The Wisdom Wall

“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 skill is often getting the thing taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet and having feces about why one's going to do better than the other.”

“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 basketball for your high school team, but that's not, that's…”

“You know, one of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that don't make the investor your customer. Um, 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 way an investor is going to like, they want to have…”

“And what they didn't tell that founder is that every subsequent investor would say to themselves, huh, this investor put in a relatively small amount of capital, bought so much of the company that the founders are going to get so diluted that they're not going to end up owning anything. And it's going to shut off later…”

“It shouldn't cost 50,000 dollars to a price round. Like you're just ripping off founders, pure and simple ripping off founders.”

“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 why you might be getting funded that have like nothing to do…”

“spending more money allows product market fit to happen faster.”

“If they can keep you spending your entire salary, and if they can keep the money that you haven't vested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three X, you never leave.”

“In many ways, this is a defensive tactic to warehouse talent. Out of the fear that maybe someone else can use you in a way that can hurt the company.”

“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 later.”

“I think sometimes counterintuitively investors who know slightly less about your space can be a little bit more grasses greener, like, optimistic than folks who know more about your space.”

“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 working on, as opposed to, like, hiring and going to…”

“So strangely, starting with a higher price or a price is almost always better than starting free. Um, almost always better.”

“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, 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 almost never the user of a product that comes into YC. And…”

“an A investor, grade A investor, Um, gives you money quickly, signs the paperwork quickly, shuts the hell up. That's an A investor. There are very, very few A plus investors in the world. There are very, very many less than A investors.”

“the most hyped investment on Demo Day is often not the best one. Very, very often. Um, I think what's interesting is that the crowd on Demo Day is just not as smart as it appears”

“Um, so I would say that it's extremely rare that an investor can have truly big impact.”

“I think investors believe that having the skill to network to an investor is an important characteristic of a good founder, and I think, ah, kind of YC's core position from the beginning is that it's not.”

“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.”

“people do not see the NBA as a startup. Um, uh, what is that called? It's not seen as like a positive resume item.”

“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.”

“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, contrived, almost you could have extracted it from Twitter.”

“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 startups change.”

“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 almost a consulting and say, I need to go around. I need to…”

“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.”

“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 chances of death just went through the roof, right? Like…”

“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.”

“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 easiest and best path to starting the startup journey with the…”

“I would argue that if you're the Googler, you're getting a bad deal if you're doing, like, a hundred hour weeks and grinding, and, like, your boss or your boss's boss is getting, like, mega vacations and ten million dollar a year packages and, like, promotions and dah, dah, dah, dah.”

“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.”

“Those politicians, what they're looking for is tech jobs. They're like, the, the, What they really need is a Google office. Like, they're not gonna get the Google office by having a startup culture, but their politicians didn't realize that.”

“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 multiplier. And I'm like, this game is so hard. You might as well…”

“The people who code are the most powerful people inside of software.”

“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 juice from them.”

“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. Um, oftentimes you have the wrong people on your team. You have a bunch of people…”

“It's always about moving fast. That's the lie. It's like, if we had this, we could finally move as fast as like, you know, we could finally build all the things that I want us to build.”

“if you ever see someone making an argument that's 100% ripping something else down and zero percent explaining why their thing is good, if all of your talking points is the alternative is bad, you know, maybe all you're selling is fear because that's all you have to sell.”

“So it's like lending and big physical things definitely require a lot of money. It's not obvious to me that there are many other business categories that require a lot of money where cash is the advantage.”

“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 of companies. And then your customer might not be an early…”

“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 guess things aren't as bad as I thought. All right. So like…”

“it's so obvious the society we lived in, we live in today, was built by people who were playing positive some games. So what it really is, is, like, those people created, like, a little bit of excess capital That the zero sum game people are like harvesting. They're kind of like slowly degrading society, and as long as…”

“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.”

“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 wash that off yourself very easily.”

“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 all in on your startup because the real world isn't…”

“The best people, shit goes wrong, and they go take a hike or something. And the worst people think shit goes wrong and they drink and do drugs.”

