Luc Cheung

Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:

“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”

“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in

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Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort.

At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new, or worse, 5 minutes each on 12 new things. Before you ever do something new, you should understand the opportunity cost vs.... See more

An analogy we use at KV is that building a company is like laying cement. Early on the cement is liquid and malleable – you can stir it around with your hands. As time passes, the cement hardens. Once it solidifies, adjustments require a jackhammer. And jackhammering leads to cracks and lots of noise.

As a result, we prefer to get involved as early... See more

The most important part of editing is getting your video as tight as possible. Attention spans are short on TikTok, so you have to be willing to cut the video to make it as good and concise as possible. And make sure the first 2-3 seconds immediately hooks people. That’s how long you get before they scroll to the next video.

Unfortunately, that flabby life is the default we slide into without a deliberate struggle against it. You are always getting weaker unless you’re making efforts to get stronger. If you aren’t finding new ways to push your physical and mental limits, or at least maintain their capacity, they are shrinking. Your capacity is unlikely to be stretched... See more

One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you make what you measure." It means that if you pick some number to focus on, it will tend to improve, but that you have to choose the right number, because only the one you choose will improve; another that seems conceptually adjacent might not. For example, if you're a university... See more

The tendency of people and organizations is to lose focus. So one way to identify outstanding people is by their ability to commit and focus on something for a long period of time.

The only people you should hire are focused ones. The only competitors you should worry about are the focused ones.