Startups

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it take off, but it's hard to say which ones.

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company In the clip below, Ben Silbermann shares what surprised him the most in starting a company after reading about overnight startup successes like Facebook and Instagram: “It can take a really, really… Show more

Many startups just died today. Because OpenAI added PDF chat. You can also chat with data files and other document types. We had a wave of products better suited as features rather than stand-alone companies. Wrappers are being squeezed by OpenAI on one side and incumbents on… Show more

Fantastic startup advice from Marc Andreessen 15 years ago. https://t.co/slnUkIGB5j

AI-first companies are going to change the world. I’m going into learning mode on the space. I will share what I learn in real time on this thread:

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:

You need 2 types of people to keep early-stage startups from stagnating: - someone who’ll shamelessly sell the product before it’s fully ready to be sold - someone who’s embarrassed by this and will push to improve the product faster

Startup strategic planning: + Set a goal for rev/traffic/x that is 3 mos out + Figure out the top 3-5 driver metrics (eg, leads, sales mtgs, churn) needed to hit the goal + Pick the top 3 activities w high confidence to achieve the driver metrics Execute. Rinse/repeat.

Startup COO job boils down to this: 1. Pick a problem area, and build 0 to 1 yourself. First principles get you pretty far! 2. After it gets going, start recruiting for an experienced leader for the area. 3. Onboard the leader well, nuke yourself out and attack next problem.