“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 friends, but you don't have to put those relationships, you…”

“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, it's weird because on the surface, the hype cycle looks good, but when you actually get into the dirt, the hype cycle, like, hurts just as much as it…”

“I think the founders I talked to, they don't want to build a startup ecosystem. They want to be a part of a startup ecosystem.”

“I think that's extremely rare for an investor to be demanding you to like burn like crazy. I think that the horrible truth is that founders don't need much of a push.”

“technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of Fang. And misunderstand is an understatement. They, they grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a Fang job and what value they can't extract.”

“Their standard for getting a product into even beta at Google is 10 X what an MVP in a startup is, and they just have to unlearn. It's like, can anyone find this useful? Launch.”

“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 marketing results, right? It's like, those are the mistakes,…”

“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, they tend to actually have way more power than you might think.”

“The platforms change faster than the human problems. So like you and I have lived through one, Web one O, Web two O, mobile, and whatever the hell you call it. Turns out that like, I want to go grocery shopping, but I don't want to go to the grocery store. That's been a problem the whole time. Like, or I want to…”

“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't really encounter on a day to day, and they can't really…”

“I would argue that in a lot of the teams that we fund, two, three, four founders, They're not all equally passionate about the problem, right?”

“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, there are some things that are done on paper that are not…”

“In any situation where you actually have real cost, you should be charging from day one.”

“Charge more than you might feel comfortable so you can identify the people who are most desperate for it.”

“And so the problem is, is that you're not only competing with other players in your market, you're competing against the platform you're on. If this is a significant revenue opportunity for the platform you're on, they have every incentive to either buy you or kill it, and they're not going to buy you for a lot of…”

“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.”

“So, I define pivot As changing the customer or changing the problem. This should be rare. This should happen infrequently. Um, many times this means you should start a new company. I defined iterate as changing the solution.”

“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 just dreams and creates art.”

“If one of your friends is starting a company, and you would have FOMO if it would become a billion dollar company, just shut up and write him a check.”

“Especially in the days now where you can write software with relatively little money that has relatively large impact. Like the value of networking and being able to raise large amounts of money is less and less.”

“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.”

“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 high risk, high commitment, and a long-term bet.”

“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.”

“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 that media off.”

“I also think spending time with your users is a cure for this because your users don't care about macro at all.”

“Another way I like to think about that is to convince yourself this customer is worth helping. Like you're going to enjoy spending time with this customer. And I find a lot of founders kind of want to skip That part.”

“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.”

“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 realize, man, this probably wasn't a good use of my time.”

“if you can't get anyone to use your MVP, it's probably not an MVP.”

“The ones that work take like 12 years to work, right? So it's like even for the ones that do well, like you don't make money fast being an early stage startup investor.”

“It's magical thinking to think that we get all the things we spent the first chunk of the video talking about, and there's nothing bad. That's magical. That's like, that's not being an adult.”

“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 tall, people like to go and have drinks with you, you've got…”

“when you're pitching adventure, there aren't a lot of, there aren't a lot of alternatives. Most people don't have six adventures on the plane, right?”

“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 mean you necessarily should have as much equity as the…”

“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 getting a really good deal.”

“Cause like, if that amazing tech person leaves your company, you're fucked.”

“And I think that, unfortunately, these valuations have gotten people all messed up in the head. Like, they think that if investor thinks it's worth a billion dollars, it's working.”

“these are things that founders do to impress themselves, to impress other founders. The user is not essential.”

“maybe the base conclusion here is that you have to do some copying. You cannot innovate everything.”

“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 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. That's a rare thing.”

“I think that, um, 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 investors might give you money, why your co-founders might…”

“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 just like, folks, like so often in this one, I'm just like,…”

“I love to engage and like lean in and talk through conflict, but it's just as likely the person that I'm working with, um, wants to avoid conflict or wants to take time to process conflict or doesn't process conflict through conversation. And like, I have to look at those cues. I have to understand who I'm talking to…”

“In fact, I might argue in many times, the first conversations we have are wrong. I think the only thing that we do well is we continuously ask ourselves, are we lying to ourselves?”

“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, it was a very comforting structure.”

“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, 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 challenge of the future.”

