#  @StartupArchive_ Startup Archive Founders and entrepreneurs are sharing valuable insights and lessons learned from their experiences building successful startups. Key takeaways include the importance of being relentlessly resourceful, working with people you're close to, and hiring high-agency individuals who can solve problems without being asked. Additionally, many emphasize the need to get to know your users well, be stubborn on vision but flexible on details, and focus on making your product remarkable. ### Engagements: [------] [#](/creator/twitter::1443703292647940098/interactions)  - [--] Week [-------] -52% - [--] Month [---------] -86% - [--] Months [----------] +446% - [--] Year [----------] +54% ### Mentions: [--] [#](/creator/twitter::1443703292647940098/posts_active)  - [--] Week [--] -12% - [--] Month [---] +31% - [--] Months [---] +64% - [--] Year [---] +35% ### Followers: [-------] [#](/creator/twitter::1443703292647940098/followers)  - [--] Week [-------] +0.71% - [--] Month [-------] +2.60% - [--] Months [-------] +38% - [--] Year [-------] +67% ### CreatorRank: [-------] [#](/creator/twitter::1443703292647940098/influencer_rank)  ### Social Influence **Social category influence** [technology brands](/list/technology-brands) [celebrities](/list/celebrities) [stocks](/list/stocks) [finance](/list/finance) [social networks](/list/social-networks) [vc firms](/list/vc-firms) #345 [automotive brands](/list/automotive-brands) [exchanges](/list/exchanges) [countries](/list/countries) [fashion brands](/list/fashion-brands) **Social topic influence** [elon musk](/topic/elon-musk) #2477, [mark zuckerberg](/topic/mark-zuckerberg), [y combinator](/topic/y-combinator), [jeff bezos](/topic/jeff-bezos) #213, [if you](/topic/if-you), [facebook](/topic/facebook), [money](/topic/money), [$googl](/topic/$googl) #3124, [in the](/topic/in-the), [ceo](/topic/ceo) #1555 **Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by** [@ycombinator](/creator/undefined) [@lexfridman](/creator/undefined) [@twistartups](/creator/undefined) [@startuparchive](/creator/undefined) [@jason](/creator/undefined) [@stanfordgsb](/creator/undefined) [@khoslaventures](/creator/undefined) [@stanfordonline](/creator/undefined) [@greylockvc](/creator/undefined) [@ecorner](/creator/undefined) [@stripe](/creator/undefined) [@startupgrind](/creator/undefined) [@southpkcommons](/creator/undefined) [@kevinrose](/creator/undefined) [@acquiredfm](/creator/undefined) [@pandodaily](/creator/undefined) [@stevenbartlett](/creator/undefined) [@a16z](/creator/undefined) [@hubermanlab](/creator/undefined) [@lennysan](/creator/undefined) **Top assets mentioned** [Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL)](/topic/$googl) [Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)](/topic/tesla) [Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN)](/topic/coinbase) [PayPal Holdings Inc (PYPL)](/topic/paypal) [Shopify Inc (SHOP)](/topic/$shop) [Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER)](/topic/$uber) [Spotify Technology (SPOT)](/topic/$spot) [DoorDash Inc. (DASH)](/topic/doordash) [YELP INC. (YELP)](/topic/$yelp) [Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)](/topic/microsoft) [IBM (IBM)](/topic/ibm) ### Top Social Posts Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours "Q: Why are startup ideas worthless In his essay Ideas for Startups Paul Graham wrote: startup ideas are not million dollar ideas and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1708900888570720354) 2023-10-02T17:44Z 29.1K followers, [--] engagements "Watch the full @ycombinatorlecture with @peterthiel here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1709239926750126106) 2023-10-03T16:12Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Related. Steve Jobs explains why startup ideas are worthless:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1709240220112363895) 2023-10-03T16:13Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Q: Is it worth it to hire exceptionally talented people who dont always work well with others Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that companies should hire the divas: If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1709575410886037545) 2023-10-04T14:25Z 29K followers, 101.7K engagements "Q: Should startups always raise as much money as possible In the clip below Marc Andreessen shares a framework that Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff taught him called "The Onion Theory of Risk". You can think of a day [--] startup as having every conceivable kind of risk: founding team risk product risk technical risk market acceptance risk revenue risk cost of sales risk viral growth risk etc. A startup is basically just a long list of risks and as Marc explains: "The way I think about running a startup is the way I think about raising money. It's a process of peeling away layers of risk as" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1709936170543788522) 2023-10-05T14:18Z 29.1K followers, 164.5K engagements "@rabois Reminds me of this interview with Sam Altman. Oftentimes startups don't lose because of competition but because of internal conflict" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1709946317445976397) 2023-10-05T14:59Z 29K followers, [---] engagements "@packyM The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. - Elon Musk" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1710279701950840856) 2023-10-06T13:03Z 29.1K followers, [--] engagements "Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just [---] Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1710303918146662478) 2023-10-06T14:40Z 29K followers, 118K engagements "Watch the full interview with @Jason and @paulg here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1710304099600675119) 2023-10-06T14:40Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements "Q: How do you convince people to join your startup when most startups fail The founders of Pinterest and Stripe shared their answers to this question in the clip below. I really liked Stripe CEO Patrick Collison's point that joining a startup is one of the best ways for people to benchmark themselves and have an impact on the world: "Part of the reason startups resonate with people is because the outcome is not guaranteed. If it were guaranteed it would be boring. Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1710655976758514086) 2023-10-07T13:59Z 11.9K followers, 99K engagements "Q: How do you design an amazing user experience In the clip below Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains that one route to a great UX and word-of-mouth growth is designing the perfect experience for one person: How do you make something for a million people I dont know where to start. But if you pick one person study them and take their journey you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Dont stop improving it until that person loves it and youre not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1711013681754943602) 2023-10-08T13:40Z 29K followers, 182.9K engagements "Q: How do you build effective teams Keith Rabois Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: Barrels and Ammunition. When most companies begin scaling they just hire a lot of people. Naively they expect thatas they add peopletheir velocity of shipping will increase. But startups dont work that way and in fact you sometimes get less done when you add more people. Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in your companyeven great peopleare what he calls ammunition. But what you need in your company are" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1711368901538230782) 2023-10-09T13:11Z 52.9K followers, 163.3K engagements "Watch @rabois's full How To Operate lecture here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1711369205008805991) 2023-10-09T13:13Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full "How and Why to Start A Startup" lecture with Sam Altman & Dustin Moskovitz here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1712073771442401478) 2023-10-11T11:52Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Q: What are VCs looking for in the companies they fund Marc Andreessen founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. He continues: Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. Youre" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1712472079499665584) 2023-10-12T14:15Z 46.4K followers, 80.3K engagements "Watch the full @ycombinator interview with @pmarca @RonConway and @parkerconrad here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1712472387713908885) 2023-10-12T14:16Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Q: Does my startup need a growth team Mark Zuckerberg has said that one of the best things Facebook did was invent the idea of a growth team. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: Making it so that we could grow faster was the most important product feature we ended up building for Facebook. The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes theres a place for that. But if youre actually trying to grow a product the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself. He continues: Theres no" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1712854778278015006) 2023-10-13T15:36Z 100K followers, 92.5K engagements "Watch the full Y Combinator interview with Mark Zuckerberg here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1712854973652869133) 2023-10-13T15:37Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Q: What's your favorite counterintuitive startup advice In this interview clip Mark Zuckerberg shares the best piece of advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: "In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Whenever you're in a position where you have to make a big shift in the direction of the company or product people will always point to the downside risks of that decision. Mark explains: "they may be right locally. but in aggregate if you are stagnant and don't make those changes I think you're guaranteed to fail." Follow @startuparchive_ for more" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1713220440565395640) 2023-10-14T15:49Z [----] followers, 48.8K engagements "Watch the full @ycombinator interview between Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1713220597352718536) 2023-10-14T15:49Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Q: What factors explain the PayPal Mafia The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s such as Tesla SpaceX LinkedIn YouTube Palantir Yelp Yammer and more. In the clip below David Sacksfounding COO and product leader at PayPaltalks through the factors that he believed contributed to the success of the PayPal mafia. The crux of his thesis is that the PayPal Mafia innovated on distribution not just product. They leveraged viral platform and embed strategies to achieve explosive growth at PayPal and then took these strategies to their" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1713556150203896035) 2023-10-15T14:03Z 84.4K followers, 211.2K engagements "Watch @rabois full "How to Operate" lecture here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1713897506071773362) 2023-10-16T12:39Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "@rabois Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1713897830555763028) 2023-10-16T12:41Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Q: How should hiring change as a startup scales Patrick Collison is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe which was valued at $50B in March. In the clip below he describes how one of the things that took him by surprise when running Stripe is how quickly the time horizons change: In your first month youre largely thinking about things maybe one month ahead and as time goes by theres a corresponding increase in the time horizon. After one year youre thinking one year ahead. After four years youre thinking four years ahead. And as he points out this change in time horizon should factor into the" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714249647303082143) 2023-10-17T11:58Z [----] followers, 25.6K engagements "Watch the full @patrickc interview here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714250151684890653) 2023-10-17T12:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Q: Is it normal to feel like youre failing as a startup founder and want to quit Yes In the words of Elon Musk: Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. He continues: Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714684041272971447) 2023-10-18T16:45Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full @elonmusk interview here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714684458891411508) 2023-10-18T16:46Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714768200460550280) 2023-10-18T22:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "@elonmusk Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714768241778635180) 2023-10-18T22:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "Great AMA opportunity if you have UX and product design questions" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714772776681193838) 2023-10-18T22:37Z 15.7K followers, [---] engagements "Q: How do you handle negativity and criticism toward your startup or idea When Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston posted his demo video on Hacker News he received an infamous comment telling him why Dropbox wouldnt work: "For a Linux user you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially You still need to carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. It does not seem very viral or income-generating. As he explains in the clip below he got a lot of pushback from investors too: Google is going to do this Online storage is a commodity Drews response to these investors" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1714970375509954698) 2023-10-19T11:42Z 29.1K followers, 28.3K engagements "Q: Best advice for raising venture capital In the clip below Parker Conrad (founder of Rippling & Zenefits) Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen share their best advice for raising venture capital which is basically: be so good they cant ignore you. Parker tells the story of pitching almost every VC in Silicon Valley for Zenefits and failing. Then while pitching someone at Khosla Ventures he realized what he was missing: I should really just find a way to be the Twitter guys What he means here is that you need to make it obvious that you can build a business thats going to be a gigantic" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715340138874548451) 2023-10-20T12:12Z [----] followers, 16.9K engagements "Its always a big mistake going after a giant market on day [--]. Thats typically evidence that you havent defined the categories correctly and theres going to be too much competition. Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding. You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where its the only one in a small ecosystem. -- Peter Thiel" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715446607913894110) 2023-10-20T19:15Z [----] followers, 54.9K engagements "Q: Are the best founders generalists or specialists Sam Altman answered this question in a lecture a few years ago: I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through. Maybe youre a specialist in a particular technology that you develop but when you transition from building a product to building a company you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back. Follow @startuparchive_ for more tactical startup advice" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715723932966248545) 2023-10-21T13:37Z [----] followers, 24.2K engagements "Advice from Patrick Collison on hiring as your startup scales:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715724242740785400) 2023-10-21T13:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715724735089152359) 2023-10-21T13:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive people hard theyre controversial and they care passionately. If you find those people youre probably going to work for one so be nice to them. -- Eric Schmidt" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1715839184634535981) 2023-10-21T21:15Z [----] followers, 14.7K engagements "Q: What factors explain the PayPal Mafia The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s such as Tesla SpaceX LinkedIn YouTube Palantir Yelp Yammer and more. In the clip below David Sacksfounding COO and product leader at PayPaltalks through the factors that he believed contributed to the success of the PayPal mafia. The crux of his thesis is that the PayPal Mafia innovated on distribution not just product. They leveraged viral platform and embed strategies to achieve explosive growth at PayPal and then took these strategies to their" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716104972830470476) 2023-10-22T14:51Z 46.7K followers, 58.4K engagements "The Onion Theory of Risk: The way I think about running a startup is the way I think about raising money. It's a process of peeling away layers of risk as you go. Marc Andreessen" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716175657078522139) 2023-10-22T19:32Z [----] followers, 28K engagements "Q: What does good user retention look like As Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz explains: Businesses in different verticals require different terminal retention rates. If youre in e-commerce and youre retaining on a monthly active basis 20-30% of your users youre probably going to do pretty well. If youre in social media and the first batch of people signing up for your product arent 80% retained youre not going to have a massive social media site. To answer this question for yourself you need to use dimensional reasoning to figure out what good retention looks like for your companys" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716425791565648110) 2023-10-23T12:06Z [----] followers, 10.5K engagements "@HarryStebbings Reminds me of what Sam Altman said on this:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716440598876479685) 2023-10-23T13:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind. If people care about your success because you seem committed to doing something significant its a background force helping you with hiring advice partnerships fundraising etc. -- Sam Altman" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716499377269932165) 2023-10-23T16:58Z [----] followers, 124.4K engagements "Q: What is the most common mistake founders make The #1 mistake that great founders make is waiting too long to fire bad people. - Sam Altman In the clip below Sam explains that he doesnt believe this is a learnable lesson youre just going to have to make the mistake and learn it. But it is the universal biggest mistake that otherwise great founders make. Firing people is the worst part of running a company. You made a hiring mistake and now you have to really negatively impact someones life because of that. A lot of great founders will think they can fix the situation by devoting more time" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716786460773228602) 2023-10-24T11:59Z [----] followers, 13.7K engagements "Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716788695460618266) 2023-10-24T12:08Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "You can watch the full @sama interview here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716842336863625264) 2023-10-24T15:41Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "Paul Graham on how the world's largest companies started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy: "You've got to start with a small intense fire. Suppose you're the Apple [--]. I think they made like [---] of those things right So all they had to do was find [---] people to buy these computers and they launched Apple. Apple. You've got to find people who want what you're making a lot and that's necessarily going to be a small number. But that's ok. That's how these giant things get started. You don't have to do any better than Apple and Facebook. You have to know who" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1716876859412217990) 2023-10-24T17:58Z [----] followers, 11.5K engagements "Q: Is a nice office worth it or a waste of money In the clip below Airbnb founder Brian Chesky talks about how Airbnb sought to make its office a competitive advantage: A really cool interesting space can be a huge differentiator for hiring people. Youll also spend more time in your office than you will at your home so its deeply important that people are comfortable and happy. Ive heard similar views expressed by Keith Rabois who said the following in his How To Operate Lecture at Stanford: You must have your own office. I dont believe ever in shared office space. Peter Thiel has said that" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1717129565498114068) 2023-10-25T10:42Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Q: Other than valuation what else should founders optimize for when fundraising In the words of Elon Musk: "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation." In the clip below he tells the story of how he got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in [----]. He was choosing between two competing bids from Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint. Kleiner offered a $50M pre-money valuation. VantagePoint offered $70M. Musk told Kleiner that if John Doerr joined the board Tesla would do it" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1717512262057918549) 2023-10-26T12:03Z [----] followers, 31.8K engagements "How do you make something for a million people I dont know where to start. But if you pick one person study them and take their journey you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Dont stop improving it until that person loves it and youre not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on. -- Brian Chesky" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1717553073579782476) 2023-10-26T14:45Z [----] followers, 24.5K engagements "Q: How important is experience when hiring I really like the way Mark Zuckerberg puts it in the clip below: I started Facebook when I was [--] so I cant really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company. At Facebook we invest in people that we think are just really talented even if they havent done that thing before. For Facebook this applies to people who are fresh out of university all the way to Facebooks CFO David Ebersman who took the company public even though he had never taken a company public before. As Mark" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1717859974657781902) 2023-10-27T11:05Z [----] followers, 25.6K engagements ""I really like this idea of barrels and ammunition. Most companies--when they get into hiring mode--they just hire a lot of people. And you expect that as you add people your throughput and velocity of shipping things is going to increase. It turns out it doesn't work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers you actually don't get more done. You sometimes get less done. If you hire more designers you definitely don't get more done--you get less done per day. The reason why is that most people--most great people even--are actually ammunition. But what you need in your company are" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1717953971036590532) 2023-10-27T17:18Z [----] followers, 12.6K engagements "Q: Are monopolies bad Peter Thiel is famous for telling founders to aim for monopoly if they want to build a world-changing company. In the clip below he makes his argument for why monopolies arent always bad: I think they become bad in a static world where a monopoly is just a tax or toll collector I think in a dynamic world youre not creating artificial scarcity. So when Apple invents a smartphone that works thats not restricting supplyits creating new supply where none existed. Current laws seem to reflect this: there are anti-trust laws to stop bad monopolies and copyright/intellectual" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718235460076519817) 2023-10-28T11:57Z [----] followers, 10.4K engagements ""If you're pre-product/market fit the best advice I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. Paul Graham had this great line: startups are like sharks--if they stop swimming they die. Even if you're not sure what to do just do anything. Because when you do it it'll produce some information." -- Brian Armstrong" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718276153016725666) 2023-10-28T14:38Z [----] followers, 228.3K engagements "Q: When should a startup founder give up on their idea Stewart Butterfield is the founder of Slack which he famously pivoted to from a failed gaming platform called Glitch. In the clip below he describes how he felt stuck trying to figure out whether or not it was time to give up on Glitch: On the one hand you have the narrative of good entrepreneurs are resilient; when everyone else thinks its a bad idea its probably a really good idea; you have to dig in and prove people wrong; keep going even when times are dark. On the other hand there was a morning when I woke up and was like I cant do" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718619247344050322) 2023-10-29T13:22Z 46.5K followers, 15.9K engagements "Watch the full clip where Sam discusses how to build a great company here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718666678328799447) 2023-10-29T16:30Z [----] followers, 17.4K engagements "Q: How do I know if my startup is working on a worthwhile problem Former Google CEO Larry Page uses a simple framework called "The Toothbrush Test" to decide whether he likes a business. He asks himself if the product is like a toothbrush "something you will use once or twice a day." Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel has a similar framework for assessing whether or not a startup is working on a good problem. As he explains in the clip below it's extremely important to analyze the frequency and intensity of the problem you're solving for the customer. He uses a car shopping website as an" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718953269395947870) 2023-10-30T11:29Z [----] followers, 83.7K engagements "Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718957825135628752) 2023-10-30T11:47Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. Youre either in one of the [--] or youre not." -- Marc Andreessen" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1718994812437930270) 2023-10-30T14:14Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Jeff Bezos: What goes into a great company strategy I love this insight from Jeff Bezos You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. Bezos rallied the entire company around the idea that customers will always want low prices fast delivery and vast selection. And then executed relentlessly on being the absolute best in the world in those three areas. There are lots of important things that go into a great company strategy but I love this advice from Bezos because its super counterintuitive: I very frequently get the question: Whats going to change in the next 10" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1719314887296377154) 2023-10-31T11:26Z [----] followers, 86.3K engagements "Over the past month I have shared a piece of startup advice every single day. But these [--] accumulated more than [-------] views and thousands of comments & shares. Here they are all in one place:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1719670914416091140) 2023-11-01T11:01Z [----] followers, 49.3K engagements ""In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." -- Peter Thiel" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1719787813200335181) 2023-11-01T18:45Z [----] followers, 11K engagements "Q: Should startup founders be able to code In the clip below Naval Ravikant gives advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything youre doing theres a team of 2-4 dedicated hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar. He continues: If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then youre like no it wasnt quite right because a lot of" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720035337500598494) 2023-11-02T11:09Z [----] followers, 43.2K engagements ""There were about [---] pre-IPO PayPal people and they produced [--] post-PayPal unicorns. If you look at a company like Google which has [-----] employees--literally 100x more--there aren't [--] unicorns created by ex-Googlers. It's a really interesting question: why. I think the scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation. When you work in a big company distribution is guaranteed. Google understands good products versus bad products but the one thing they really don't have to pay tremendous attention to is this problem of: you're an entrepreneur--working in a small team with very" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720110131957129297) 2023-11-02T16:06Z 82.9K followers, 86K engagements "Q: Can two cofounders who just met build a billion-dollar company Most founders and investors will tell you that choosing a random cofounder is a terrible idea. However as Dropbox founder Drew Houston explains in the clip below it is possible for two cofounders who just met to build a billion dollar company: Arash Ferdowsi and I probably knew each other for two or three hours before we threw in together. He explains that when he applied to Y Combinator as a solo founder he received an email from Paul Graham telling him the ideas for Dropbox was interesting but he needed to find a cofounder." [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720392954697699426) 2023-11-03T10:50Z [----] followers, 12K engagements "Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720393175947268468) 2023-11-03T10:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements ""Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. Every single person at the company rebelled because it's so unnatural. At every other company people want to do multiple things--especially as you get more senior. you feel like it's insulting to be asked to do just one thing. But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He'd basically say: 'I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I've assigned to you. I don't want to hear about how great you're doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720495845089415669) 2023-11-03T17:39Z [----] followers, 279.3K engagements "Sam Altman on how best startup founders make it through the dark times: No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be because its so embarrassing in retrospect. Even though Open AI is rumored to be worth $80-90 billion today the journey to this point wasnt as smooth as you might think. Sam talks through just how unpromising everything looked in the early days: We were this extremely ragtag group of people. We were mocked by everyone serious in the field. And we didnt have working technical progress. We had some little things that kind of worked but it was deeply" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1720781756830195914) 2023-11-04T12:35Z [----] followers, 60.3K engagements "Seth Godin explains the difference between a logo and a brand: If Nike opened a hotel I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like. If Hyatt came out with sneakers wed have no clue what theyd be like. Thats because Hyatt doesnt have a brandthey have a logo. He continues: What it means to have a brand is youve made a promise to people. They have expectations. Its a shorthand. And if that is distinct youve earned something. If its not distinct admit you make a commodity and youre trying to charge just a little bit extra for peace of mind. The problem that Hyatt" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721185171532136609) 2023-11-05T15:18Z 10.5K followers, 41.7K engagements "Reed Hastings on the role of the CEO at a startup As the Netflix founder explains in the clip below: In the first couple of years you do everythingyoure doing dishes at night youre coding youre writing marketing materials youre dealing with customers and investors. And you have so many disadvantages as an irrelevant little nothing of a company that you have to make up for it with talent hard work and brute force. If youre lucky this company stage only lasts for a couple of years as opposed to [--]. But once you get to 50-100 people you have to evolve your management style entirely and adapt to" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721516772442960183) 2023-11-06T13:15Z [----] followers, 76.6K engagements "Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but Im not aware of many. Expect quite a long period of high difficulty. But if you can stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721565167241032100) 2023-11-06T16:28Z [----] followers, 41.4K engagements "Elon Musk on failing as a startup founder:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721565270370664698) 2023-11-06T16:28Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721592939611386109) 2023-11-06T18:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Paul Buchheit on how too much funding before product/market fit can kill a startup Paul is the creator of gmail and managing partner at Y Combinator. In the clip below he shares: One of the most surprising thing Ive learned just working with so many startups is how often the cause of death is too much money I think there are companies thathad they not been so well fundedcouldve been successful. The company he uses as an example is Juicero a startup that raised $120 million to build a juicing machine that would sell for $400 plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly. Its so easy" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721880954770206813) 2023-11-07T13:23Z 50.3K followers, 12.5K engagements "Watch the full Y Combinator Path to $100B discussion with Paul Buchheit here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721881263814947119) 2023-11-07T13:24Z 10.7K followers, [---] engagements "Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1721881264913858795) 2023-11-07T13:24Z [----] followers, [---] engagements "Reid Hoffman on why the best founders dont have work-life balance In the clip below the founder of LinkedIn addresses the classic question on work-life balance at startups: I actually think founders have no balance If I ever hear a founder talking about how this is how I have a balanced life and so forth theyre not committed to winning The really great founders are like: I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years But while Im doing this I am unbalanced at this thing. Its not to say that you dont take breaks or you dont go on dates or" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1722238629299572757) 2023-11-08T13:04Z 22.6K followers, 304.8K engagements "I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through. Maybe youre a specialist in a particular technology that you develop but when you transition from building a product to building a company you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back. -- Sam Altman Founder & CEO of Open AI" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1722286266203394260) 2023-11-08T16:13Z [----] followers, 83.3K engagements "Andrew Chen on how Tinder failed initially despite building the perfect product: In the clip below a16z general partner Andrew Chen explains that the early Tinder product had all of the right features from the start: The first version of it had everything that you would think of as Tinder. They just nailed the product idea from day one and sometimes that happensthe first version of Instagram just nailed it However when they started to invite their friends it still wasnt working because they didnt have the right network. As Andrew explains: Sometimes you have all of the right features you just" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1722609433451352237) 2023-11-09T13:37Z 46.4K followers, 24K engagements "The #1 mistake that great founders make is waiting too long to fire bad people. -- Sam Altman" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1723049655351562578) 2023-11-10T18:47Z 12.3K followers, 38.9K engagements "Peter Thiel on why sectors and trends are overrated Im always skeptical of sectors and trends. People always ask me what some trends are that I see happening in the future and I have never liked the question because Im not a prophet and I dont think the future is fixed in that sort of way At this point I think all trends are overrated if you hear the words big data and cloud computing you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. Just think fraud and run away. He continues: All these buzzwords are a telllike in pokerthat the company is bluffing and undifferentiated Weve heard the" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1723339029674934620) 2023-11-11T13:56Z 12.9K followers, 181.6K engagements "Ben Horowitz on the importance of company culture In the clip below a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz argues that culture drives how people in your company behave on a daily basisand particularly how they behave when youre not looking. Is that phone call so important I need to return it today or can it wait until tomorrow Can I ask for a raise before my annual review Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it Do I have to be on time for that meeting Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn Should I go home at [--] p.m. or [--] p.m. Should we discuss the color" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1723696618904396087) 2023-11-12T13:37Z 29.1K followers, 44.8K engagements "Instagram founder Kevin Systroms #1 piece of advice for startup founders As Instagram founder Kevin Systrom explains in the clip below: The #1 piece of advice I always give is to solve a problem. So many people found a company just to found a company or theyre like Ive got an idea. But ideas are not companies. Ideas are not products. He explains that one warning sign youre on the wrong track is that your idea includes some element of a current fad like AI or crypto. Not in the sense that these technology waves arent realbut the core issue is when these ideas are not backed up by a clear" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1724064724940165584) 2023-11-13T14:00Z 11.8K followers, 41.6K engagements "Jeff Bezos on what separates Amazon from everyone else: If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different its this: We are genuinely customer-centric we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor rather than the customer. They prefer to be close followers rather than inventors because its safer The number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1724132631674261906) 2023-11-13T18:30Z 12.1K followers, 90.2K engagements "How Steve Jobs perfected the pitch for the iPhone Steve Jobs broke a key marketing rule when he introduced the first iPhone in [----]. As iPhone and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell puts it in the clip below: When he comes out on stage he does something that every marketer is told not to do: say these three things are now combined in one. They say that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing. But what gave him the confidence to break this rule was the fact that he was constantly iterating on the story for the iPhone since they started building it: He was working on that story from" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1724436089790661041) 2023-11-14T14:36Z 12.7K followers, 58.1K engagements "Retention is the single-most important thing for growth If you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes parallel to the x-axis you have a viable business and you have product/market fit for some subset of market. Alex Schultz CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1724511143299784751) 2023-11-14T19:34Z 11.7K followers, 10.9K engagements ""When things are working well you use data and qualitative feedback from your users to tell you what problems to go solve. And then you use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be. And then you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback. And that gives you a sense of where to go. Mark Zuckerberg" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1724815869002629184) 2023-11-15T15:45Z 11.8K followers, 24K engagements "Ev Williams on what he admires most in founders like Reed Hastings Sergey Brin and Larry Page In the clip below Ev Williams (founder of Twitter Blogger and Medium) is asked who inspires him. When I think about a commonality of companies and leaders I admire it is those whowhether they have a bunch of resources or notcome from a position of confidence and an abundance mindset. When he got to Google the thing that most struck him was how big they thought. They would ask things like: why not index the whole Internet or why wouldnt we map the whole earth or why wouldnt we scan all of the books It" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1725117408413692049) 2023-11-16T11:43Z 11.9K followers, 17.7K engagements "Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer Yahoo started out as a web directory for Stanford Google didnt start out as a search engine. It was all about PageRank and improving search for search engineskind of a middleware offering in many ways. YouTube was for sharing videos from parties. Apple was going after the hobby computer market. When you think about these three companies you could have made all sorts of arguments about market size not being large enoughfeature rather than a product. But in all cases theres a great deal of" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1725495329280135451) 2023-11-17T12:45Z 13.4K followers, 90.5K engagements "Sam Altman on the leading causes of conflict in a founding team The two times you get conflict in a startup is when people want different things for the company or they want the same things for themselves when they both want to be CEO and have their face on the magazine cover that conflict is actually the worst one. That gets really nasty. He continues: What you really want are complimentary teams where the people have the same vision for the kind of company that they want to build and they bring very different skills to the table. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is the example he uses to" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1726262491632508963) 2023-11-19T15:33Z 15.3K followers, 143.7K engagements "Watch Sam's full Blitzscaling lecture on Y Combinator and what makes the best founders here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1726262797909311685) 2023-11-19T15:34Z 15.2K followers, [----] engagements "Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical startup advice via the free newsletter here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1726262799415009520) 2023-11-19T15:34Z 13.7K followers, [----] engagements "Reid Hoffman explains Paypal Mafias unique hiring strategy The thing that was unique about the PayPal crew is typically when people start companies theyll go: I need to get people with a lot of experience at doing just this jobyou have a lot of experience coding running a data center marketing selling etc. But PayPal opted for very high-talent young people with the expectation that the high-talent young people would learn the jobs. He continues: So as opposed to hiring someone who has had a ton of experience doing an exact job we said: were going to hire someone we think is a very fast" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1726956723779391770) 2023-11-21T13:32Z 15.5K followers, 84.7K engagements "Sam Altman on the number one trait of successful founders Its not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlates exactly with startup success. But its not a bad first approximation. Being quick being decisive and getting things done quicklyif you look at our datathat correlates with almost all of our successful founders The trick to being a great founderat least in the early stagesis your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything youve seen before and solve it quickly. @sama" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1727024058984763561) 2023-11-21T17:59Z 15.4K followers, 22.1K engagements "David Sacks explains why many founders get distribution wrong The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping. Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. If you're going to have a breakout startup you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution not just product. Whats tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: Successful distribution" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1727311388631003533) 2023-11-22T13:01Z 29K followers, 72.7K engagements "Sam Altman also shared his take on generalists vs. specialists here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1727525376774013404) 2023-11-23T03:12Z 12.8K followers, [---] engagements "Sam Altman on how to build a great company:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1727525453236207704) 2023-11-23T03:12Z 12.8K followers, [---] engagements "Sam Altman on how to make it through the "dark times":" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1727526194352927083) 2023-11-23T03:15Z 13.8K followers, [----] engagements "Bret Taylor (OpenAI Chairman) on founder psychology and the importance of having great cofounders @btaylor is now the chairman of OpenAI. Before that he co-created Google Maps co-founded FriendFeed (sold to Facebook for $50M) was the CTO of Facebook co-founded Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M) and was the co-CEO of Salesforce. His resume looks like one home run after another. But in the clip below he reflects on some of his failures: The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is managing your own psychology I take failure very personally when its my company. Its so hard not to become" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1728406997211484395) 2023-11-25T13:35Z 52.9K followers, 48.7K engagements "I started Facebook when I was [--] so I cant really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company. At Facebook we invest in people that we think are just really talented even if they havent done that thing before. Mark Zuckerberg" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1728472056629494244) 2023-11-25T17:53Z 15.3K followers, 23.8K engagements "Elon Musk on why startups shouldnt optimize solely for valuation If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation. It's better to have a higher quality venture capitalist who you think would be great to work with then get a higher valuation with someone where there's even a question mark. Elon Musk" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1728809126040396180) 2023-11-26T16:13Z 15.4K followers, 12.3K engagements "Sam Altman explains why founders should start hard companies Easy companies are boring. Its hard to get the 10th or 20th employee to join. It's very hard to differentiate. There are hundreds of shots on goal for every good idea. And people don't care that much. Altman explains that people want to help founders on a mission. If you are starting a nuclear fusion company even if the odds are against you people really want to help you. You have this tailwind. People want to join you in the quest. And thats a super valuable thing - especially in a time when there's so much clutter and so much" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729116323240706172) 2023-11-27T12:33Z 19.3K followers, 180.2K engagements "An easy startup is a headwind a hard startup is a tailwind" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729117402657648832) 2023-11-27T12:38Z 19.2K followers, [----] engagements "Join 4000+ founders and investors receiving tactical startup advice via the free newsletter here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729126339691905177) 2023-11-27T13:13Z 15.5K followers, [----] engagements "Reddit Cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman on the advantages of launching your product early I wrote my first line of code on June 4th [----] for Reddit. We launched on June 22nd. I didn't even launch it. Paul Graham linked to us from his blog without telling me we didn't actually have a vision for Reddit at the time but as soon as we launched that's when we started to find a path. Wed follow users every day - what do we think is best for the users what do we think is best for us - and just build towards that. We built a lot of loyalty through those actions. That wouldnt have happened if we were" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729155790223868302) 2023-11-27T15:10Z 17K followers, 72.7K engagements "10 Book Recommendations by Mark Zuckerberg: [--]. Dealing With China "I've been personally interested as a student of Chinese culture history and language. I'm looking forward to reading Paulson's perspective on what China's rise means for the world." [--]. Orwells Revenge "An alternate version of [----]. After seeing how history has actually played out Huber's fiction describes how tools like the internet benefit people and change society for the better." [--]. The Varieties of Religious Experience "When I read 'Sapiens': I found the chapter on the evolution of the role of religion in human life most" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729192068189491290) 2023-11-27T17:34Z 29K followers, 25.2K engagements "Michael Seibel explains why metrics are so important and how to set them up correctly In this clip former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel explains why metrics are so important to set up early and properly. Setting up metrics very early on in your company is super important because its how you know whether your product is being used or not and its one of the top sources of new product ideas and inspiration. Google Analytics is great for knowing how many people visited your website and how many pages they viewed but its not great for identifying peoples actions when they use your product (e.g." [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1729478506730455334) 2023-11-28T12:33Z 22.7K followers, 40.2K engagements "Steve Jobs was incredible at marketing Apple products:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1730548403484909622) 2023-12-01T11:24Z 17.6K followers, [----] engagements ""If you're a startup you shouldn't have a growth team. The whole company should be the growth team and the CEO should be the head of growth." -- Mark Zuckerberg" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1730548746549596160) 2023-12-01T11:25Z 16.4K followers, [----] engagements "Make sure youve subscribed to the newsletter if you havent yet: I don't actually read most newsletters I sub to (who does) .except for @StartupArchive_ (built on @perchpages) been following them for a few months and they consistently nail content/length/style/tone tons of value @mikemcg0 + team well done 🫡 https://t.co/A7Mg8zttaw I don't actually read most newsletters I sub to (who does) .except for @StartupArchive_ (built on @perchpages) been following them for a few months and they consistently nail content/length/style/tone tons of value @mikemcg0 + team well done 🫡" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1730627573699219674) 2023-12-01T16:39Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements "Elon Musk on the importance of actively seeking negative feedback Its very important to actively seek out and listen to negative feedback.This is something people tend to avoid because its painful but I think this is a very common mistake I tell friends: Dont tell me what you like. Tell me what you dont like. Because otherwise your friend will not tell you what they dont like. You really need to coax out negative feedback. Elon Musk" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1730629051675562364) 2023-12-01T16:44Z 18.5K followers, 111.3K engagements "What's one piece of advice you would give to new startup founders" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1730629364671295691) 2023-12-01T16:46Z 52.9K followers, [----] engagements "Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it but dont actually commit to turning it into a company until its working. If you look at the data of the very best companies I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1731300000263463224) 2023-12-03T13:11Z 19.4K followers, 126.1K engagements "Paul Graham's advice for coming up with startup ideas If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-soundingmeaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and youll waste a lot of time before realizing theyre no good. He continues: The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. Yahoo Google Facebook and Apple all got started this way. None of" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1732011183366873585) 2023-12-05T12:16Z 29.1K followers, 162.7K engagements "Watch Pauls full Before the Startup lecture for Y Combinator here: And for a deeper dive on this topic Id recommend his essay How to Get Startup Ideas:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1732011448987987974) 2023-12-05T12:18Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements "Ron Conway on the biggest fundraising mistake founders make The biggest fundraising mistake that I see by far is not getting things in writing When somebody makes a commitment to you you type an email that confirms what they just said to you. Because a lot of investors have very short memories and they forget that they committed to you that they were going to finance or they forget what the valuation was You can get rid of all that controversy just by putting it in writing. Ron Conway founder of SV Angel" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1732066873670238289) 2023-12-05T15:58Z 18.6K followers, 43.4K engagements "Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas As the former CEO of Y Combinator puts it in the clip below: Theres a common misconception that your idea has to be great to start a company and the first thing I want to do is destroy that misconception. Michael was one of the cofounders of JustinTV which later become Twitch and sold to Amazon for almost $1B. Their original idea was to create an online reality TV showvery different from where Twitch eventually ended up. Rather than falling for the trap of thinking that your initial startup idea has to be great Michael advises founders to" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1732738834192900168) 2023-12-07T12:28Z [--] followers, 100K engagements "Watch Michaels full Y Combinator talk How to Get and Test Startup Ideas here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1732739089323982993) 2023-12-07T12:29Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "The best way to find great talent is to look at the products you admire and figure out who built them. Thats how we hired some of our earliest designers at Facebook. Julie Zhuo former Director of Product Design at Facebook" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1732784700760940707) 2023-12-07T15:30Z 46.7K followers, 12.5K engagements "Larry Pages response to Steve Jobss critique that Google lacks focus I mean he was right. He did fine as well but I worry about that. In the clip below Page explains that he chose this path for Google because he wanted to build a company for engineers and entrepreneurs. Youre looking at the business benefit you might get from trying all of these different ideas. But I also think in terms of motivating ourselves potential employees and entrepreneurs. We want to be doing things that are exciting and that are really going to make a difference. One of the things that inspired Page to create the" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1733103912062767357) 2023-12-08T12:39Z 21.4K followers, 76.1K engagements "Peter Thiels four characteristics of monopoly The next Mark Zuckerberg wont build a social network. The next Larry Page wont build a search engine. The next Bill Gates wont build an operating system. And if youre copying these people youre not learning from them. Each of these founders built something unique that had not been built before. And In the clip below Thiel cites the opening line in Anna Karenina: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He believes the opposite to be true in business: All happy companies are different because theyre doing" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1733474577500532880) 2023-12-09T13:12Z 22.6K followers, 173.4K engagements "Zillow cofounder Spencer Rascoff on why B2C startups shouldnt buy ads Very deliberatelyand this is the advice I would give to any founderwe did no advertising. The philosophy for the first three years of the company was: any money that we might spend on SEM Google Facebook whatever Lets invest that in product and try to build something viral The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides. When I do angel investing for example I will never invest in anything B2C with paid marketing" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1733899633250668679) 2023-12-10T17:21Z 20.4K followers, 65.6K engagements "The virality model Sean Parker taught the early Facebook team Alex Schultz is CMO and VP of Analytics at Facebook. When he joined Facebook Sean Parker explained that you want to think about virality in terms of three things: [--]. Payload. How many people can you hit with any given viral blast [--]. Conversion Rate. What percentage of them will convert to becoming users of your product [--]. Frequency. How many times can you hit them per blast The higher these three factors the more viral a product will be. Hotmail is the canonical example of brilliant viral marketing. When they launched their" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734188440973897740) 2023-12-11T12:28Z [----] followers, 53.2K engagements "Watch the full Growth lecture by Alex as part of Y Combinators How to Start a Startup course here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734188739285447018) 2023-12-11T12:29Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Sam Altman on the qualities of the best founders The trick to being a great founder is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything youve seen before and solve it very quickly. When Sam was CEO of Y Combinator they were looking at 20000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order Sam believes the following qualities matter most: [--]. Clarity of vision. Can the founder explain what they do and why If the founder cant explain it clearly to us then (a) theyre not going to be able to recruit hire sell" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734556421432250485) 2023-12-12T12:50Z 29.2K followers, 161.6K engagements "For more timeless startup advice from the best founders and investors join our free newsletter:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734556742380310812) 2023-12-12T12:52Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full Sam Altman on Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders lecture as part of Greylocks Blitzscaling course at Stanford here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734557008961884184) 2023-12-12T12:53Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear on resolving product roadmap disagreements "If you havent talked to users and you havent looked at data you dont get to have an opinion about the product. The person who has actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas but they get to make the call."" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734595235496264147) 2023-12-12T15:25Z 22.6K followers, 61.6K engagements "Jeff Bezos Eric Schmidt Larry Page and Paul Graham on why companies shouldnt focus on competitors If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different its this: We are genuinely customer-centric we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor rather than the customer. They prefer to be close followers rather than inventors because its safer. Bezos adds to this quote in the clip below: The number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1734927043182076113) 2023-12-13T13:23Z [--] followers, 153.4K engagements "For more timeless startup advice from the best founders and investors join our free newsletter:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734954267281076598) 2023-12-13T15:11Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full Recode interview with Evan Spiegel at Code [----] here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1734954268384252076) 2023-12-13T15:11Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements "Flexport founder Ryan Peterson on getting ramen profitable Ryan Peterson is the founder and CEO of Flexport which was valued at more than $8 billion last year. In the clip below he talks about how he adopted Paul Grahams be a cockroach philosophy and aimed for ramen profitability with the company he started before Flexport (Import Genius) which didnt raise venture capital. He adjusted his lifestyle to minimize his living expenses. And then to cover those expenses he picked up part-time jobs that still allowed him to spend most of his time working on his startup. He wrote case studies for" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1735295424108343778) 2023-12-14T13:47Z [--] followers, 121.4K engagements "Stripe cofounder John Collison on why internal transparency is valuable for scaling a startup All of the things people talk about like hiring really great people or giving them a huge amount of leveragetransparency for us plays into that. We think that if you are aligned at a high level about what Stripe is doingif everybody really believes in the missionand if everyone has really good access to information and a good picture of the current state of Stripe then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in terms of working productively together. And it forgives a lot of the other things" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1735325352036024613) 2023-12-14T15:46Z 29.1K followers, 27.8K engagements "Watch Y Combinators full Hiring and Culture with Patrick and John Collison and Ben Silbermann lecture here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1735325570005688616) 2023-12-14T15:47Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Dropbox founder Drew Houston explains why good products with great distribution will beat great products with bad distribution LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains in the" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1736732470983180575) 2023-12-18T12:57Z 45.7K followers, 254.7K engagements "OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor explains why platform shifts are a fruitful source of startup ideas Bret Taylor is now the chairman of OpenAI. Before that he co-created Google Maps co-founded FriendFeed (sold to Facebook for $50M) was the CTO of Facebook co-founded Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M) and was the co-CEO of Salesforce. In the clip below he explains that when deciding what to work on next he will often ask himself when this platform exists what habits will change He believes that platform shifts are large drivers of economic value. For example the PC led to the creation of Microsoft" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1737093268884558247) 2023-12-19T12:51Z 22.6K followers, 32.7K engagements "The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have [---] customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you. In the clip below Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky explains: If you have [---] people who absolutely love your product theyll tell [---] people and theyll tell [---] people and this thing will grow virally. In fact almost all movements in history have grown this waythere are deeply passionate followers and they grow it. He contrasts this with the general wisdom in Silicon Valley of: I need to build this app. It" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1737446769519124584) 2023-12-20T12:16Z 22.6K followers, 170K engagements "Peter Thiel: disruption is one of the most horrible overused buzzwords I dont think that your goal in starting a company should be to disrupt or destroy a big company. Your goal is to create a successful company. He continues: And this is why I really dislike disruption as a buzzword. It is one of the most horrible overused buzzwords. A disruptive person is someone who looks for trouble and finds it Napster was a very disruptive company that set out to destroy the music industry and a year later it was shut down by the government It's not constructive. I think one really shouldnt take ones" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1737813161837830201) 2023-12-21T12:31Z 29.1K followers, 36.3K engagements "Michael Seibel on how to create a great startup pitch In the clip below former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel breaks down the two types of pitches every startup founder needs: a 30-second elevator pitch and a two-minute pitch for investors. A lot of people practice 10-minute 30-minute hour-long pitches. I think thats all garbage. I think you can get all of your points across in two minutes. And one thing I like to tell founders is that the more you talk the more you have an opportunity to say something that people dont like. 30-Second Elevator Pitch: You should be able to explain to anyone" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1738173594994118743) 2023-12-22T12:24Z 46.8K followers, 74.9K engagements "Watch the full @ycombinator lecture here:" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1738173819460694480) 2023-12-22T12:25Z [--] followers, [----] engagements "Brian Armstrong's best advice for a pre-product/market fit startup If youre pre-product/market fit the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. He borrows this from Paul Graham who said: Startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming they die. Even if youre not sure what to do just do anything. Because when you do it itll produce some informationpeople liked it they didnt etc. Brian shares that there were many times in the early days of Coinbase when he just shipped something rather than debate it endlessly: And there were a couple of" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1738905209093468459) 2023-12-24T12:51Z 29.1K followers, 115.5K engagements "How Alexis Ohanian Steve Huffman and Paul Graham came up with the idea for Reddit in a one-hour brainstorm Co-founders Alexis and Steve first started a company in [----] while undergrads at the University of Virginia. The original product was called My Mobile Menu (MMM) and their goal was to let people order food from their phones. During spring break the two college seniors decided to drive from Virginia to Boston to attend a talk Paul Graham was giving. Surprised that two college students drove all the way from Virginia to attend his talk Paul let them buy him a drink and pitch their startup" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1739276158464659740) 2023-12-25T13:25Z [--] followers, 59.5K engagements "Ben Horowitzs framework for tough management decisions In the clip below a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz walks through the following real-world scenario he consulted a founder on: "Your executive has been working extremely hard and is well liked and a great part of the culture. However he is not world-class running his function and you need someone who is." Do you fire or demote him On one hand it's tough to fire someone who has put in a big effort and a demotion can sometimes look like a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario: there's no culture backlash you save the executive the" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1739642649374511425) 2023-12-26T13:41Z 29K followers, 63.5K engagements "Paul Graham: the secret to growing really fast is starting with a small intense fire Youve got to find people who want what youre making A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok. Thats how these giant things get started You dont have to do any better than Apple and Facebook. Apple started by selling just [---] Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1741079240475320757) 2023-12-30T12:50Z 29.1K followers, 70K engagements "Watch the full @twistartups discussion between @Jason and @paulg here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1741079651420643698) 2023-12-30T12:51Z 29K followers, [----] engagements ""If you think about the greatest products they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them." -- Eric Schmidt former CEO of Google" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1741452643430474174) 2023-12-31T13:33Z [--] followers, 43.2K engagements "Google Cofounder Larry Page: I recommend reading things When asked in the clip below how he learned to run Google Larry responds: I read a lot of books. He jokes: When renaming Alphabet I read like three books on namingwhich is more than anyone else had read. So I decided I was the expert and actually that was useful. I recommend reading things. I think this is a really important mindset that is often overlooked. One of the richest ways to learn something is reading things written by people who deeply understand their subject matter. Even Elon Musk was able to teach himself about the" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1742520160475365708) 2024-01-03T12:15Z [--] followers, 66.5K engagements "Jeff Bezos: Missionaries build better products In the clip below Jeff tells Charlie Rose that Amazons mission is to be Earths most customer-centric company. When asked what that means Jeff shares the example: Right after World War II Akio Moritathe guy who founded Sonyset as the mission for Sony that they were going to make Japan known for quality. You have to remember this was a time when Japan was known for cheap copycat products. And Morita didnt say were going to make Sony known for quality. He said were going to make Japan known for quality. He chose a mission for Sony that was bigger" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1742905724315836753) 2024-01-04T13:48Z [--] followers, 115.2K engagements "Full list here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744025314005545271) 2024-01-07T15:56Z 12.1K followers, [----] engagements "And to save you hours of reading we've attempted to weave the key ideas of all [--] of these resources into a single essay here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744027918160814341) 2024-01-07T16:07Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements "Quora founder Adam DAngelo explains cohort retention and other startup metrics you should track In the clip below the Quora founder and former CTO of Facebook argues: As a startup you really need to focus. So the core concept that I would try to focus on is users that are getting value from your product today. This can be measured in several ways depending on your product and business model (e.g. active users revenue transaction volume etc.). You can go a long way just by measuring this. But if youre not measuring anything youre susceptible to cognitive biases and all kinds of problemsyoure" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744344534807363948) 2024-01-08T13:05Z 77.8K followers, 54.6K engagements "Keith Raboiss formula for startup