Startup Archive
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Archiving the world's best startup advice for future generations of founders
Videos
Elon Musk: “Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect” Elon is asked for his advice for entrepreneurs, to which he responds: “I’m a big fan of anyone who wants to build. Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect. That’s the main thing you should aim for: to make more than you take and be a net contributor to society.” He compares it to the pursuit of happiness: “If you want to create something valuable financially, you don’t pursue that. It’s best to pursue providing useful products and services. If you do that, money will come as a natural consequence of that rather than pursuing money directly. You can’t pursue happiness directly. You pursue things that lead to happiness — fulfilling work, study, friends, loved ones.” Elon continues: “It sounds very obvious, but generally if somebody is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard and accept that there’s a meaningful chance of failure. Then just focus on having the output be worth more than the input. Are you a value creator? That’s what really matters: making more than you take.” Video source: Nikhil Kamath (2025)
Startup Archive32,790,244 views • 6 months ago
Elon Musk on building his first startup Zip2 In 1995, when he was just 23 years old, Elon dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in physics to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal Musk. Elon personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages on the Internet that summer in C with a little C++. In this CBS interview, a 27 year old Elon describes living in a $200/month office with a leaky roof: “We found that an office was actually cheaper than apartment in Silicon Valley and we got this dinky little office that had a leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you could imagine. I lived in it too and showered at the YMCA. This lasted for about three or four months, and the reason we chose this office — in addition to it being really cheap — was that there was an internet service provider on the floor below. So we were able to get really cheap internet access by drilling a hole in the floor and connecting to their server directly.” In February 1999 — less than a year after this interview — Compaq would purchase Zip2 for $307 million in cash. The interviewer also asks Elon what he thinks the future of the Internet will be, to which Elon responds: “I think the internet is the superset of all media. It is the be all and end all of media. One will see print, broadcast, radio — essentially all media — folding into the internet. What the internet amounts to is it’s the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent. It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”
Startup Archive13,499,188 views • 5 months ago
Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.
Startup Archive94,334 views • 3 days ago
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: Lenny Rachitsky (Feb 2025)
Startup Archive686,273 views • 18 days ago
Steve Jobs on the most important job of a CEO “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.” Steve continues: “We wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.”
Startup Archive30,701,170 views • 1 year ago
![John Carmack on what he admires about Elon Musk Programming legend John Carmack is asked about his relationship with Elon Musk, to which he replies: “In some ways we have a similar background. We’re almost exactly the same age, have backgrounds programming personal computers, and have even read similar books that have turned us into the people we are today.” John first met Elon when he was building Armadillo Aerospace. Elon visited Armadillo with his right-hand propulsion guy, and the three of them talked about rockets. “I think in many corners [Elon] does not get the respect he should for being a wealthy person who could just retire,” John says. “He went all-in, and he could’ve gone bust. There’s plenty of athletes or entertainers who had all the money in the world and blew it. [Elon] could’ve been the business case example of that with the things he was doing: space exploration, electrification of transportation, and Solar City type things. These are big, world-level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that.” John contrasts this with the way he approached his own aerospace company: “I was doing Armadillo Aerospace in this tightly-bounded way. It was ‘John’s crazy money’ at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed, and I was still hedging my bets working at id Software at a time when [Elon] had been really all-in. I have a huge amount of respect for that.” It also irritates John when people call Elon “just a business guy”: “Elon was deeply involved in a lot of the [technical] decisions. Not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection and propellant selection. For years he’d be telling me to ‘Get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. Liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this.’ And the times that I’ve gone through the factories with him, we talked about very detailed things like how this weld is made or how this subassembly goes together. He’s really in there a very detailed level . . . I worry a lot that he’s stretched too thin. He’s got the Boring Company and Neuralink and Twitter too whereas I know I have limits on how much I can pay attention to.” John continues: “I look back at my aerospace side of things, and I’m like, ‘I did not go all-in on that.’ I did not commit myself at a level that it would’ve taken to be successful there. And it’s a weird thing having a discussion with him. He’s the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on the technical side of things.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2022)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2001273783844220985/amplify_video_thumb/2001267044122042372/img/wWDZKXSYxN1AciSS.jpg)