“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 would otherwise. And oftentimes people are setting goals that…”

“for companies who charge their customers money, somehow creating a goal incremented in something that's not money, um, 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, That's weird. Like hell, if, if users is going to be…”

“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.”

“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 real and sustainable?”

“It, 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.”

“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, you know, you're spending five minutes saying, yes, this is an…”

“as a second time founder, it's, it's just as hard to talk to your users But it's 10 times easier to talk to experts. So almost by extension, it's like even harder to talk to your users.”

“You know, one of the things we've been saying is like the lows are just as low, but the highs aren't as high.”

“Because they're going to have harder times typically raising money or hiring employees, they tend to have to innovate more. Like they, they tend to have to, they're constrained into building something good. Whereas like the lack of constraints so often lead people astray.”

“when you cross over being too optimist, your employees start questioning everything. Like you, you lose all trust. Cause they're like, oh crap. Like if, if the, if the leader can't see this obvious thing right in front of their face, uh, oh, like what, what, like what else have I not uncovered yet on what the leader…”

“Like setting the aggressive goal, the purpose was to get you to move fast, to get you to, to go, go, go. Like it was the, it was the juice. Like if you learned a bunch pursuing that goal, you got value, even if you didn't accomplish it.”

“you want to get in before everyone thinks it's cool, not at the peak of everyone thinking it's cool. Like the peak of everyone thinking school is usually right before everything goes to shit.”

“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.”

“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 money, like they're playing the zero sum game, 10 X better than…”

“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 the folks who are playing the zero sum games, if you don't…”

“be careful with the zero sum games because today you're taking money from a dummy and tomorrow you might be the dummy.”

“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.”

“And it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company, you might have to adult harder than the people around you. In fact, it almost assuredly requires adulting harder than the people around you.”

“Like at the minimum, your home should be neutral, but I think for the most successful people, the home's actually a plus. Like the home is like where they're making points, where they're winning points.”

“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 your thirties and company running just gets harder.”

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

“I actually see that most Problems between co-founders, the root cause isn't whatever went wrong, or whatever they're debating. It's actually their style of dealing with their frustration.”

“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 wrong. And you're just like, holy crap, you just invented a…”

“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?”

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

“Whereas I'd argue when you're running your company, those numbers are important, but there's also your burn rate, your retention, how much your existing customer accounts are expanding, your revenue expansion over time. Those metrics are the ones that can better help you when you're trying to figure out how to make…”

“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 better product, getting closer to product market fit or getting…”

“this is one of the dirty little secrets behind Amazon. They've always known that they were in a low margin business, and they've always run their company that way. And I'm sure they were so tempted to look at a Google or a Facebook and say, why don't we do those things? And like, they had to be strong enough to say,…”

“Our saying at YC is, believe the no, don't believe the why.”

“If you actually just change the facts of your business, right? Like make progress more often than not. The investor will look at that prognus as a much better signal than any modification you made to your deck or any modification you made to the words in your pitch. Like that progress is signal.”

“If you're fighting the bonus head to head with no plan, bonus wins most of the time.”

“the depressing fact that most likely everyone's going to die. So like, you're not accounting for like the most common outcomes, like you and your competitors, none of you will make something that people want.”

“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 it's like, God forbid you're doing anything more than…”

“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.”

“And what's interesting is that over the years, a lot of YC founders will kind of start following the advice of these people. And they'll make very, very common errors, and you can almost track it back to, like, oh, I kind of understand the type of person who is giving you this advice, because I see what you're doing…”

“how much we are learning from the founders that we're working with and how much we are condensing their learnings and delivering it to the next generation of YC founders versus how much we're condensing learnings personally that we got in our own companies.”

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

“you can get a lot more honesty out of somebody when they're not financially incentivized to kind of blow smoke up your ass to, you know, to say nice things.”

“even though engineers are better, At grading other engineers. There are two other facts. One, they don't tend to enjoy doing it. And two, it doesn't tend to be the greatest way to extract value out of a great engineer.”

“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 lie go wild.”

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

“For each of these companies, there was a pre-existing product. Pre-existing competitor, dominant, you might say, but there was an opportunity to make something that was 10 X better than what existed.”