success In the clip below Founders Fund GP @rabois explains the viral tweet thats pinned to his profile which reads: Formula for startup success: Find large highly fragmented industry w low NPS; vertically integrate a solution to simplify value product. He argues that fragmented and low-NPS industries have created massive opportunities for many of the worlds most successful companies: If you have a fragmented industry theres usually structural reasons why and a bad NPS means customers are not delighted. He uses ride sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft as" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744382554164154667) 2024-01-08T15:36Z 50.1K followers, 37.6K engagements "Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel: Dont be fake Steve Jobs A lot of people think Steve jobs is this person to emulate but they have a false picture in their heads of what Steve Jobs was. They think that he dreamed perfect ideas out of his head and into the world. People look at the iPhone as an example of this. But they look at their iPhone today: Your iPhone today is f'ing magical. The first iPhone sucked in almost every way. The first iPhone had no 3Geven though 3G was a standard feature at the time. There was only one carrier so if you didnt have AT&T you had to switch carriers. The" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744704647292440786) 2024-01-09T12:56Z 44.6K followers, 37.8K engagements "The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company It can take a really really long time to build things that are worthwhile. He describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning when he was building Pinterest: In March [----] we launched Pinterest and were at [----] accounts. And that wouldnt have been so bad if we hadnt started building Pinterest in November [----]. And that wouldnt have been so bad if I hadnt left my job to start a company in May [----]. A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon but Ben disagrees: The part of the analogy" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1744753304800796748) 2024-01-09T16:09Z 29K followers, 29K engagements "Marc Andreessen explains what VCs look for in the companies they fund Marc Andreessen founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. He continues: Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1745059170372497909) 2024-01-10T12:25Z 46.4K followers, 35.9K engagements "Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on how to build strong cofounder relationships We Airbnb cofounders had a rule. The rule was that winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. And the reason that's important is because if you start a company you're going to have to debate a hundred thousand things. so no one argument can be the thing. There has to be this larger sense that we're a band. Brian likens strong relationships to exercise. I think you gotta really work hard at the relationship almost like exercising. If you don't keep exercising you get out of shape. We" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1745116232905286049) 2024-01-10T16:11Z 29K followers, 96.2K engagements "Elon Musks warning to startup founders: "it can be very painful for several years Elon Musk is famous for saying Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. He continues: Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1745416300807999830) 2024-01-11T12:04Z 29K followers, 103.1K engagements "Watch the full interview with Elon Musk at the StartmeupHK Venture Forum here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1745418693410967631) 2024-01-11T12:13Z 30.6K followers, [----] engagements "LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Itll take somewhere between three and five companies to be successful Reid Hoffmans first startup SocialNet failed before he went on to help build PayPal and found LinkedIn. In the clip below he explains what he told his dad before starting SocialNet: Itll take somewhere between three and five companies to be successful. If you look at the statistics of it the huge majority of these companies fail. Going into it you may say I bat better than average but even if you do you cannot bat [---] or [----]. He continues: I think this framing is really critical to do because" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1745476148501283023) 2024-01-11T16:01Z [--] followers, 23.5K engagements "Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz: Retention is the single-most important thing for growth In the clip below Alex walks through how to calculate a retention curve for your startup. Basically you want to graph the percentage of monthly active users (y-axis) versus the number of days from acquisition (x-axis). And as he explains: If you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes to a line parallel to the x-axis you have a viable business and you have product/market fit for some subset of market. If you do not have a retention curve that flattens out you do not have product/market fit and" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1745778512399618167) 2024-01-12T12:03Z 12.1K followers, 28.9K engagements "Netflix founder Reed Hasting on the importance of talent density and using a keeper test After the dot-com bubble burst and Netflix had to lay off a third of its employees Reed expected everything to grind to a halt. However the opposite happened and the company actually got more done with fewer people: Without the bottom third of the company there was no dummy-proofing necessary. Everyone was going fast and everything was right. We realized that with the right density of talent there is very little process needed. Individual motivation inspiration and excitement also increasedits" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1746148594346852555) 2024-01-13T12:34Z 29K followers, 67.2K engagements "Mark Zuckerberg shares the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him "In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Whenever you're in a position where you have to make a big shift in the direction of the company or product people will always point to the downside risks of that decision. Mark explains: "they may be right locally. but in aggregate if you are stagnant and don't make those changes I think you're guaranteed to fail." Video Source: @ycombinator" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1746207104665337926) 2024-01-13T16:26Z 29.3K followers, 52.2K engagements "Mark's advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact: Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something https://t.co/kFDIVchHnJ Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1746207390981038323) 2024-01-13T16:27Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1746207393011105937) 2024-01-13T16:27Z 29K followers, [----] engagements "@kscottburgess A lot of people try going after millions users at the outset. Brian Chesky explains here that Airbnb initially fell for this trap before hearing this advice from Paul Graham The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have [---] customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you. In the clip below Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky explains: If you have [---] people https://t.co/BgtvP4ZMEi The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have 100" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1746517377225789602) 2024-01-14T12:59Z 30.7K followers, [---] engagements "Steve Jobs: Theres a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product Steve recounts: One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that diseaseIve seen other people get it toois the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. But thats never the case. As Steve explains a product idea never turns out as originally conceived because you learn a lot from the details of building it and there are always tradeoffs you have to make. Theres a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1746870952816726329) 2024-01-15T12:24Z [--] followers, 111.2K engagements "Marissa Mayer on scaling Google and the internal black market CEO Eric Schmidt created for new hires One of the things that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about a lot was that at every order of magnitude you should expect every process to breakand you should expect to have to completely reinvent it. Its very different to deal with tens of people versus hundreds of people versus thousands of people Marissa shares a story of how one time Eric reinvented Googles hiring process in a way that initially frustrated everyone: We had closed the year at about [---] people and we had a plan to" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1747232727894552737) 2024-01-16T12:21Z [--] followers, 161K engagements "Marc Andreessen: Every successful innovator eventually starts to like the taste of their own blood Once something works the stories get retconned and adapted to say it was inevitable all along everybody always knew this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards and society embraces them. But invariably if you were with them when they were actually doing the workor you get a couple of drinks into them and talk about it theyll be like: no thats not how it happened at all. Marc continues: They faced a wall of skepticismbasically a wall of social denial: no this is not going to work no" [X Link](https://x.com/anyuser/status/1747602198681288865) 2024-01-17T12:50Z [--] followers, 216.2K engagements "Jeff Bezos explains the difference between one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions In the simplest terms a two-way door decision is one thats easy to reverse and a one-way door decision is one thats impossible or very costly to reverse. As Jeff explains: One-way door decisions have to be made very deliberately and very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision you should slow down and do that. He uses choosing which propellants to use in a rocket engine at Blue Origin as an example of a one-way door decision. However most decisions are not consequential" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1748314782707691863) 2024-01-19T12:01Z 29.1K followers, 57.9K engagements "Watch the full interview with @JeffBezos on the @lexfridman podcast here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1748315961999171589) 2024-01-19T12:06Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements "What Twitter founder Jack Dorsey learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years they were Super Bowl Champions. In his book The Score Takes Care of Itself he writes: Winners act like winners before theyre winnersThe culture precedes positive results. It doesnt get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before theyre champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners. And he provides six guidelines for establishing a" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749055051081883665) 2024-01-21T13:03Z 30.7K followers, 198K engagements "Watch Jack's full [----] talk at Y Combinator's Startup School here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749055652511481915) 2024-01-21T13:05Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "People think culture is like architecture when its a lot more like gardening: you plant some seeds and pull out weeds that arent working. -- Ben Silbermann founder of Pinterest Source: @ycombinator" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749112039568482473) 2024-01-21T16:49Z 30.7K followers, 19.1K engagements "Watch the full Y Combinator lecture on Hiring and Culture with Ben Silbermann and Patrick and John Collison here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749112040956834229) 2024-01-21T16:49Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on why you should hire the divas: Steve Jobs was a diva If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive people hard theyre controversial and they care passionately. If you find those people" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749402567136919582) 2024-01-22T12:04Z [----] followers, 94.8K engagements ""If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation. Elon Musk Source: @PandoDaily" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749462600851898392) 2024-01-22T16:02Z 29K followers, 15K engagements "Watch the full fireside chat with Elon Musk here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749463079677784085) 2024-01-22T16:04Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements "Read the full Startup Archive post on how Elon got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in [----] here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749463152239276434) 2024-01-22T16:04Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements "Legendary coach Bill Campbell on trying to convince Steve Jobs to do market research at Apple Bill Campbell was a mentor to some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley including Steve Jobs Larry Page Sergey Brin Eric Schmidt Jeff Bezos Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg. In the clip below he responds to an audience member who asks which approach to product he favors: the visionary Steve Jobs approach or the Lean Startup Methodology. He responds: I came from a real research organization like Kodak when I came to Apple in [----]. And I was always trying to push Steve Jobs into market research and" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749772390962549043) 2024-01-23T12:33Z 29.1K followers, 31.1K engagements "Watch the full interview with Bill Campbell and former Intuit CEO Brad Smith here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749772768374300832) 2024-01-23T12:35Z [----] followers, [----] engagements "Steve Jobs: The doers are the major thinkers Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it Of course not. Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist and knew about pigments and human anatomy. Combining all of those skills togetherthe art and the science the thinking and the doingis what resulted in the exceptional result There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1749810189296083137) 2024-01-23T15:03Z 29.3K followers, 59.5K engagements "Jeff Bezos: Every startup is unlikely to work But that doesnt mean you cant be optimistic When Jeff started Amazon he told his investors that he thought there was a 30% chance theyd get their money back: Because thats the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. Its helpful to be in reality about that. But that doesnt mean you cant be optimistic. You kind of have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. And on the other hand you have to ignore all that and just be 100% sure its going to work. He continues:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1750855441222131788) 2024-01-26T12:17Z 29.1K followers, 28.7K engagements "LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Founders have no balance. I actually think founders have no balance If I ever hear a founder talking about how this is how I have a balanced life and so forth theyre not committed to winning The really great founders are like: I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years But while Im doing this I am unbalanced at this thing. Its not to say that you dont take breaks or you dont go on dates or whatever else. But youre super focused on this because its really hard and theres lots of ways to die. Source:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1750908040768045292) 2024-01-26T15:46Z 44.5K followers, 79.8K engagements "Dropbox founder Drew Houstons response to investors who told him online storage was a commodity Frankly I agreed with them. I was like yeah Google can probably do this. Yeah we dont really have a lot of structural advantages. Yeah were not really sure how were going to make money Thats all true but you have to realize thats not causal. Just because other folks have done something in a way that you dont think is good doesnt mean its inherently a bad idea I would ask investors: yes there are [--] of these things out there but do you use any of them And they would say no. And Id say isnt that" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751266583932985788) 2024-01-27T15:31Z 29.4K followers, 100.6K engagements "Jack Dorsey: When we started Square we thought we were just building a piece of hardware In his blog post Product First @DavidSacks explains that the founding of Squaredescribed by @jack in the clip belowresembled his own experience at PayPal. Most people think startups begin with brilliant insight and the founders have it all figured out from the beginning. But startups are messier than that. As David explains in the blog post: Founders usually start with a product idea. They know users will like it but may be a bit hazy on the exact market buyer or business model. Those details get filled" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751586118548570582) 2024-01-28T12:40Z 30.5K followers, 56.2K engagements "If youre pre-product/market fit the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. -- Brian Armstrong Cofounder & CEO of Coinbase Source: @lexfridman" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751628380695318750) 2024-01-28T15:28Z 50.4K followers, 65K engagements "Sequoia partner Michael Moritz explains why Bill Gates had the radio removed from his car dashboard When asked what founder obsession looks like Sequoia partner Michael Moritz gives two examples. The first is Apoorva Mehta founder & CEO of Instacart which is valued at more than $7 billion today. Before investing in Instacart Michael asked Apoorva how he got into the business of grocery delivery. Apoorva responded that after toying with a variety of other businesses he decided Instacart was the one for him when the idea of the business was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751944603719307696) 2024-01-29T12:25Z 49.9K followers, 181.2K engagements "Read the full archive of timeless startup advice from the world's best founders and investors here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751945978847125696) 2024-01-29T12:30Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements "Watch the full discussion with Michael Moritz at Stanford GSB here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751952892796240123) 2024-01-29T12:58Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements "Stripe founder & CEO Patrick Collison: Joining a startup is a great way to benchmark yourself "Whether or not you're the best or worst person in the world you're probably not going to significantly alter Google's trajectory. Whereas if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is quite compelling to a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to go test that. Source: @ycombinator" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751994903092191406) 2024-01-29T15:45Z 30.8K followers, 46.3K engagements "Watch the full Y Combinator lecture on Hiring and Culture with Ben Silbermann and Patrick and John Collison here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1751995068716822836) 2024-01-29T15:45Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "Peter Thiel: Vertical integration is an under-explored modality of technological progress In my mind there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last [---] years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so. The first is vertically-integrated complex monopolies which people started building at the end of the second industrial revolutionlike Standard Oil and Ford at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. As Peter points out this is done surprisingly little today: Its typically fairly capital intensive and we live in" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752308416197095467) 2024-01-30T12:30Z 30.8K followers, 63.2K engagements "Watch the full Competition is for Losers lecture from Peter Thiel for Y Combinators How to Start a Startup course here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752308596401139724) 2024-01-30T12:31Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "The two times you get conflict in a startup is when people want different things for the company and when they want the same things for themselves." -- Sam Altman Source: @GreylockVC" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752351705927160034) 2024-01-30T15:22Z 30.7K followers, 13.6K engagements "Watch the full Graylock Blitzscaling lecture with Sam Altman on "Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders" here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752351707386839077) 2024-01-30T15:22Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "Scott Belsky: You should only do half of what you want to do in product development When building Behance (acquired by Adobe for $150M) Scott learned the lesson do only half of what you want to do the hard way. The initial Behance product had tons of features: If I were to be honest I was probably just trying to hedge ourselves. I didnt know what thing would take off so we launched V1 with so many things. And Scott explains that as they killed each of these features the key KPIs improved: The key KPIs were served when we reduced the scope of the product. And since then Ive been very insistent" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752663610718093359) 2024-01-31T12:02Z 29.5K followers, 21.5K engagements "Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman: "We didn't actually have a vision for Reddit As soon as we launched thats when we started to find a path and we just followed the users every day and just built towards that. We built a lot of loyalty through those actions. And that would not have happened if we were sitting in our apartment not launching. Source: @StanfordOnline" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1752719652323745945) 2024-01-31T15:45Z 29.3K followers, 27.3K engagements "Gmail creator Paul Buchheit: As a startup focus is your most powerful weapon As a startup focus is your most powerful weapon. The reason youre able to take on these big companies is because theyre doing [----] different things. The only way you can win is if you take everything you have and focus it at one point. Source: @ycombinator" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1753445955968651490) 2024-02-02T15:51Z 30.7K followers, 18.7K engagements "Watch the full Y Combinator Path to $100B discussion with Paul here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1753446156162707818) 2024-02-02T15:51Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements "Sam Altman on the number one trait of successful founders Its not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but its not a bad first approximation. Being quick decisive and getting things done quicklyif you look at our data that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait. Source: @GreylockVC" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1754169919589994788) 2024-02-04T15:47Z 31.3K followers, 38.4K engagements "Watch Sams full blitzcaling lecture on Y Combinator and what makes the best founders here:" [X Link](https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1754170114398625880) 2024-02-04T15:48Z 31.3K followers, [----] engagements Limited data mode. Full metrics available with subscription: lunarcrush.com/pricing
@StartupArchive_ Startup Archive
Founders and entrepreneurs are sharing valuable insights and lessons learned from their experiences building successful startups. Key takeaways include the importance of being relentlessly resourceful, working with people you're close to, and hiring high-agency individuals who can solve problems without being asked. Additionally, many emphasize the need to get to know your users well, be stubborn on vision but flexible on details, and focus on making your product remarkable.