John Carmack on what he admires about Elon Musk Programming legend John Carmack is asked about his relationship with Elon Musk, to which he replies: “In some ways we have a similar background. We’re almost exactly the same age, have backgrounds programming personal computers, and have even read similar books that have turned us into the people we are today.” John first met Elon when he was building Armadillo Aerospace. Elon visited Armadillo with his right-hand propulsion guy, and the three of them talked about rockets. “I think in many corners [Elon] does not get the respect he should for being a wealthy person who could just retire,” John says. “He went all-in, and he could’ve gone bust. There’s plenty of athletes or entertainers who had all the money in the world and blew it. [Elon] could’ve been the business case example of that with the things he was doing: space exploration, electrification of transportation, and Solar City type things. These are big, world-level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that.” John contrasts this with the way he approached his own aerospace company: “I was doing Armadillo Aerospace in this tightly-bounded way. It was ‘John’s crazy money’ at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed, and I was still hedging my bets working at id Software at a time when [Elon] had been really all-in. I have a huge amount of respect for that.” It also irritates John when people call Elon “just a business guy”: “Elon was deeply involved in a lot of the [technical] decisions. Not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection and propellant selection. For years he’d be telling me to ‘Get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. Liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this.’ And the times that I’ve gone through the factories with him, we talked about very detailed things like how this weld is made or how this subassembly goes together. He’s really in there a very detailed level . . . I worry a lot that he’s stretched too thin. He’s got the Boring Company and Neuralink and Twitter too whereas I know I have limits on how much I can pay attention to.” John continues: “I look back at my aerospace side of things, and I’m like, ‘I did not go all-in on that.’ I did not commit myself at a level that it would’ve taken to be successful there. And it’s a weird thing having a discussion with him. He’s the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on the technical side of things.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2022)
Startup Archive5,628,299 views • 5 months ago
![Jeff Bezos: “People who are right a lot change their mind a lot” “Because of AI, new technologies, and all the dynamism in the world, so many things are changing — and they’re changing rapidly,” Jeff observes. The best solution he’s found for dealing with this rapid change is “thinking long-term” because it forces you to ask yourself, “What are the points of stability?” and “What is not going to change?” He continues: “One of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs. So you can build a strategy around customer needs. That will have durability.” When building Amazon, for example, Jeff built the company around the customer needs of fast delivery, low prices, and vast selection. “The technologies will change. Your competitive set will change. Everything will change, except those customer needs,” Jeff argues. And it’s this idea that is behind Jeff’s core idea of “Be stubborn on the vision, and flexible on the details.” He explains: “You have to be [flexible on the details] because the world is changing and so you change your mind. I’ve noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very stubborn on the details.” Source: Reuters (Oct 2025)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2060388194567237715/amplify_video_thumb/2059447368773193734/img/lPB6QNeV-dftNX0p.jpg)
Jeff Bezos: “People who are right a lot change their mind a lot” “Because of AI, new technologies, and all the dynamism in the world, so many things are changing — and they’re changing rapidly,” Jeff observes. The best solution he’s found for dealing with this rapid change is “thinking long-term” because it forces you to ask yourself, “What are the points of stability?” and “What is not going to change?” He continues: “One of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs. So you can build a strategy around customer needs. That will have durability.” When building Amazon, for example, Jeff built the company around the customer needs of fast delivery, low prices, and vast selection. “The technologies will change. Your competitive set will change. Everything will change, except those customer needs,” Jeff argues. And it’s this idea that is behind Jeff’s core idea of “Be stubborn on the vision, and flexible on the details.” He explains: “You have to be [flexible on the details] because the world is changing and so you change your mind. I’ve noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very stubborn on the details.” Source: Reuters (Oct 2025)
Startup Archive96,187 views • 5 days ago
![Brian Armstrong explains how he built Coinbase on nights and weekends while working at Airbnb Brian first advises those who are currently employed to not build your project on company hours or on your company laptop: “If you build it on company time or on the company hardware, the company probably owns the IP.” Then he describes his schedule for working on Coinbase while still working full-time at Airbnb. “I would often work [at Airbnb] until 7pm. I’d come home, eat dinner, and then I would work from 8pm to midnight. I would do that maybe 3-4 days a week on weekdays. And then on the weekend I’d work Sunday afternoon for 7-8 hours.” Brian did this consistently for about a year and a half until Coinbase was far enough along for him to get seed funding from Y Combinator. “It sucked. I mean I was tired after the full day of work [at Airbnb]. But this is where determination comes in… At that moment in time, I was in my late 20s, and I was like, ‘I really want to try to build something important in the world.’” When asked how he maintained friendships during this time, Brian replies: “I was pretty intense about it. I would say I sacrificed friendships for it. It’s not like I was just never responding to people, but I’ve seen this happen to various people. They get to a certain point in their life. Sometimes they turn a certain age where they thought they would have more done by then or maybe someone in their family passes away and they’re like, Oh my god, time is finite. It’s precious. And something happens where they’re like, ‘I’m going to get this done, no matter the cost.’” Brian tells those out there who might be in a similar situation: “Go hard at it. Finish your book. Launch your thing. Just start doing stuff - and even if you don’t know what to do, just do anything, because action will produce information and it’ll help you get to the right thing.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2041846076530159814/amplify_video_thumb/2041840826733805568/img/ER65zu-BY4aJ4KG7.jpg)
