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Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.
Here's a good rule of thumb: don't worry about a competitor at all, until they're actually beating you with a real shipped product.
Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.
Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.
What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.
You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.
There's at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.
If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.
... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.
Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.
If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.
Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.
Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?
I care much more about the growth rate of the market than it's current size and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out.
If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.
It's really easy to get PR with no results & it actually feels like you're really actually cool, but in a year you'll still have nothing.
... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.
You don't need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn't. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.
It's easy to say, 'I'm going to build something that already exists,' but it's difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.
If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new-it's hard to kill your babies.
If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
So if you want a culture where people work hard, & pay attention to detail, focus on the customer, are frugal: you have to do it yourself.
Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.
... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
The nice thing about Reddit is, we don't have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.
I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.
You also really want to take the time to think about how the market is going to evolve.You need a market that's going to be big in 10 years.
It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.
If you look at people who have an iPhone or Android and are under 40 and are dissatisfied with their bank, it's actually quite a large market.
One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused without good communication.
Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website, but it will never be a truly great community.
These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.
Asking what I'd do without Loopt is almost like asking what I would do if I didn't have a smartphone because the feature set has become the norm for me.
I suppose if I didn't have Loopt, I'd have to, I don't know, pick up the phone and just start calling people, a lot more texting and certainly more Googling.
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.
The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.
Communication services need interoperability to succeed - and Loopt is the first such service since SMS that is available across all major U.S. wireless carriers.
I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it's worth thinking critically about what the future will be.