Engagements: [------] #
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- [--] Month [---------] -86%
- [--] Months [----------] +446%
- [--] Year [----------] +54%
Mentions: [--] #
- [--] Week [--] -12%
- [--] Month [---] +31%
- [--] Months [---] +64%
- [--] Year [---] +35%
Followers: [-------] #
- [--] Week [-------] +0.71%
- [--] Month [-------] +2.60%
- [--] Months [-------] +38%
- [--] Year [-------] +67%
CreatorRank: [-------] #
Social Influence
Social category influence technology brands celebrities stocks finance social networks vc firms #345 automotive brands exchanges countries fashion brands
Social topic influence elon musk #2477, mark zuckerberg, y combinator, jeff bezos #213, if you, facebook, money, $googl #3124, in the, ceo #1555
Top accounts mentioned or mentioned by @ycombinator @lexfridman @twistartups @startuparchive @jason @stanfordgsb @khoslaventures @stanfordonline @greylockvc @ecorner @stripe @startupgrind @southpkcommons @kevinrose @acquiredfm @pandodaily @stevenbartlett @a16z @hubermanlab @lennysan
Top assets mentioned Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL) Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Coinbase Global Inc. (COIN) PayPal Holdings Inc (PYPL) Shopify Inc (SHOP) Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER) Spotify Technology (SPOT) DoorDash Inc. (DASH) YELP INC. (YELP) Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) IBM (IBM)
Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last [--] hours
"Q: Why are startup ideas worthless In his essay Ideas for Startups Paul Graham wrote: startup ideas are not million dollar ideas and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market"
X Link 2023-10-02T17:44Z 29.1K followers, [--] engagements
"Watch the full @ycombinatorlecture with @peterthiel here:"
X Link 2023-10-03T16:12Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Related. Steve Jobs explains why startup ideas are worthless:"
X Link 2023-10-03T16:13Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Q: Is it worth it to hire exceptionally talented people who dont always work well with others Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that companies should hire the divas: If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive"
X Link 2023-10-04T14:25Z 29K followers, 101.7K engagements
"Q: Should startups always raise as much money as possible In the clip below Marc Andreessen shares a framework that Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff taught him called "The Onion Theory of Risk". You can think of a day [--] startup as having every conceivable kind of risk: founding team risk product risk technical risk market acceptance risk revenue risk cost of sales risk viral growth risk etc. A startup is basically just a long list of risks and as Marc explains: "The way I think about running a startup is the way I think about raising money. It's a process of peeling away layers of risk as"
X Link 2023-10-05T14:18Z 29.1K followers, 164.5K engagements
"@rabois Reminds me of this interview with Sam Altman. Oftentimes startups don't lose because of competition but because of internal conflict"
X Link 2023-10-05T14:59Z 29K followers, [---] engagements
"@packyM The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. - Elon Musk"
X Link 2023-10-06T13:03Z 29.1K followers, [--] engagements
"Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just [---] Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets"
X Link 2023-10-06T14:40Z 29K followers, 118K engagements
"Watch the full interview with @Jason and @paulg here:"
X Link 2023-10-06T14:40Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements
"Q: How do you convince people to join your startup when most startups fail The founders of Pinterest and Stripe shared their answers to this question in the clip below. I really liked Stripe CEO Patrick Collison's point that joining a startup is one of the best ways for people to benchmark themselves and have an impact on the world: "Part of the reason startups resonate with people is because the outcome is not guaranteed. If it were guaranteed it would be boring. Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if"
X Link 2023-10-07T13:59Z 11.9K followers, 99K engagements
"Q: How do you design an amazing user experience In the clip below Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains that one route to a great UX and word-of-mouth growth is designing the perfect experience for one person: How do you make something for a million people I dont know where to start. But if you pick one person study them and take their journey you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Dont stop improving it until that person loves it and youre not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves"
X Link 2023-10-08T13:40Z 29K followers, 182.9K engagements
"Q: How do you build effective teams Keith Rabois Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: Barrels and Ammunition. When most companies begin scaling they just hire a lot of people. Naively they expect thatas they add peopletheir velocity of shipping will increase. But startups dont work that way and in fact you sometimes get less done when you add more people. Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in your companyeven great peopleare what he calls ammunition. But what you need in your company are"
X Link 2023-10-09T13:11Z 52.9K followers, 163.3K engagements
"Watch @rabois's full How To Operate lecture here:"
X Link 2023-10-09T13:13Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full "How and Why to Start A Startup" lecture with Sam Altman & Dustin Moskovitz here:"
X Link 2023-10-11T11:52Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Q: What are VCs looking for in the companies they fund Marc Andreessen founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. He continues: Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. Youre"
X Link 2023-10-12T14:15Z 46.4K followers, 80.3K engagements
"Watch the full @ycombinator interview with @pmarca @RonConway and @parkerconrad here:"
X Link 2023-10-12T14:16Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Q: Does my startup need a growth team Mark Zuckerberg has said that one of the best things Facebook did was invent the idea of a growth team. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: Making it so that we could grow faster was the most important product feature we ended up building for Facebook. The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes theres a place for that. But if youre actually trying to grow a product the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself. He continues: Theres no"
X Link 2023-10-13T15:36Z 100K followers, 92.5K engagements
"Watch the full Y Combinator interview with Mark Zuckerberg here:"
X Link 2023-10-13T15:37Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Q: What's your favorite counterintuitive startup advice In this interview clip Mark Zuckerberg shares the best piece of advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: "In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Whenever you're in a position where you have to make a big shift in the direction of the company or product people will always point to the downside risks of that decision. Mark explains: "they may be right locally. but in aggregate if you are stagnant and don't make those changes I think you're guaranteed to fail." Follow @startuparchive_ for more"
X Link 2023-10-14T15:49Z [----] followers, 48.8K engagements
"Watch the full @ycombinator interview between Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg here:"
X Link 2023-10-14T15:49Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Q: What factors explain the PayPal Mafia The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s such as Tesla SpaceX LinkedIn YouTube Palantir Yelp Yammer and more. In the clip below David Sacksfounding COO and product leader at PayPaltalks through the factors that he believed contributed to the success of the PayPal mafia. The crux of his thesis is that the PayPal Mafia innovated on distribution not just product. They leveraged viral platform and embed strategies to achieve explosive growth at PayPal and then took these strategies to their"
X Link 2023-10-15T14:03Z 84.4K followers, 211.2K engagements
"Watch @rabois full "How to Operate" lecture here:"
X Link 2023-10-16T12:39Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"@rabois Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-16T12:41Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Q: How should hiring change as a startup scales Patrick Collison is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe which was valued at $50B in March. In the clip below he describes how one of the things that took him by surprise when running Stripe is how quickly the time horizons change: In your first month youre largely thinking about things maybe one month ahead and as time goes by theres a corresponding increase in the time horizon. After one year youre thinking one year ahead. After four years youre thinking four years ahead. And as he points out this change in time horizon should factor into the"
X Link 2023-10-17T11:58Z [----] followers, 25.6K engagements
"Watch the full @patrickc interview here:"
X Link 2023-10-17T12:01Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Q: Is it normal to feel like youre failing as a startup founder and want to quit Yes In the words of Elon Musk: Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. He continues: Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but"
X Link 2023-10-18T16:45Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full @elonmusk interview here:"
X Link 2023-10-18T16:46Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-18T22:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"@elonmusk Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-18T22:19Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Great AMA opportunity if you have UX and product design questions"
X Link 2023-10-18T22:37Z 15.7K followers, [---] engagements
"Q: How do you handle negativity and criticism toward your startup or idea When Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston posted his demo video on Hacker News he received an infamous comment telling him why Dropbox wouldnt work: "For a Linux user you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially You still need to carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. It does not seem very viral or income-generating. As he explains in the clip below he got a lot of pushback from investors too: Google is going to do this Online storage is a commodity Drews response to these investors"
X Link 2023-10-19T11:42Z 29.1K followers, 28.3K engagements
"Q: Best advice for raising venture capital In the clip below Parker Conrad (founder of Rippling & Zenefits) Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen share their best advice for raising venture capital which is basically: be so good they cant ignore you. Parker tells the story of pitching almost every VC in Silicon Valley for Zenefits and failing. Then while pitching someone at Khosla Ventures he realized what he was missing: I should really just find a way to be the Twitter guys What he means here is that you need to make it obvious that you can build a business thats going to be a gigantic"
X Link 2023-10-20T12:12Z [----] followers, 16.9K engagements
"Its always a big mistake going after a giant market on day [--]. Thats typically evidence that you havent defined the categories correctly and theres going to be too much competition. Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding. You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where its the only one in a small ecosystem. -- Peter Thiel"
X Link 2023-10-20T19:15Z [----] followers, 54.9K engagements
"Q: Are the best founders generalists or specialists Sam Altman answered this question in a lecture a few years ago: I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through. Maybe youre a specialist in a particular technology that you develop but when you transition from building a product to building a company you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back. Follow @startuparchive_ for more tactical startup advice"
X Link 2023-10-21T13:37Z [----] followers, 24.2K engagements
"Advice from Patrick Collison on hiring as your startup scales:"
X Link 2023-10-21T13:38Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-21T13:40Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive people hard theyre controversial and they care passionately. If you find those people youre probably going to work for one so be nice to them. -- Eric Schmidt"
X Link 2023-10-21T21:15Z [----] followers, 14.7K engagements
"Q: What factors explain the PayPal Mafia The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s such as Tesla SpaceX LinkedIn YouTube Palantir Yelp Yammer and more. In the clip below David Sacksfounding COO and product leader at PayPaltalks through the factors that he believed contributed to the success of the PayPal mafia. The crux of his thesis is that the PayPal Mafia innovated on distribution not just product. They leveraged viral platform and embed strategies to achieve explosive growth at PayPal and then took these strategies to their"
X Link 2023-10-22T14:51Z 46.7K followers, 58.4K engagements
"The Onion Theory of Risk: The way I think about running a startup is the way I think about raising money. It's a process of peeling away layers of risk as you go. Marc Andreessen"
X Link 2023-10-22T19:32Z [----] followers, 28K engagements
"Q: What does good user retention look like As Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz explains: Businesses in different verticals require different terminal retention rates. If youre in e-commerce and youre retaining on a monthly active basis 20-30% of your users youre probably going to do pretty well. If youre in social media and the first batch of people signing up for your product arent 80% retained youre not going to have a massive social media site. To answer this question for yourself you need to use dimensional reasoning to figure out what good retention looks like for your companys"
X Link 2023-10-23T12:06Z [----] followers, 10.5K engagements
"@HarryStebbings Reminds me of what Sam Altman said on this:"
X Link 2023-10-23T13:05Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind. If people care about your success because you seem committed to doing something significant its a background force helping you with hiring advice partnerships fundraising etc. -- Sam Altman"
X Link 2023-10-23T16:58Z [----] followers, 124.4K engagements
"Q: What is the most common mistake founders make The #1 mistake that great founders make is waiting too long to fire bad people. - Sam Altman In the clip below Sam explains that he doesnt believe this is a learnable lesson youre just going to have to make the mistake and learn it. But it is the universal biggest mistake that otherwise great founders make. Firing people is the worst part of running a company. You made a hiring mistake and now you have to really negatively impact someones life because of that. A lot of great founders will think they can fix the situation by devoting more time"
X Link 2023-10-24T11:59Z [----] followers, 13.7K engagements
"Join 3500+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-24T12:08Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"You can watch the full @sama interview here:"
X Link 2023-10-24T15:41Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Paul Graham on how the world's largest companies started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy: "You've got to start with a small intense fire. Suppose you're the Apple [--]. I think they made like [---] of those things right So all they had to do was find [---] people to buy these computers and they launched Apple. Apple. You've got to find people who want what you're making a lot and that's necessarily going to be a small number. But that's ok. That's how these giant things get started. You don't have to do any better than Apple and Facebook. You have to know who"
X Link 2023-10-24T17:58Z [----] followers, 11.5K engagements
"Q: Is a nice office worth it or a waste of money In the clip below Airbnb founder Brian Chesky talks about how Airbnb sought to make its office a competitive advantage: A really cool interesting space can be a huge differentiator for hiring people. Youll also spend more time in your office than you will at your home so its deeply important that people are comfortable and happy. Ive heard similar views expressed by Keith Rabois who said the following in his How To Operate Lecture at Stanford: You must have your own office. I dont believe ever in shared office space. Peter Thiel has said that"
X Link 2023-10-25T10:42Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Q: Other than valuation what else should founders optimize for when fundraising In the words of Elon Musk: "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation." In the clip below he tells the story of how he got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in [----]. He was choosing between two competing bids from Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint. Kleiner offered a $50M pre-money valuation. VantagePoint offered $70M. Musk told Kleiner that if John Doerr joined the board Tesla would do it"
X Link 2023-10-26T12:03Z [----] followers, 31.8K engagements
"How do you make something for a million people I dont know where to start. But if you pick one person study them and take their journey you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Dont stop improving it until that person loves it and youre not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on. -- Brian Chesky"
X Link 2023-10-26T14:45Z [----] followers, 24.5K engagements
"Q: How important is experience when hiring I really like the way Mark Zuckerberg puts it in the clip below: I started Facebook when I was [--] so I cant really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company. At Facebook we invest in people that we think are just really talented even if they havent done that thing before. For Facebook this applies to people who are fresh out of university all the way to Facebooks CFO David Ebersman who took the company public even though he had never taken a company public before. As Mark"
X Link 2023-10-27T11:05Z [----] followers, 25.6K engagements
""I really like this idea of barrels and ammunition. Most companies--when they get into hiring mode--they just hire a lot of people. And you expect that as you add people your throughput and velocity of shipping things is going to increase. It turns out it doesn't work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers you actually don't get more done. You sometimes get less done. If you hire more designers you definitely don't get more done--you get less done per day. The reason why is that most people--most great people even--are actually ammunition. But what you need in your company are"
X Link 2023-10-27T17:18Z [----] followers, 12.6K engagements
"Q: Are monopolies bad Peter Thiel is famous for telling founders to aim for monopoly if they want to build a world-changing company. In the clip below he makes his argument for why monopolies arent always bad: I think they become bad in a static world where a monopoly is just a tax or toll collector I think in a dynamic world youre not creating artificial scarcity. So when Apple invents a smartphone that works thats not restricting supplyits creating new supply where none existed. Current laws seem to reflect this: there are anti-trust laws to stop bad monopolies and copyright/intellectual"
X Link 2023-10-28T11:57Z [----] followers, 10.4K engagements
""If you're pre-product/market fit the best advice I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. Paul Graham had this great line: startups are like sharks--if they stop swimming they die. Even if you're not sure what to do just do anything. Because when you do it it'll produce some information." -- Brian Armstrong"
X Link 2023-10-28T14:38Z [----] followers, 228.3K engagements
"Q: When should a startup founder give up on their idea Stewart Butterfield is the founder of Slack which he famously pivoted to from a failed gaming platform called Glitch. In the clip below he describes how he felt stuck trying to figure out whether or not it was time to give up on Glitch: On the one hand you have the narrative of good entrepreneurs are resilient; when everyone else thinks its a bad idea its probably a really good idea; you have to dig in and prove people wrong; keep going even when times are dark. On the other hand there was a morning when I woke up and was like I cant do"
X Link 2023-10-29T13:22Z 46.5K followers, 15.9K engagements
"Watch the full clip where Sam discusses how to build a great company here:"
X Link 2023-10-29T16:30Z [----] followers, 17.4K engagements
"Q: How do I know if my startup is working on a worthwhile problem Former Google CEO Larry Page uses a simple framework called "The Toothbrush Test" to decide whether he likes a business. He asks himself if the product is like a toothbrush "something you will use once or twice a day." Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel has a similar framework for assessing whether or not a startup is working on a good problem. As he explains in the clip below it's extremely important to analyze the frequency and intensity of the problem you're solving for the customer. He uses a car shopping website as an"
X Link 2023-10-30T11:29Z [----] followers, 83.7K engagements
"Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-10-30T11:47Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. Youre either in one of the [--] or youre not." -- Marc Andreessen"
X Link 2023-10-30T14:14Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Jeff Bezos: What goes into a great company strategy I love this insight from Jeff Bezos You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. Bezos rallied the entire company around the idea that customers will always want low prices fast delivery and vast selection. And then executed relentlessly on being the absolute best in the world in those three areas. There are lots of important things that go into a great company strategy but I love this advice from Bezos because its super counterintuitive: I very frequently get the question: Whats going to change in the next 10"
X Link 2023-10-31T11:26Z [----] followers, 86.3K engagements
"Over the past month I have shared a piece of startup advice every single day. But these [--] accumulated more than [-------] views and thousands of comments & shares. Here they are all in one place:"
X Link 2023-11-01T11:01Z [----] followers, 49.3K engagements
""In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." -- Peter Thiel"
X Link 2023-11-01T18:45Z [----] followers, 11K engagements
"Q: Should startup founders be able to code In the clip below Naval Ravikant gives advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything youre doing theres a team of 2-4 dedicated hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar. He continues: If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then youre like no it wasnt quite right because a lot of"
X Link 2023-11-02T11:09Z [----] followers, 43.2K engagements
""There were about [---] pre-IPO PayPal people and they produced [--] post-PayPal unicorns. If you look at a company like Google which has [-----] employees--literally 100x more--there aren't [--] unicorns created by ex-Googlers. It's a really interesting question: why. I think the scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation. When you work in a big company distribution is guaranteed. Google understands good products versus bad products but the one thing they really don't have to pay tremendous attention to is this problem of: you're an entrepreneur--working in a small team with very"
X Link 2023-11-02T16:06Z 82.9K followers, 86K engagements
"Q: Can two cofounders who just met build a billion-dollar company Most founders and investors will tell you that choosing a random cofounder is a terrible idea. However as Dropbox founder Drew Houston explains in the clip below it is possible for two cofounders who just met to build a billion dollar company: Arash Ferdowsi and I probably knew each other for two or three hours before we threw in together. He explains that when he applied to Y Combinator as a solo founder he received an email from Paul Graham telling him the ideas for Dropbox was interesting but he needed to find a cofounder."