Brian Armstrong explains how he built Coinbase on nights and weekends while working at Airbnb Brian first advises those who are currently employed to not build your project on company hours or on your company laptop: “If you build it on company time or on the company hardware, the company probably owns the IP.” Then he describes his schedule for working on Coinbase while still working full-time at Airbnb. “I would often work [at Airbnb] until 7pm. I’d come home, eat dinner, and then I would work from 8pm to midnight. I would do that maybe 3-4 days a week on weekdays. And then on the weekend I’d work Sunday afternoon for 7-8 hours.” Brian did this consistently for about a year and a half until Coinbase was far enough along for him to get seed funding from Y Combinator. “It sucked. I mean I was tired after the full day of work [at Airbnb]. But this is where determination comes in… At that moment in time, I was in my late 20s, and I was like, ‘I really want to try to build something important in the world.’” When asked how he maintained friendships during this time, Brian replies: “I was pretty intense about it. I would say I sacrificed friendships for it. It’s not like I was just never responding to people, but I’ve seen this happen to various people. They get to a certain point in their life. Sometimes they turn a certain age where they thought they would have more done by then or maybe someone in their family passes away and they’re like, Oh my god, time is finite. It’s precious. And something happens where they’re like, ‘I’m going to get this done, no matter the cost.’” Brian tells those out there who might be in a similar situation: “Go hard at it. Finish your book. Launch your thing. Just start doing stuff - and even if you don’t know what to do, just do anything, because action will produce information and it’ll help you get to the right thing.” Video source: Steven Bartlett (2022)
Startup Archive1,092,339 views • 1 month ago
Larry Ellison on what made Steve Jobs great “Steve was my best friend for about 25 years. We were neighbors in Woodside and his peacock wandered onto my property and woke me up. His girlfriend had given him a peacock and I came over to complain.” Steve replied: “You don’t like that bird either?” Larry recalls how Steve made him watch 73 different versions of Toy Story: “I said I’m not coming over if you make me watch Toy Story again… Now I know the new version is 4% better than the one I saw last week, but I’m not watching this thing again. And he’d say: ‘Larry, you won’t believe how different the shadows look.’ But that was Steve. Until it was perfect. And then once it was perfect, he moved onto the next problem.” Larry believes obsessing over a product until it was perfect was a huge part of what made Steve Jobs great: “If you want to know you’re like Steve Jobs, it’s very simple. You’re unable to think about anything other than serious problems at work. That’s all you can do, and you obsess about it until you solve it. And then you move on to the next thing. And you obsess about that until you solve it… If you have that kind of obsession combined with Picasso’s aesthetic and Edison’s inventiveness, then you are the next Steve Jobs.” He continues: “Apple became the most valuable company on earth and it wasn’t even one of Steve’s goals. He wasn’t trying to be rich. He wasn’t trying to be famous. He wasn’t trying to be powerful. He was obsessed with the creative process and building something beautiful.” Source: The Wall Street Journal (May 2012)
Startup Archive217,309 views • 17 days ago
Naval Ravikant: “The smart and leveraged are getting richer” “I’ve been saying this for a while, but the leverage in the system is insane,” Naval begins. “Leverage is a force-multiplier for your work. The oldest form of leverage is labor (you have people working with you or for you). Then it was capital (you’re investing money behind a problem). Then it was media (you’re writing a book and people are listening to you and your words are moving many people to do things)… Then code came along. Code is this incredible, permissionless form of leverage where you have robots and data centers cranking away for you. And now the leverage is increasing through AI, agents, robots, supply chains, 3D printing, and all the things you can do to amplify your work.” Naval reflects on the claim that there will be 1-person, billion-dollar companies and points out that there actually already have been: Minecraft and Bitcoin were both 1-person projects. “The leverage will just continue to increase, which means non-linear returns.” Naval explains. And he points out that this has important societal implications: “Society is just not built to handle that. You can see all of the outcry against the rich getting richer and billionaires and all that, but it’s not really that the richer are getting richer. It’s that the smart and leveraged are getting richer. If you’re smart, and you’re highly-leveraged, you’re knowledge-creation power (earning-power is downstream of knowledge) is so much higher than your peers that you may have left behind in college and they just have no idea what’s coming. It’s going to be a kind of crazy time.” Source: Z Fellows (Aug 2025)
Startup Archive75,766 views • 7 days ago
![Larry Ellison: “When WhatsApp sold for $19B, a lot of us were shocked… until we thought about it” In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp and their 450 million MAUs for $19 billion. “A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison says in this interview that took place a few months after the acquisition closed. Ellison points out that you have to take into consideration how much traditional businesses (e.g. cable TV companies) pay to acquire customers: “This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.” He continues: “There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.” As of 2025, WhatsApp has approximately 3.1 billion MAUs globally.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2041184021544329474/amplify_video_thumb/2041181541490102272/img/va19kXVWkTNC0wIJ.jpg)
Larry Ellison: “When WhatsApp sold for $19B, a lot of us were shocked… until we thought about it” In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp and their 450 million MAUs for $19 billion. “A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison says in this interview that took place a few months after the acquisition closed. Ellison points out that you have to take into consideration how much traditional businesses (e.g. cable TV companies) pay to acquire customers: “This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.” He continues: “There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.” As of 2025, WhatsApp has approximately 3.1 billion MAUs globally.