“if you think about the core insight of this market, it's that hosts are the game. If you can get the most hosts, you win. You have the best inventory. But if you charge them up front to be on your site, uh, like you're probably doing it wrong.”

“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 hundred who love you, is if to have a very polished product,…”

“Just learning the business means you're gonna be building a lot of features that probably are not generally applicable, and that's the cost of learning about this business.”

“Generating letters of intent or agreements to pilot shouldn't be very hard if there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing. So being able just to get your customer to sign anything, even if it doesn't have a price on it, is evidence that you can sell to an investor.”

“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, if you're the kind of issue here is a lot of people like to go…”

“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, the demand and the price, you'll lose a lot of customers.”

“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 raise money, is like, well, what about this?”

“I think the best strategy for this, um, 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 haven't figured it out then, then we're gonna be…”

“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, try to assume the pessimist role, and, like, try to come up…”

“So here's how I would probably structure the pitch. Step one, what you're working on now. Step two, the traction. Step three, um, the business model, and then step four, the vision. It's a lot easier to sell me if I know what the hell's going on, and those first three, now I kind of know, ok, this is what you're doing…”

“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.”

“If you're looking to build a lifestyle business, then like I would definitely charge right now.”

“be very careful about asking any startup person who's not your customer for, for customer insight, because they won't have them.”

“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. Um, if we do, well, you'll change your mind. Um, much…”

“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.”

“it actually shows a level of sophistication to ask the question when you don't know, as opposed to just kind of, like, nod as if you do know and not, and then leave without any insights.”

“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 delivering an essay, you're doing it wrong.”

“the Uber model only works because there's a whole bunch of basically replaceable people with a common skill. Well, it turns out the people who've got the skills to watch infants and make parents comfortable with that tend to have nanny jobs where they work lots of hours and tend to be paid fairly well, especially in up…”

“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 day the dealership has to hit their numbers.”

“And so if you have both an infrequent and low intensity problem that you're trying to solve, you're going to have a problem getting a lot of customers even interested in talking to you.”

“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.”

“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 of times I talk to founders, I really push them towards who…”

“For all of those things, you want an events-based metrics product. Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap. I think we funded like, 50 of them. There are like, a hundred of them out there. You should be using one of them. Um, if you're not, you can't be sophisticated at building your product. This is just kind of a prerequisite.”

“If your analytics product has got too many analytics in it in the beginning, it will be hard to use. And part of what you're doing, if you've never used product like Mixpan before, is learning how to use it. And most importantly, teaching your employees and your co-founders how to use it. Because this product should be…”

“Almost always, if you ever are going to charge money to your customers, this number should be revenue. Almost always. If you are never going to charge your customers money, like Facebook, then maybe it should be a usage based metric. Like how often do your customers come back every day? Like DAUs. It is almost always…”

“If your KPI is revenue, and the number is zero, should you still be tracking that as your top line KPI? The short answer is yes. You should be depressed looking at that number every week until, like, that's, that's the answer.”

“The number one mistake I see with presales is discounting. The number one mistake is that basically, especially hardware founders will misunderstand how much they need to charge so they don't lose money, and so their pre-sale becomes their death.”

“I do also think there's something to an investment having a little bite. Like, it, like, just a little bite. Just a little, like, mmm, um, to make you think a little bit more sharp, sharply about whether this is a good thing you should be doing.”

“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's gonna be after that. You know, and if you're looking at a…”

“the number one reason why people stay in research is they can't build their MVP.”

“And then I guess, you know, last but not least is the college student who, like, in most cases isn't even offered equity. Like, that's like, you know, they're just, they're just the typer.”

“this is a skill that anyone can grasp for. And like, there's examples of good design and bad design all over the internet, right? So you can easily copy.”

“sorry, but lots of things are announced way after they happen. Way, way after.”

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

“If you don't need a deal, man, you're going to pitch better. Like, like this, that's the way life works. Like when you don't need something, you're way more convincing than when you're begging for something.”

“all of the moves that you can do to rescue your company require time.”

“if you, if you are in an operationally intensive business, you know, a la DoorDash, you better be 10 X better than the people around you at knowing your numbers at steering that plane well.”

“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, like, F you in the middle of the day.”

“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, and then the whole spike, spiral of death.”