X Link 2023-11-03T10:50Z [----] followers, 12K engagements
"Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-11-03T10:51Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
""Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. Every single person at the company rebelled because it's so unnatural. At every other company people want to do multiple things--especially as you get more senior. you feel like it's insulting to be asked to do just one thing. But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He'd basically say: 'I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I've assigned to you. I don't want to hear about how great you're doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one"
X Link 2023-11-03T17:39Z [----] followers, 279.3K engagements
"Sam Altman on how best startup founders make it through the dark times: No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be because its so embarrassing in retrospect. Even though Open AI is rumored to be worth $80-90 billion today the journey to this point wasnt as smooth as you might think. Sam talks through just how unpromising everything looked in the early days: We were this extremely ragtag group of people. We were mocked by everyone serious in the field. And we didnt have working technical progress. We had some little things that kind of worked but it was deeply"
X Link 2023-11-04T12:35Z [----] followers, 60.3K engagements
"Seth Godin explains the difference between a logo and a brand: If Nike opened a hotel I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like. If Hyatt came out with sneakers wed have no clue what theyd be like. Thats because Hyatt doesnt have a brandthey have a logo. He continues: What it means to have a brand is youve made a promise to people. They have expectations. Its a shorthand. And if that is distinct youve earned something. If its not distinct admit you make a commodity and youre trying to charge just a little bit extra for peace of mind. The problem that Hyatt"
X Link 2023-11-05T15:18Z 10.5K followers, 41.7K engagements
"Reed Hastings on the role of the CEO at a startup As the Netflix founder explains in the clip below: In the first couple of years you do everythingyoure doing dishes at night youre coding youre writing marketing materials youre dealing with customers and investors. And you have so many disadvantages as an irrelevant little nothing of a company that you have to make up for it with talent hard work and brute force. If youre lucky this company stage only lasts for a couple of years as opposed to [--]. But once you get to 50-100 people you have to evolve your management style entirely and adapt to"
X Link 2023-11-06T13:15Z [----] followers, 76.6K engagements
"Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but Im not aware of many. Expect quite a long period of high difficulty. But if you can stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights"
X Link 2023-11-06T16:28Z [----] followers, 41.4K engagements
"Elon Musk on failing as a startup founder:"
X Link 2023-11-06T16:28Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-11-06T18:18Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Paul Buchheit on how too much funding before product/market fit can kill a startup Paul is the creator of gmail and managing partner at Y Combinator. In the clip below he shares: One of the most surprising thing Ive learned just working with so many startups is how often the cause of death is too much money I think there are companies thathad they not been so well fundedcouldve been successful. The company he uses as an example is Juicero a startup that raised $120 million to build a juicing machine that would sell for $400 plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly. Its so easy"
X Link 2023-11-07T13:23Z 50.3K followers, 12.5K engagements
"Watch the full Y Combinator Path to $100B discussion with Paul Buchheit here:"
X Link 2023-11-07T13:24Z 10.7K followers, [---] engagements
"Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:"
X Link 2023-11-07T13:24Z [----] followers, [---] engagements
"Reid Hoffman on why the best founders dont have work-life balance In the clip below the founder of LinkedIn addresses the classic question on work-life balance at startups: I actually think founders have no balance If I ever hear a founder talking about how this is how I have a balanced life and so forth theyre not committed to winning The really great founders are like: I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years But while Im doing this I am unbalanced at this thing. Its not to say that you dont take breaks or you dont go on dates or"
X Link 2023-11-08T13:04Z 22.6K followers, 304.8K engagements
"I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through. Maybe youre a specialist in a particular technology that you develop but when you transition from building a product to building a company you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back. -- Sam Altman Founder & CEO of Open AI"
X Link 2023-11-08T16:13Z [----] followers, 83.3K engagements
"Andrew Chen on how Tinder failed initially despite building the perfect product: In the clip below a16z general partner Andrew Chen explains that the early Tinder product had all of the right features from the start: The first version of it had everything that you would think of as Tinder. They just nailed the product idea from day one and sometimes that happensthe first version of Instagram just nailed it However when they started to invite their friends it still wasnt working because they didnt have the right network. As Andrew explains: Sometimes you have all of the right features you just"
X Link 2023-11-09T13:37Z 46.4K followers, 24K engagements
"The #1 mistake that great founders make is waiting too long to fire bad people. -- Sam Altman"
X Link 2023-11-10T18:47Z 12.3K followers, 38.9K engagements
"Peter Thiel on why sectors and trends are overrated Im always skeptical of sectors and trends. People always ask me what some trends are that I see happening in the future and I have never liked the question because Im not a prophet and I dont think the future is fixed in that sort of way At this point I think all trends are overrated if you hear the words big data and cloud computing you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. Just think fraud and run away. He continues: All these buzzwords are a telllike in pokerthat the company is bluffing and undifferentiated Weve heard the"
X Link 2023-11-11T13:56Z 12.9K followers, 181.6K engagements
"Ben Horowitz on the importance of company culture In the clip below a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz argues that culture drives how people in your company behave on a daily basisand particularly how they behave when youre not looking. Is that phone call so important I need to return it today or can it wait until tomorrow Can I ask for a raise before my annual review Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it Do I have to be on time for that meeting Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn Should I go home at [--] p.m. or [--] p.m. Should we discuss the color"
X Link 2023-11-12T13:37Z 29.1K followers, 44.8K engagements
"Instagram founder Kevin Systroms #1 piece of advice for startup founders As Instagram founder Kevin Systrom explains in the clip below: The #1 piece of advice I always give is to solve a problem. So many people found a company just to found a company or theyre like Ive got an idea. But ideas are not companies. Ideas are not products. He explains that one warning sign youre on the wrong track is that your idea includes some element of a current fad like AI or crypto. Not in the sense that these technology waves arent realbut the core issue is when these ideas are not backed up by a clear"
X Link 2023-11-13T14:00Z 11.8K followers, 41.6K engagements
"Jeff Bezos on what separates Amazon from everyone else: If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different its this: We are genuinely customer-centric we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor rather than the customer. They prefer to be close followers rather than inventors because its safer The number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor"
X Link 2023-11-13T18:30Z 12.1K followers, 90.2K engagements
"How Steve Jobs perfected the pitch for the iPhone Steve Jobs broke a key marketing rule when he introduced the first iPhone in [----]. As iPhone and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell puts it in the clip below: When he comes out on stage he does something that every marketer is told not to do: say these three things are now combined in one. They say that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing. But what gave him the confidence to break this rule was the fact that he was constantly iterating on the story for the iPhone since they started building it: He was working on that story from"
X Link 2023-11-14T14:36Z 12.7K followers, 58.1K engagements
"Retention is the single-most important thing for growth If you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes parallel to the x-axis you have a viable business and you have product/market fit for some subset of market. Alex Schultz CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta"
X Link 2023-11-14T19:34Z 11.7K followers, 10.9K engagements
""When things are working well you use data and qualitative feedback from your users to tell you what problems to go solve. And then you use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be. And then you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback. And that gives you a sense of where to go. Mark Zuckerberg"
X Link 2023-11-15T15:45Z 11.8K followers, 24K engagements
"Ev Williams on what he admires most in founders like Reed Hastings Sergey Brin and Larry Page In the clip below Ev Williams (founder of Twitter Blogger and Medium) is asked who inspires him. When I think about a commonality of companies and leaders I admire it is those whowhether they have a bunch of resources or notcome from a position of confidence and an abundance mindset. When he got to Google the thing that most struck him was how big they thought. They would ask things like: why not index the whole Internet or why wouldnt we map the whole earth or why wouldnt we scan all of the books It"
X Link 2023-11-16T11:43Z 11.9K followers, 17.7K engagements
"Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer Yahoo started out as a web directory for Stanford Google didnt start out as a search engine. It was all about PageRank and improving search for search engineskind of a middleware offering in many ways. YouTube was for sharing videos from parties. Apple was going after the hobby computer market. When you think about these three companies you could have made all sorts of arguments about market size not being large enoughfeature rather than a product. But in all cases theres a great deal of"
X Link 2023-11-17T12:45Z 13.4K followers, 90.5K engagements
"Sam Altman on the leading causes of conflict in a founding team The two times you get conflict in a startup is when people want different things for the company or they want the same things for themselves when they both want to be CEO and have their face on the magazine cover that conflict is actually the worst one. That gets really nasty. He continues: What you really want are complimentary teams where the people have the same vision for the kind of company that they want to build and they bring very different skills to the table. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is the example he uses to"
X Link 2023-11-19T15:33Z 15.3K followers, 143.7K engagements
"Watch Sam's full Blitzscaling lecture on Y Combinator and what makes the best founders here:"
X Link 2023-11-19T15:34Z 15.2K followers, [----] engagements
"Join 4000+ founders receiving tactical startup advice via the free newsletter here:"
X Link 2023-11-19T15:34Z 13.7K followers, [----] engagements
"Reid Hoffman explains Paypal Mafias unique hiring strategy The thing that was unique about the PayPal crew is typically when people start companies theyll go: I need to get people with a lot of experience at doing just this jobyou have a lot of experience coding running a data center marketing selling etc. But PayPal opted for very high-talent young people with the expectation that the high-talent young people would learn the jobs. He continues: So as opposed to hiring someone who has had a ton of experience doing an exact job we said: were going to hire someone we think is a very fast"
X Link 2023-11-21T13:32Z 15.5K followers, 84.7K engagements
"Sam Altman on the number one trait of successful founders Its not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlates exactly with startup success. But its not a bad first approximation. Being quick being decisive and getting things done quicklyif you look at our datathat correlates with almost all of our successful founders The trick to being a great founderat least in the early stagesis your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything youve seen before and solve it quickly. @sama"
X Link 2023-11-21T17:59Z 15.4K followers, 22.1K engagements
"David Sacks explains why many founders get distribution wrong The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping. Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. If you're going to have a breakout startup you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution not just product. Whats tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: Successful distribution"
X Link 2023-11-22T13:01Z 29K followers, 72.7K engagements
"Sam Altman also shared his take on generalists vs. specialists here:"
X Link 2023-11-23T03:12Z 12.8K followers, [---] engagements
"Sam Altman on how to build a great company:"
X Link 2023-11-23T03:12Z 12.8K followers, [---] engagements
"Sam Altman on how to make it through the "dark times":"
X Link 2023-11-23T03:15Z 13.8K followers, [----] engagements
"Bret Taylor (OpenAI Chairman) on founder psychology and the importance of having great cofounders @btaylor is now the chairman of OpenAI. Before that he co-created Google Maps co-founded FriendFeed (sold to Facebook for $50M) was the CTO of Facebook co-founded Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M) and was the co-CEO of Salesforce. His resume looks like one home run after another. But in the clip below he reflects on some of his failures: The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is managing your own psychology I take failure very personally when its my company. Its so hard not to become"
X Link 2023-11-25T13:35Z 52.9K followers, 48.7K engagements
"I started Facebook when I was [--] so I cant really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company. At Facebook we invest in people that we think are just really talented even if they havent done that thing before. Mark Zuckerberg"
X Link 2023-11-25T17:53Z 15.3K followers, 23.8K engagements
"Elon Musk on why startups shouldnt optimize solely for valuation If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation. It's better to have a higher quality venture capitalist who you think would be great to work with then get a higher valuation with someone where there's even a question mark. Elon Musk"
X Link 2023-11-26T16:13Z 15.4K followers, 12.3K engagements
"Sam Altman explains why founders should start hard companies Easy companies are boring. Its hard to get the 10th or 20th employee to join. It's very hard to differentiate. There are hundreds of shots on goal for every good idea. And people don't care that much. Altman explains that people want to help founders on a mission. If you are starting a nuclear fusion company even if the odds are against you people really want to help you. You have this tailwind. People want to join you in the quest. And thats a super valuable thing - especially in a time when there's so much clutter and so much"
X Link 2023-11-27T12:33Z 19.3K followers, 180.2K engagements
"An easy startup is a headwind a hard startup is a tailwind"
X Link 2023-11-27T12:38Z 19.2K followers, [----] engagements
"Join 4000+ founders and investors receiving tactical startup advice via the free newsletter here:"
X Link 2023-11-27T13:13Z 15.5K followers, [----] engagements
"Reddit Cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman on the advantages of launching your product early I wrote my first line of code on June 4th [----] for Reddit. We launched on June 22nd. I didn't even launch it. Paul Graham linked to us from his blog without telling me we didn't actually have a vision for Reddit at the time but as soon as we launched that's when we started to find a path. Wed follow users every day - what do we think is best for the users what do we think is best for us - and just build towards that. We built a lot of loyalty through those actions. That wouldnt have happened if we were"
X Link 2023-11-27T15:10Z 17K followers, 72.7K engagements
"10 Book Recommendations by Mark Zuckerberg: [--]. Dealing With China "I've been personally interested as a student of Chinese culture history and language. I'm looking forward to reading Paulson's perspective on what China's rise means for the world." [--]. Orwells Revenge "An alternate version of [----]. After seeing how history has actually played out Huber's fiction describes how tools like the internet benefit people and change society for the better." [--]. The Varieties of Religious Experience "When I read 'Sapiens': I found the chapter on the evolution of the role of religion in human life most"
X Link 2023-11-27T17:34Z 29K followers, 25.2K engagements
"Michael Seibel explains why metrics are so important and how to set them up correctly In this clip former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel explains why metrics are so important to set up early and properly. Setting up metrics very early on in your company is super important because its how you know whether your product is being used or not and its one of the top sources of new product ideas and inspiration. Google Analytics is great for knowing how many people visited your website and how many pages they viewed but its not great for identifying peoples actions when they use your product (e.g."