Startup Archive600,281 views • 1 month ago
Jeff Bezos on his favorite interview question “When I interview people, I ask them to give me an example of something they've invented. And I always point out, it doesn't have to be something that you actually took to the patent office. It could be a metric that you invented and followed carefully. It could be a business process that you invented. You want to select people who like to invent their way out of boxes.” A lot of people will immediately jump to what Jeff calls an “either or” solution (e.g. “We can do A or B.”). But as Jeff explains: “The right question is how can we do A and B? What invention do we need to be able to do both?”
Startup Archive1,846,259 views • 6 months ago
Jensen Huang: “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company“ “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company. Because starting a company has a very low probability of success. And so if that is your reason for doing it, you will likely regret the experience… You should build a company because you believe in your idea, you’re passionate about it, and you want to build something great… You have to have a perspective that’s unique and that you feel really strongly about, so you’re willing to persevere almost any challenge to make it happen.” Source: Stanford University Jun (2011)
Startup Archive65,000 views • 10 days ago
Mark Zuckerberg on Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter Elon Musk famously reduced head count by 80% after acquiring Twitter. It was controversial at the time, but Mark is asked what he thinks Elon did well during it. Mark responds: “You can agree or disagree with the exact tactics and how he did that. Every leader has their own style… But a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on: making the organization more technical, decreasing distance between engineers at the company and him, fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes.” Mark also believes this was good for the technology industry as a whole: “My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them. Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things we’ve done… When people see what Elon is doing, I think that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time.” He continues: “So I think that was one thing where he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on… And from the outside, it’s very hard to know. Did he cut too much? Did he not cut enough? I don’t think it’s my place to opine on that… But certainly his actions led me and, I think, a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?’” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)
Startup Archive522,371 views • 2 months ago
![Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique “I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.” The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams: “At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.” Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff: “He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.” Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team: “Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.” And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone. Video source: Sequoia Capital (2024)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1957047096957079939/amplify_video_thumb/1957032127066714112/img/OT0T-TSmH_poW8RL.jpg)
Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique “I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.” The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams: “At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.” Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff: “He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.” Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team: “Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.” And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone. Video source: Sequoia Capital (2024)
Startup Archive1,658,202 views • 9 months ago
Jeff Bezos: “You don’t understand my audience” When Charlie Rose asks him if the iPad is a “Kindle killer” in this 2012 interview, Jeff gives an incredible response: “It’s a very different product, and I can give you an example. If I came to you and said: ‘Charlie, I love your show, but we’ve got to sex it up. We need fast cuts and vicious arguments between your guests.’ You would rightly say to me: ‘Jeff, I love you man, but you don’t understand my audience. We have a cerebral conversation here. It’s what we do, and it’s how we’re differentiated.’” He continues: “When people come to me and say: ‘You’ve got to have full-motion video and color on the Kindle.” I say: ‘Why? You think Hemingway is going to pop more in color?’… You don’t understand my audience.” Jeff explains that his vision for the Kindle is a purpose-build device for reading where no tradeoffs have been made—every single design decision is optimized for reading. And knowing exactly who his audience is gave him conviction in the Kindle team’s design decisions—even when everyone at the time was saying that the iPad would crush them.
