Many founding teams pursue opportunities for clout and status first, problem/customer/opportunity second. What’s high status in tech is ephemeral. Problems and customers are not.

The Silicon Valley small business, the SV-SB, is a hybrid of sorts — it intertwines small business values and discipline with big tech know-how and ambition.

• Founding teams may look like that of a “traditional” Silicon Valley startup. They’re native to Silicon Valley ethos, skills, and playbooks. But , beneath the surface, they’re different. You m

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I’ve started to think about the idea of the trophy job — a job that people covet for its status more than its substance.

"Seeing is Believing as a Potential Entrepreneur" -

@davidcummings

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I credit a lot of my self-belief with having worked in startups before making the jump to my own.

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Direct exposure to other founders/operators dispels the myths of going from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10.

To find some of the most effective people that others may not know about, I make sure to leverage my network. Before hiring for a new role, I ask people who they consider to be the top 1% of performers for a certain function. I then reach out to the people who were recommended to me for calibration meetings, but my secret goal is to actually hire t... See more

a lot of “burnout” is just the result of prolonged exposure to environments you were never truly aligned with to start

Ramp keeps finding itself in the right place at the right time because the company is built to be in the right place at the right time, executing against a mission that will never go out of style with a structure and team that allows it to take advantage of new ways to fulfill it.

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

1. We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.


2. We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of

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