X Link 2023-11-28T12:33Z 22.7K followers, 40.2K engagements
"Steve Jobs was incredible at marketing Apple products:"
X Link 2023-12-01T11:24Z 17.6K followers, [----] engagements
""If you're a startup you shouldn't have a growth team. The whole company should be the growth team and the CEO should be the head of growth." -- Mark Zuckerberg"
X Link 2023-12-01T11:25Z 16.4K followers, [----] engagements
"Make sure youve subscribed to the newsletter if you havent yet: I don't actually read most newsletters I sub to (who does) .except for @StartupArchive_ (built on @perchpages) been following them for a few months and they consistently nail content/length/style/tone tons of value @mikemcg0 + team well done 🫡 https://t.co/A7Mg8zttaw I don't actually read most newsletters I sub to (who does) .except for @StartupArchive_ (built on @perchpages) been following them for a few months and they consistently nail content/length/style/tone tons of value @mikemcg0 + team well done 🫡"
X Link 2023-12-01T16:39Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements
"Elon Musk on the importance of actively seeking negative feedback Its very important to actively seek out and listen to negative feedback.This is something people tend to avoid because its painful but I think this is a very common mistake I tell friends: Dont tell me what you like. Tell me what you dont like. Because otherwise your friend will not tell you what they dont like. You really need to coax out negative feedback. Elon Musk"
X Link 2023-12-01T16:44Z 18.5K followers, 111.3K engagements
"What's one piece of advice you would give to new startup founders"
X Link 2023-12-01T16:46Z 52.9K followers, [----] engagements
"Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it but dont actually commit to turning it into a company until its working. If you look at the data of the very best companies I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked"
X Link 2023-12-03T13:11Z 19.4K followers, 126.1K engagements
"Paul Graham's advice for coming up with startup ideas If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-soundingmeaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and youll waste a lot of time before realizing theyre no good. He continues: The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. Yahoo Google Facebook and Apple all got started this way. None of"
X Link 2023-12-05T12:16Z 29.1K followers, 162.7K engagements
"Watch Pauls full Before the Startup lecture for Y Combinator here: And for a deeper dive on this topic Id recommend his essay How to Get Startup Ideas:"
X Link 2023-12-05T12:18Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements
"Ron Conway on the biggest fundraising mistake founders make The biggest fundraising mistake that I see by far is not getting things in writing When somebody makes a commitment to you you type an email that confirms what they just said to you. Because a lot of investors have very short memories and they forget that they committed to you that they were going to finance or they forget what the valuation was You can get rid of all that controversy just by putting it in writing. Ron Conway founder of SV Angel"
X Link 2023-12-05T15:58Z 18.6K followers, 43.4K engagements
"Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas As the former CEO of Y Combinator puts it in the clip below: Theres a common misconception that your idea has to be great to start a company and the first thing I want to do is destroy that misconception. Michael was one of the cofounders of JustinTV which later become Twitch and sold to Amazon for almost $1B. Their original idea was to create an online reality TV showvery different from where Twitch eventually ended up. Rather than falling for the trap of thinking that your initial startup idea has to be great Michael advises founders to"
X Link 2023-12-07T12:28Z [--] followers, 100K engagements
"Watch Michaels full Y Combinator talk How to Get and Test Startup Ideas here:"
X Link 2023-12-07T12:29Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"The best way to find great talent is to look at the products you admire and figure out who built them. Thats how we hired some of our earliest designers at Facebook. Julie Zhuo former Director of Product Design at Facebook"
X Link 2023-12-07T15:30Z 46.7K followers, 12.5K engagements
"Larry Pages response to Steve Jobss critique that Google lacks focus I mean he was right. He did fine as well but I worry about that. In the clip below Page explains that he chose this path for Google because he wanted to build a company for engineers and entrepreneurs. Youre looking at the business benefit you might get from trying all of these different ideas. But I also think in terms of motivating ourselves potential employees and entrepreneurs. We want to be doing things that are exciting and that are really going to make a difference. One of the things that inspired Page to create the"
X Link 2023-12-08T12:39Z 21.4K followers, 76.1K engagements
"Peter Thiels four characteristics of monopoly The next Mark Zuckerberg wont build a social network. The next Larry Page wont build a search engine. The next Bill Gates wont build an operating system. And if youre copying these people youre not learning from them. Each of these founders built something unique that had not been built before. And In the clip below Thiel cites the opening line in Anna Karenina: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He believes the opposite to be true in business: All happy companies are different because theyre doing"
X Link 2023-12-09T13:12Z 22.6K followers, 173.4K engagements
"Zillow cofounder Spencer Rascoff on why B2C startups shouldnt buy ads Very deliberatelyand this is the advice I would give to any founderwe did no advertising. The philosophy for the first three years of the company was: any money that we might spend on SEM Google Facebook whatever Lets invest that in product and try to build something viral The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides. When I do angel investing for example I will never invest in anything B2C with paid marketing"
X Link 2023-12-10T17:21Z 20.4K followers, 65.6K engagements
"The virality model Sean Parker taught the early Facebook team Alex Schultz is CMO and VP of Analytics at Facebook. When he joined Facebook Sean Parker explained that you want to think about virality in terms of three things: [--]. Payload. How many people can you hit with any given viral blast [--]. Conversion Rate. What percentage of them will convert to becoming users of your product [--]. Frequency. How many times can you hit them per blast The higher these three factors the more viral a product will be. Hotmail is the canonical example of brilliant viral marketing. When they launched their"
X Link 2023-12-11T12:28Z [----] followers, 53.2K engagements
"Watch the full Growth lecture by Alex as part of Y Combinators How to Start a Startup course here:"
X Link 2023-12-11T12:29Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Sam Altman on the qualities of the best founders The trick to being a great founder is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything youve seen before and solve it very quickly. When Sam was CEO of Y Combinator they were looking at 20000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order Sam believes the following qualities matter most: [--]. Clarity of vision. Can the founder explain what they do and why If the founder cant explain it clearly to us then (a) theyre not going to be able to recruit hire sell"
X Link 2023-12-12T12:50Z 29.2K followers, 161.6K engagements
"For more timeless startup advice from the best founders and investors join our free newsletter:"
X Link 2023-12-12T12:52Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full Sam Altman on Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders lecture as part of Greylocks Blitzscaling course at Stanford here:"
X Link 2023-12-12T12:53Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear on resolving product roadmap disagreements "If you havent talked to users and you havent looked at data you dont get to have an opinion about the product. The person who has actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas but they get to make the call.""
X Link 2023-12-12T15:25Z 22.6K followers, 61.6K engagements
"Jeff Bezos Eric Schmidt Larry Page and Paul Graham on why companies shouldnt focus on competitors If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different its this: We are genuinely customer-centric we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor rather than the customer. They prefer to be close followers rather than inventors because its safer. Bezos adds to this quote in the clip below: The number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as"
X Link 2023-12-13T13:23Z [--] followers, 153.4K engagements
"For more timeless startup advice from the best founders and investors join our free newsletter:"
X Link 2023-12-13T15:11Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full Recode interview with Evan Spiegel at Code [----] here:"
X Link 2023-12-13T15:11Z 22.6K followers, [----] engagements
"Flexport founder Ryan Peterson on getting ramen profitable Ryan Peterson is the founder and CEO of Flexport which was valued at more than $8 billion last year. In the clip below he talks about how he adopted Paul Grahams be a cockroach philosophy and aimed for ramen profitability with the company he started before Flexport (Import Genius) which didnt raise venture capital. He adjusted his lifestyle to minimize his living expenses. And then to cover those expenses he picked up part-time jobs that still allowed him to spend most of his time working on his startup. He wrote case studies for"
X Link 2023-12-14T13:47Z [--] followers, 121.4K engagements
"Stripe cofounder John Collison on why internal transparency is valuable for scaling a startup All of the things people talk about like hiring really great people or giving them a huge amount of leveragetransparency for us plays into that. We think that if you are aligned at a high level about what Stripe is doingif everybody really believes in the missionand if everyone has really good access to information and a good picture of the current state of Stripe then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in terms of working productively together. And it forgives a lot of the other things"
X Link 2023-12-14T15:46Z 29.1K followers, 27.8K engagements
"Watch Y Combinators full Hiring and Culture with Patrick and John Collison and Ben Silbermann lecture here:"
X Link 2023-12-14T15:47Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Dropbox founder Drew Houston explains why good products with great distribution will beat great products with bad distribution LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains in the"
X Link 2023-12-18T12:57Z 45.7K followers, 254.7K engagements
"OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor explains why platform shifts are a fruitful source of startup ideas Bret Taylor is now the chairman of OpenAI. Before that he co-created Google Maps co-founded FriendFeed (sold to Facebook for $50M) was the CTO of Facebook co-founded Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M) and was the co-CEO of Salesforce. In the clip below he explains that when deciding what to work on next he will often ask himself when this platform exists what habits will change He believes that platform shifts are large drivers of economic value. For example the PC led to the creation of Microsoft"
X Link 2023-12-19T12:51Z 22.6K followers, 32.7K engagements
"The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have [---] customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you. In the clip below Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky explains: If you have [---] people who absolutely love your product theyll tell [---] people and theyll tell [---] people and this thing will grow virally. In fact almost all movements in history have grown this waythere are deeply passionate followers and they grow it. He contrasts this with the general wisdom in Silicon Valley of: I need to build this app. It"
X Link 2023-12-20T12:16Z 22.6K followers, 170K engagements
"Peter Thiel: disruption is one of the most horrible overused buzzwords I dont think that your goal in starting a company should be to disrupt or destroy a big company. Your goal is to create a successful company. He continues: And this is why I really dislike disruption as a buzzword. It is one of the most horrible overused buzzwords. A disruptive person is someone who looks for trouble and finds it Napster was a very disruptive company that set out to destroy the music industry and a year later it was shut down by the government It's not constructive. I think one really shouldnt take ones"
X Link 2023-12-21T12:31Z 29.1K followers, 36.3K engagements
"Michael Seibel on how to create a great startup pitch In the clip below former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel breaks down the two types of pitches every startup founder needs: a 30-second elevator pitch and a two-minute pitch for investors. A lot of people practice 10-minute 30-minute hour-long pitches. I think thats all garbage. I think you can get all of your points across in two minutes. And one thing I like to tell founders is that the more you talk the more you have an opportunity to say something that people dont like. 30-Second Elevator Pitch: You should be able to explain to anyone"
X Link 2023-12-22T12:24Z 46.8K followers, 74.9K engagements
"Watch the full @ycombinator lecture here:"
X Link 2023-12-22T12:25Z [--] followers, [----] engagements
"Brian Armstrong's best advice for a pre-product/market fit startup If youre pre-product/market fit the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. He borrows this from Paul Graham who said: Startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming they die. Even if youre not sure what to do just do anything. Because when you do it itll produce some informationpeople liked it they didnt etc. Brian shares that there were many times in the early days of Coinbase when he just shipped something rather than debate it endlessly: And there were a couple of"
X Link 2023-12-24T12:51Z 29.1K followers, 115.5K engagements
"How Alexis Ohanian Steve Huffman and Paul Graham came up with the idea for Reddit in a one-hour brainstorm Co-founders Alexis and Steve first started a company in [----] while undergrads at the University of Virginia. The original product was called My Mobile Menu (MMM) and their goal was to let people order food from their phones. During spring break the two college seniors decided to drive from Virginia to Boston to attend a talk Paul Graham was giving. Surprised that two college students drove all the way from Virginia to attend his talk Paul let them buy him a drink and pitch their startup"
X Link 2023-12-25T13:25Z [--] followers, 59.5K engagements
"Ben Horowitzs framework for tough management decisions In the clip below a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz walks through the following real-world scenario he consulted a founder on: "Your executive has been working extremely hard and is well liked and a great part of the culture. However he is not world-class running his function and you need someone who is." Do you fire or demote him On one hand it's tough to fire someone who has put in a big effort and a demotion can sometimes look like a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario: there's no culture backlash you save the executive the"
X Link 2023-12-26T13:41Z 29K followers, 63.5K engagements
"Paul Graham: the secret to growing really fast is starting with a small intense fire Youve got to find people who want what youre making A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok. Thats how these giant things get started You dont have to do any better than Apple and Facebook. Apple started by selling just [---] Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on"
X Link 2023-12-30T12:50Z 29.1K followers, 70K engagements
"Watch the full @twistartups discussion between @Jason and @paulg here:"
X Link 2023-12-30T12:51Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
""If you think about the greatest products they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them." -- Eric Schmidt former CEO of Google"
X Link 2023-12-31T13:33Z [--] followers, 43.2K engagements
"Google Cofounder Larry Page: I recommend reading things When asked in the clip below how he learned to run Google Larry responds: I read a lot of books. He jokes: When renaming Alphabet I read like three books on namingwhich is more than anyone else had read. So I decided I was the expert and actually that was useful. I recommend reading things. I think this is a really important mindset that is often overlooked. One of the richest ways to learn something is reading things written by people who deeply understand their subject matter. Even Elon Musk was able to teach himself about the"
X Link 2024-01-03T12:15Z [--] followers, 66.5K engagements
"Jeff Bezos: Missionaries build better products In the clip below Jeff tells Charlie Rose that Amazons mission is to be Earths most customer-centric company. When asked what that means Jeff shares the example: Right after World War II Akio Moritathe guy who founded Sonyset as the mission for Sony that they were going to make Japan known for quality. You have to remember this was a time when Japan was known for cheap copycat products. And Morita didnt say were going to make Sony known for quality. He said were going to make Japan known for quality. He chose a mission for Sony that was bigger"
X Link 2024-01-04T13:48Z [--] followers, 115.2K engagements
"Full list here:"
X Link 2024-01-07T15:56Z 12.1K followers, [----] engagements
"And to save you hours of reading we've attempted to weave the key ideas of all [--] of these resources into a single essay here:"
X Link 2024-01-07T16:07Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements
"Quora founder Adam DAngelo explains cohort retention and other startup metrics you should track In the clip below the Quora founder and former CTO of Facebook argues: As a startup you really need to focus. So the core concept that I would try to focus on is users that are getting value from your product today. This can be measured in several ways depending on your product and business model (e.g. active users revenue transaction volume etc.). You can go a long way just by measuring this. But if youre not measuring anything youre susceptible to cognitive biases and all kinds of problemsyoure"
X Link 2024-01-08T13:05Z 77.8K followers, 54.6K engagements
"Keith Raboiss formula for startup success In the clip below Founders Fund GP @rabois explains the viral tweet thats pinned to his profile which reads: Formula for startup success: Find large highly fragmented industry w low NPS; vertically integrate a solution to simplify value product. He argues that fragmented and low-NPS industries have created massive opportunities for many of the worlds most successful companies: If you have a fragmented industry theres usually structural reasons why and a bad NPS means customers are not delighted. He uses ride sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft as"
X Link 2024-01-08T15:36Z 50.1K followers, 37.6K engagements
"Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel: Dont be fake Steve Jobs A lot of people think Steve jobs is this person to emulate but they have a false picture in their heads of what Steve Jobs was. They think that he dreamed perfect ideas out of his head and into the world. People look at the iPhone as an example of this. But they look at their iPhone today: Your iPhone today is f'ing magical. The first iPhone sucked in almost every way. The first iPhone had no 3Geven though 3G was a standard feature at the time. There was only one carrier so if you didnt have AT&T you had to switch carriers. The"
X Link 2024-01-09T12:56Z 44.6K followers, 37.8K engagements