Startup Archive1,164,969 views • 6 months ago
Jeff Bezos explains how he decided to quit his job and start Amazon At 30 years old, Jeff Bezos had great Wall Street job working at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. When he told his boss David Shaw about his idea to start an internet book store, David replied: “I think this is a good idea, but it would be an even better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” That made logical sense to Jeff, but he ultimately decided that the best way to make a very personal decision like this was to project himself forward to age 80: “When I’m 80 years old, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have. I don’t want to be 80 years old, in a quiet moment of reflection, thinking back over my life and cataloging a bunch of major regrets.” And Jeff believes that our biggest regrets are acts of omission: “It’s paths not taken that haunt us. We wonder what would have happened: I loved that person and I never told them, and then they married somebody else.” Once Jeff thought about it this way, the answer was immediately obvious to him: “I knew that when I’m 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing. If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I’m 80 that I tried. And I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn’t try.” Jeff believes this regret-minimization framework is a useful lens for any important life decision. Source: Summit (Nov 2017)
Startup Archive88,871 views • 17 days ago
Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex “In October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us,” Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang (Jack Zhang) begins. Patrick Collison flew out to Shanghai to meet Jack and his co-founder, and they spent the day together. After the meeting, Patrick sent over a Google Doc that was 10-20 pages long and asked Jack to make comments. “I was like, ‘Wow, the vision of the companies over the next decade is very much the same.’ We both wanted to build the AWS of financial services, and obviously Stripe was much further ahead of us. But this was before COVID. Stripe was like a $9 billion company — very similar to the scale of Airwallex today. I also really liked Patrick. It was like this guy is so smart.” Asked what makes Patrick Collison so smart, Jack replies: “He’s intellectually honest about everything, and he’s able to go deep in multiple dimensions.” Eventually Stripe offered $1.2 billion for Airwallex, and according to Jack, he and his co-founders would’ve walked away with $350 million. “I met with the whole team, and I was really impressed,” Jack recalls. “I basically said I think we’re going to do it.” But when he flew back to Melbourne, Jack decided against it. And it was actually Patrick Collison who inspired him to reject the offer. Jack explains: “So one of the things that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick was I asked, ‘What’s the long-term thing for Stripe and yourself? Are you going to be here forever?’ And Patrick said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next 20-40 years. And I just never heard a founder tell me they will dedicate their entire life to building a business. And so that was inspiring to me, and I’m like that’s what I want to do.” Today, Airwallex (Airwallex) is an $8B company, with more than $1B in ARR. Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2025)
Startup Archive696,577 views • 4 months ago
![Paul Graham: “In the best startups each founder is king of their own domain” “Woz was not a super forceful person, but he did not let Steve Jobs change anything about the Apple I computer. There was one thing [Jobs] wanted to change. I think fewer expansion slots. And Woz said no. Steve Jobs knew where the limits were.” He continues: “Woz didn’t give a damn about the business stuff, so Steve Jobs was off selling the thing and Woz built it. They were each masters of their own domain. That’s the model that works. That’s how you have multiple people who are each extremely effective without stepping on one another’s toes.” Source: This Week in Startups @jason (Mar 2014)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2057564588581785933/amplify_video_thumb/2056908412663873536/img/XR6BOt39nAdblMRt.jpg)
Paul Graham: “In the best startups each founder is king of their own domain” “Woz was not a super forceful person, but he did not let Steve Jobs change anything about the Apple I computer. There was one thing [Jobs] wanted to change. I think fewer expansion slots. And Woz said no. Steve Jobs knew where the limits were.” He continues: “Woz didn’t give a damn about the business stuff, so Steve Jobs was off selling the thing and Woz built it. They were each masters of their own domain. That’s the model that works. That’s how you have multiple people who are each extremely effective without stepping on one another’s toes.” Source: This Week in Startups @jason (Mar 2014)
Startup Archive61,703 views • 13 days ago
Jensen Huang: It's easier to fall in love with what you do than to find what you love “A lot of people say, ‘Find something you love.’ I don’t know about that. I guess I’ve fallen in love with many things that I do. I loved it when I was a dishwasher. I loved it when I was a busboy. I loved it when I was delivering papers. I loved it when I was waiting tables.” Jensen continues: “I’ve loved every single job that I’ve ever had, and I’ve loved every single day at Nvidia that I’ve ever had. I just learned to love what I’m doing. It’s hard to find something that you love, but it’s easier to fall in love with what you’re doing. And once you fall in love with what you’re doing because you desperately want to do a good job at it, it’s easier to do it well and work hard.” Video source: Norges Bank (2023)
Startup Archive1,505,445 views • 10 months ago