We are in a product cycle business. Which is to say that every product in tech becomes obsolete, and they become obsolete pretty quickly. If all you do is take your current product to market and win the market, and you don’t do anything else—if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product

We used to have a saying at Venture Hacks: “Valuation is temporary. Control is forever.” Whoever has control can effectively end up controlling your valuation later. Never give up control.

The trick to being effective at this is that you have to get really good at saying no and just not doing things. There are a lot of things that are urgent but not important. The hard part of being a good CEO is that you have to be willing to let some things fall apart. You don’t have enough time to do everything well. And in practice, what that

That’s why secondaries probably shouldn’t happen for seed and A and B companies. But generally it’s C and up now where you’re starting to see it quite commonly. Even in B-round cases, you’ll see it if the company’s made substantial progress.

It’s super important that employees have a great experience from week one and that includes everything, from making sure the laptop actually works to making sure they are invited to the right meetings. All the little things really do add up at this stage. Internal comms is playing a much bigger role in employee engagement and satisfaction than it

I think future companies, especially those that haven’t raised money yet or haven’t raised substantial capital or haven’t gotten product/market fit even loosely, when they’re hiring early employees, they’re really just hiring late founders. And so they should be giving 1, 2, 3, 4% of the company, instead of giving 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4%. The issue

Hiring a COO is not about adding a title to your org chart, but rather finding the background and experience you are looking for. Optimally, you want someone who will come in to complement, operationalize, and execute your vision as a founder. Many technical or product-focused founders want to (and should) remain focused on the product and overall

Many companies make the mistake of spending months building a pipeline for recruiting the very best people, but then spend little time actually onboarding them to make sure they are successful.

Every founder has that moment of temptation: there is a big hole you want to fill. You have been looking for the right candidate for too long and can’t find her. Or, even worse, you finally find someone great for the role, but he seems borderline or outright bad culturally. The right strategy is to not hire the person. “If there is a doubt, there