"The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company It can take a really really long time to build things that are worthwhile. He describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning when he was building Pinterest: In March [----] we launched Pinterest and were at [----] accounts. And that wouldnt have been so bad if we hadnt started building Pinterest in November [----]. And that wouldnt have been so bad if I hadnt left my job to start a company in May [----]. A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon but Ben disagrees: The part of the analogy"
X Link 2024-01-09T16:09Z 29K followers, 29K engagements
"Marc Andreessen explains what VCs look for in the companies they fund Marc Andreessen founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: The conventional statistics are that about [---] of the [----] venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About [--] of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue and those [--] will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. He continues: Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine"
X Link 2024-01-10T12:25Z 46.4K followers, 35.9K engagements
"Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on how to build strong cofounder relationships We Airbnb cofounders had a rule. The rule was that winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. And the reason that's important is because if you start a company you're going to have to debate a hundred thousand things. so no one argument can be the thing. There has to be this larger sense that we're a band. Brian likens strong relationships to exercise. I think you gotta really work hard at the relationship almost like exercising. If you don't keep exercising you get out of shape. We"
X Link 2024-01-10T16:11Z 29K followers, 96.2K engagements
"Elon Musks warning to startup founders: "it can be very painful for several years Elon Musk is famous for saying Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. In the clip below he elaborates on this further: What tends to happen is that its quite exciting for the first several months. Then reality sets in: things dont go as planned; customers arent signing up; the technology or product isnt working as well as you thought It can be very painful for several years. He continues: Occasionally there are companies where theres not an extended period of extreme pain but"
X Link 2024-01-11T12:04Z 29K followers, 103.1K engagements
"Watch the full interview with Elon Musk at the StartmeupHK Venture Forum here:"
X Link 2024-01-11T12:13Z 30.6K followers, [----] engagements
"LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Itll take somewhere between three and five companies to be successful Reid Hoffmans first startup SocialNet failed before he went on to help build PayPal and found LinkedIn. In the clip below he explains what he told his dad before starting SocialNet: Itll take somewhere between three and five companies to be successful. If you look at the statistics of it the huge majority of these companies fail. Going into it you may say I bat better than average but even if you do you cannot bat [---] or [----]. He continues: I think this framing is really critical to do because"
X Link 2024-01-11T16:01Z [--] followers, 23.5K engagements
"Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz: Retention is the single-most important thing for growth In the clip below Alex walks through how to calculate a retention curve for your startup. Basically you want to graph the percentage of monthly active users (y-axis) versus the number of days from acquisition (x-axis). And as he explains: If you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes to a line parallel to the x-axis you have a viable business and you have product/market fit for some subset of market. If you do not have a retention curve that flattens out you do not have product/market fit and"
X Link 2024-01-12T12:03Z 12.1K followers, 28.9K engagements
"Netflix founder Reed Hasting on the importance of talent density and using a keeper test After the dot-com bubble burst and Netflix had to lay off a third of its employees Reed expected everything to grind to a halt. However the opposite happened and the company actually got more done with fewer people: Without the bottom third of the company there was no dummy-proofing necessary. Everyone was going fast and everything was right. We realized that with the right density of talent there is very little process needed. Individual motivation inspiration and excitement also increasedits"
X Link 2024-01-13T12:34Z 29K followers, 67.2K engagements
"Mark Zuckerberg shares the best advice Peter Thiel ever gave him "In a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Whenever you're in a position where you have to make a big shift in the direction of the company or product people will always point to the downside risks of that decision. Mark explains: "they may be right locally. but in aggregate if you are stagnant and don't make those changes I think you're guaranteed to fail." Video Source: @ycombinator"
X Link 2024-01-13T16:26Z 29.3K followers, 52.2K engagements
"Mark's advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact: Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something https://t.co/kFDIVchHnJ Mark Zuckerbergs advice to [--] year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was [--] when he started Facebook he advises not turning your idea into a company until its working: I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs"
X Link 2024-01-13T16:27Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman here:"
X Link 2024-01-13T16:27Z 29K followers, [----] engagements
"@kscottburgess A lot of people try going after millions users at the outset. Brian Chesky explains here that Airbnb initially fell for this trap before hearing this advice from Paul Graham The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have [---] customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you. In the clip below Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky explains: If you have [---] people https://t.co/BgtvP4ZMEi The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit He basically said: Its better to have 100"
X Link 2024-01-14T12:59Z 30.7K followers, [---] engagements
"Steve Jobs: Theres a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product Steve recounts: One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that diseaseIve seen other people get it toois the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. But thats never the case. As Steve explains a product idea never turns out as originally conceived because you learn a lot from the details of building it and there are always tradeoffs you have to make. Theres a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great"
X Link 2024-01-15T12:24Z [--] followers, 111.2K engagements
"Marissa Mayer on scaling Google and the internal black market CEO Eric Schmidt created for new hires One of the things that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about a lot was that at every order of magnitude you should expect every process to breakand you should expect to have to completely reinvent it. Its very different to deal with tens of people versus hundreds of people versus thousands of people Marissa shares a story of how one time Eric reinvented Googles hiring process in a way that initially frustrated everyone: We had closed the year at about [---] people and we had a plan to"
X Link 2024-01-16T12:21Z [--] followers, 161K engagements
"Marc Andreessen: Every successful innovator eventually starts to like the taste of their own blood Once something works the stories get retconned and adapted to say it was inevitable all along everybody always knew this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards and society embraces them. But invariably if you were with them when they were actually doing the workor you get a couple of drinks into them and talk about it theyll be like: no thats not how it happened at all. Marc continues: They faced a wall of skepticismbasically a wall of social denial: no this is not going to work no"
X Link 2024-01-17T12:50Z [--] followers, 216.2K engagements
"Jeff Bezos explains the difference between one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions In the simplest terms a two-way door decision is one thats easy to reverse and a one-way door decision is one thats impossible or very costly to reverse. As Jeff explains: One-way door decisions have to be made very deliberately and very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision you should slow down and do that. He uses choosing which propellants to use in a rocket engine at Blue Origin as an example of a one-way door decision. However most decisions are not consequential"
X Link 2024-01-19T12:01Z 29.1K followers, 57.9K engagements
"Watch the full interview with @JeffBezos on the @lexfridman podcast here:"
X Link 2024-01-19T12:06Z 29.1K followers, [----] engagements
"What Twitter founder Jack Dorsey learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years they were Super Bowl Champions. In his book The Score Takes Care of Itself he writes: Winners act like winners before theyre winnersThe culture precedes positive results. It doesnt get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before theyre champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners. And he provides six guidelines for establishing a"
X Link 2024-01-21T13:03Z 30.7K followers, 198K engagements
"Watch Jack's full [----] talk at Y Combinator's Startup School here:"
X Link 2024-01-21T13:05Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"People think culture is like architecture when its a lot more like gardening: you plant some seeds and pull out weeds that arent working. -- Ben Silbermann founder of Pinterest Source: @ycombinator"
X Link 2024-01-21T16:49Z 30.7K followers, 19.1K engagements
"Watch the full Y Combinator lecture on Hiring and Culture with Ben Silbermann and Patrick and John Collison here:"
X Link 2024-01-21T16:49Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on why you should hire the divas: Steve Jobs was a diva If you read any management textbook it says dont hire the divas because theyre nothing but a pain in the ass. And by the way they are. But the people who are the divaswho believeare the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence. Steve Jobs was a diva. I worked with Bill Joy who was my colleague for many yearshes an example of a diva. And I mean this in the most flattering way: they expect a lot they drive people hard theyre controversial and they care passionately. If you find those people"
X Link 2024-01-22T12:04Z [----] followers, 94.8K engagements
""If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation. Elon Musk Source: @PandoDaily"
X Link 2024-01-22T16:02Z 29K followers, 15K engagements
"Watch the full fireside chat with Elon Musk here:"
X Link 2024-01-22T16:04Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements
"Read the full Startup Archive post on how Elon got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in [----] here:"
X Link 2024-01-22T16:04Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements
"Legendary coach Bill Campbell on trying to convince Steve Jobs to do market research at Apple Bill Campbell was a mentor to some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley including Steve Jobs Larry Page Sergey Brin Eric Schmidt Jeff Bezos Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg. In the clip below he responds to an audience member who asks which approach to product he favors: the visionary Steve Jobs approach or the Lean Startup Methodology. He responds: I came from a real research organization like Kodak when I came to Apple in [----]. And I was always trying to push Steve Jobs into market research and"
X Link 2024-01-23T12:33Z 29.1K followers, 31.1K engagements
"Watch the full interview with Bill Campbell and former Intuit CEO Brad Smith here:"
X Link 2024-01-23T12:35Z [----] followers, [----] engagements
"Steve Jobs: The doers are the major thinkers Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it Of course not. Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist and knew about pigments and human anatomy. Combining all of those skills togetherthe art and the science the thinking and the doingis what resulted in the exceptional result There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and"
X Link 2024-01-23T15:03Z 29.3K followers, 59.5K engagements
"Jeff Bezos: Every startup is unlikely to work But that doesnt mean you cant be optimistic When Jeff started Amazon he told his investors that he thought there was a 30% chance theyd get their money back: Because thats the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. Its helpful to be in reality about that. But that doesnt mean you cant be optimistic. You kind of have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. And on the other hand you have to ignore all that and just be 100% sure its going to work. He continues:"
X Link 2024-01-26T12:17Z 29.1K followers, 28.7K engagements
"LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Founders have no balance. I actually think founders have no balance If I ever hear a founder talking about how this is how I have a balanced life and so forth theyre not committed to winning The really great founders are like: I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years But while Im doing this I am unbalanced at this thing. Its not to say that you dont take breaks or you dont go on dates or whatever else. But youre super focused on this because its really hard and theres lots of ways to die. Source:"
X Link 2024-01-26T15:46Z 44.5K followers, 79.8K engagements
"Dropbox founder Drew Houstons response to investors who told him online storage was a commodity Frankly I agreed with them. I was like yeah Google can probably do this. Yeah we dont really have a lot of structural advantages. Yeah were not really sure how were going to make money Thats all true but you have to realize thats not causal. Just because other folks have done something in a way that you dont think is good doesnt mean its inherently a bad idea I would ask investors: yes there are [--] of these things out there but do you use any of them And they would say no. And Id say isnt that"
X Link 2024-01-27T15:31Z 29.4K followers, 100.6K engagements
"Jack Dorsey: When we started Square we thought we were just building a piece of hardware In his blog post Product First @DavidSacks explains that the founding of Squaredescribed by @jack in the clip belowresembled his own experience at PayPal. Most people think startups begin with brilliant insight and the founders have it all figured out from the beginning. But startups are messier than that. As David explains in the blog post: Founders usually start with a product idea. They know users will like it but may be a bit hazy on the exact market buyer or business model. Those details get filled"
X Link 2024-01-28T12:40Z 30.5K followers, 56.2K engagements
"If youre pre-product/market fit the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff. -- Brian Armstrong Cofounder & CEO of Coinbase Source: @lexfridman"
X Link 2024-01-28T15:28Z 50.4K followers, 65K engagements
"Sequoia partner Michael Moritz explains why Bill Gates had the radio removed from his car dashboard When asked what founder obsession looks like Sequoia partner Michael Moritz gives two examples. The first is Apoorva Mehta founder & CEO of Instacart which is valued at more than $7 billion today. Before investing in Instacart Michael asked Apoorva how he got into the business of grocery delivery. Apoorva responded that after toying with a variety of other businesses he decided Instacart was the one for him when the idea of the business was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep"
X Link 2024-01-29T12:25Z 49.9K followers, 181.2K engagements
"Read the full archive of timeless startup advice from the world's best founders and investors here:"
X Link 2024-01-29T12:30Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements
"Watch the full discussion with Michael Moritz at Stanford GSB here:"
X Link 2024-01-29T12:58Z 29.4K followers, [----] engagements
"Stripe founder & CEO Patrick Collison: Joining a startup is a great way to benchmark yourself "Whether or not you're the best or worst person in the world you're probably not going to significantly alter Google's trajectory. Whereas if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is quite compelling to a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to go test that. Source: @ycombinator"
X Link 2024-01-29T15:45Z 30.8K followers, 46.3K engagements
"Watch the full Y Combinator lecture on Hiring and Culture with Ben Silbermann and Patrick and John Collison here:"
X Link 2024-01-29T15:45Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"Peter Thiel: Vertical integration is an under-explored modality of technological progress In my mind there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last [---] years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so. The first is vertically-integrated complex monopolies which people started building at the end of the second industrial revolutionlike Standard Oil and Ford at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. As Peter points out this is done surprisingly little today: Its typically fairly capital intensive and we live in"
X Link 2024-01-30T12:30Z 30.8K followers, 63.2K engagements
"Watch the full Competition is for Losers lecture from Peter Thiel for Y Combinators How to Start a Startup course here:"
X Link 2024-01-30T12:31Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"The two times you get conflict in a startup is when people want different things for the company and when they want the same things for themselves." -- Sam Altman Source: @GreylockVC"
X Link 2024-01-30T15:22Z 30.7K followers, 13.6K engagements
"Watch the full Graylock Blitzscaling lecture with Sam Altman on "Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders" here:"
X Link 2024-01-30T15:22Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"Scott Belsky: You should only do half of what you want to do in product development When building Behance (acquired by Adobe for $150M) Scott learned the lesson do only half of what you want to do the hard way. The initial Behance product had tons of features: If I were to be honest I was probably just trying to hedge ourselves. I didnt know what thing would take off so we launched V1 with so many things. And Scott explains that as they killed each of these features the key KPIs improved: The key KPIs were served when we reduced the scope of the product. And since then Ive been very insistent"
X Link 2024-01-31T12:02Z 29.5K followers, 21.5K engagements
"Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman: "We didn't actually have a vision for Reddit As soon as we launched thats when we started to find a path and we just followed the users every day and just built towards that. We built a lot of loyalty through those actions. And that would not have happened if we were sitting in our apartment not launching. Source: @StanfordOnline"
X Link 2024-01-31T15:45Z 29.3K followers, 27.3K engagements
"Gmail creator Paul Buchheit: As a startup focus is your most powerful weapon As a startup focus is your most powerful weapon. The reason youre able to take on these big companies is because theyre doing [----] different things. The only way you can win is if you take everything you have and focus it at one point. Source: @ycombinator"
X Link 2024-02-02T15:51Z 30.7K followers, 18.7K engagements
"Watch the full Y Combinator Path to $100B discussion with Paul here:"
X Link 2024-02-02T15:51Z 30.7K followers, [----] engagements
"Sam Altman on the number one trait of successful founders Its not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but its not a bad first approximation. Being quick decisive and getting things done quicklyif you look at our data that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait. Source: @GreylockVC"
X Link 2024-02-04T15:47Z 31.3K followers, 38.4K engagements
"Watch Sams full blitzcaling lecture on Y Combinator and what makes the best founders here:"
X Link 2024-02-04T15:48Z 31.3K followers, [----] engagements
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