founder's mentality

I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:

Keep shipping till you cannot be ignored.

The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook:

the teams best positioned to endure a bold journey are those in which the benefits from the sensation of progress outweigh the costs of working amidst uncertainty, anonymity, and anxiety. if progress is a sufficient reward, you can be losing for a long time and still win.

My philosophy re startup speed has completely changed over the last few years. I grew up at Uber, professionally, which held speed as the absolute, ultimate goal. Now, I still value speed, but hold quality as the binding constraint.