by not telling them, but actually your closest employees, especially when you're four to six, if you bring them into the challenge, And if they are challenge oriented, they will stay with you. But if you hide it, th…”

“What I soon realized as we started to grow towards eight, 10 people is that I can talk about these super ambiguous things, but I also have the power to do something about it. For more junior folks, you have to be, you know, what's the kinder thing, because you…”

“Anything you create, the mark you make on the world that you want your parents to see, is way beyond, I think, the monetary part of it.”

“Like there are a few things in the startup world that kind of are like one shot kill. And, you know, this is one of them. You screw up with enough people's money. It never leaves you. Like you get that permanent Wikipedia page.”

“The best investors point out the problem. They don't give you a solution. They just point out the problem.”

“You're screwing yourself by overthinking all this stuff. Instead of just being like, hey, I need X dollars, I'm gonna raise it, and I'm gonna get back to work.”

“The beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy, and none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you.”

“And the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you. And that freaks you out. And so you think about it a lot, right?”

“Like, it's weirdly the kind of concept that, like, the entrepreneur who runs a barber shop will understand before a startup founder will, right?”

“Just a small incremental five or 10% salary bump can make a huge lifestyle difference, and it's almost always worth it.”

“Like a lot of times founders get punched in the face as almost unforced errors. It's like a result of magical thinking or like other parts of their lives not being set up.”

“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…”

“I mean, the fact is you need to be both optimistic and pessimistic. Okay. And if you're too far on either extreme, you, Are gonna fail, right?”

“Your friends are idiots and don't know anything, especially if they would never use your product. Investors are close seconds as idiots, especially if they would never use your product, don't invest in your space, aren't good investors, don't invest in a lot o…”

“I think people don't realize that either some stage of investors or at some point in your company, someone's going to pull out your finances and do basic arithmetic and ask themselves, is this real? And like eventually you will be judged based on like, is this…”

“If something doesn't work to accept it, to acknowledge it, to look at it, but realize you're the boss of yourself and you should just not feel a need to make a million excuses or have like create this long narrative where you're the victim and everyone else, i…”

“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…”

“They will copy what you're doing because you define success in your company.”

“The actual meaning of the metric, which is to capture if it's working or not. You know, it's like every, every which way people are so creative in finding ways to like, not actually measure the thing that they know they're supposed to be measuring.”

“So first, we recommend leading with what, not with why.”

“The key in this hard, hard conversation is not to debate someone that their plan is bad. Keep the optimism, you know, but isn't it better to sort of have a plan for the worst and not be surprised on the downside?”

“Going through and answering the application questions to organize and clarify your thinking, super helpful, right? Go look at the questions. It'll help you think about your own business and maybe find some edge cases. And so I think that's worth doing for ever…”

“When the team you're coming into is extremely upfront with you about how it's going to be, and it turns out that way and it's not good, it's not necessarily you're being exploited. Like you made that choice. You chose that.”

“The pricing mistake that founders make most often is charging too little for their product. Or even making it free in exchange for product feedback.”

“When you don't launch or when you wait too long to launch, you are missing out and delaying the actual learning that you could be having by having real people reacting to what you're doing.”

“There's this aspect of the best people at the top of their careers. They're actually very not well-rounded. They're very quirky people. For good reason. And that's what makes them outlier. Like, by definition, if you're average, Then it's like, okay, you're no…”

“The strategy that got them to this school, that got them the meta job, that got them the Ivy league degree. Is not going to be the strategy that actually gets them to be successful as a startup founder.”

“What you're doing you know, in each of these new environments at each of these customer sites, Is a little bit like being a startup founder, but you're a startup founder where you have access to some very powerful piece of product leverage that makes your job …”

“If you have a lot of time to think about this question, it's probably too early. If this is something that comes to mind every day for you, it's probably too early because It's the right time to hire when, like, things are so busy that you can't even find a sl…”

“As you pitch your company, you should make sure that you know which of those four you're pitching, probably pitching one or two of them, and they might also vary depending on the candidate that you're speaking to.”

“Should I go there? And the answer is the same now as it always is. Yes, you should. You can go there for a bit and then come back, but you should at least go.”

“And so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn the technology itself actually doesn't matter.”