Startup Archive
@StartupArchive_ • 157,459 subscribers
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 Archive32,795,018 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
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 Archive1,468,941 просмотров • 25 дней назад
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 Archive13,502,397 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
Brian Armstrong’s #1 piece of advice for founders: “Think bigger” Goldman Sachs CEO David Soloman asks Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong for one piece of advice for entrepreneurs in the audience. Brian replies: “When I was first trying to start companies, I was looking for ideas that only required some tech innovation. They were smaller ideas, and none of them ended up really mattering. My advice would be to go for more ambitious, long-term projects. Anything worth doing is going to have a tech component, but you’re also probably going to have to bump up against legislation and the government. Don’t shy away from those problems. Solving these hard problems is what creates value.” He continues: “It’s probably going to take 10 years to even make a dent in it, but by 20 years you’ll really start having an impact. I think people generally don’t attack ambitious enough problems, but that’s where the value is created and there’s fewer people who play in that space. I just keep thinking: How do we think bigger?” Source: Goldman Sachs (Dec 2025)
Startup Archive170,406 просмотров • 6 дней назад
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 Archive30,721,383 просмотров • 1 год назад
![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 Archive5,629,151 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
![Palmer Luckey on the question he asked his billionaire group chat Palmer is asked how he feels about billionaires who have sold their companies and are now cruising the Mediterranean on their yachts, rather than betting their fortune to make the world a better place. He responds: “I’m in a group chat called ‘The B-Boys Club.’ It’s all boys who have sold a company for at least a billion dollars… It doesn’t exclude women. Women would be allowed. It’s just thus far only boys have applied. And for years — all the way back to when I sold my company and got invited to the B Boys Club — I’ve tried to shame people: ‘You have so much money. Why are you not doing what you know is the right thing to do with this capital?’” He asks them: “Are you going to be Batman or are you going to be you?” Palmer has succeeded in changing the thinking of some members. Others have replied that racing old vintage race cars is extremely fun. “I’ve paid my dues Palmer,” they say, “I’m not in it to stress like used to when I started my company.” To Palmer, money is just a small part of it though. These people could leverage their intelligence, network, and reputations to affect tremendous change: “Why was I able to start Anduril? Money was a small part of it… People believed in me because I was proven founder who had started a multi-billion dollar company that successfully exited. That makes it easier to recruit people. You’re in a position to do what no amount of money alone could do. You could take some guy off the street and give him $10 billion, but he won’t be able to accomplish half of what some of these people would be able to accomplish… [Reputation] is a free resource. You don’t even have to spend you’re money.” This is why Palmer hasn’t done The Giving Pledge: “When you pledge to give away your money, what you’re really saying is, ‘I think other people can do more good with my money than I can.’ and ‘I think my view of the world will be more competently executed by others than myself.’.. Maybe there are people who are truly mentally and physically not what they used to be. But for many people, I think they could absolutely achieve their goals better than handing it to a non-founder or NGO.” He continues: “My thinking is I’ve got a view as to how the world should be, and I don’t think that there’s anyone else who’s going to more-faithfully execute on that than me. When I’m all old and used up, maybe I’ll change my mind.” Source: Peter H. Diamandis, MD (May 2025)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2075276295747874843/amplify_video_thumb/2075215740454510592/img/mfQtRAGXrvP2bM3e.jpg)
Palmer Luckey on the question he asked his billionaire group chat Palmer is asked how he feels about billionaires who have sold their companies and are now cruising the Mediterranean on their yachts, rather than betting their fortune to make the world a better place. He responds: “I’m in a group chat called ‘The B-Boys Club.’ It’s all boys who have sold a company for at least a billion dollars… It doesn’t exclude women. Women would be allowed. It’s just thus far only boys have applied. And for years — all the way back to when I sold my company and got invited to the B Boys Club — I’ve tried to shame people: ‘You have so much money. Why are you not doing what you know is the right thing to do with this capital?’” He asks them: “Are you going to be Batman or are you going to be you?” Palmer has succeeded in changing the thinking of some members. Others have replied that racing old vintage race cars is extremely fun. “I’ve paid my dues Palmer,” they say, “I’m not in it to stress like used to when I started my company.” To Palmer, money is just a small part of it though. These people could leverage their intelligence, network, and reputations to affect tremendous change: “Why was I able to start Anduril? Money was a small part of it… People believed in me because I was proven founder who had started a multi-billion dollar company that successfully exited. That makes it easier to recruit people. You’re in a position to do what no amount of money alone could do. You could take some guy off the street and give him $10 billion, but he won’t be able to accomplish half of what some of these people would be able to accomplish… [Reputation] is a free resource. You don’t even have to spend you’re money.” This is why Palmer hasn’t done The Giving Pledge: “When you pledge to give away your money, what you’re really saying is, ‘I think other people can do more good with my money than I can.’ and ‘I think my view of the world will be more competently executed by others than myself.’.. Maybe there are people who are truly mentally and physically not what they used to be. But for many people, I think they could absolutely achieve their goals better than handing it to a non-founder or NGO.” He continues: “My thinking is I’ve got a view as to how the world should be, and I don’t think that there’s anyone else who’s going to more-faithfully execute on that than me. When I’m all old and used up, maybe I’ll change my mind.” Source: Peter H. Diamandis, MD (May 2025)
Startup Archive132,182 просмотров • 9 дней назад
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 Archive690,639 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
![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 Archive1,093,580 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
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 Archive175,418 просмотров • 21 дней назад
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 Archive1,846,369 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon’s seed round: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done” “To raise the first $1 million of seed capital for Amazon, I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.” Jeff recalls taking 60 meetings to get to those 22 angels who said yes, which means roughly 40 of the investors he pitched said no. “And by the way, the 40 ‘no’s were hard-earned ‘no’s… They were multiple meetings, working really hard to get people to write that $50,000 check. And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.” This was in 1995, and the first question Jeff would always get was, “What’s the Internet?” So Jeff would patiently explain what the Internet was. He would also always tell them he thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think was giving myself better than the real odds.” Source: New York Times Events (Dec 2024)
Startup Archive78,447 просмотров • 12 дней назад
![Elon Musk on why he slept on the Tesla factory floor for 3 years “I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight. That was my primary residence. I’m not kidding. Literally. I slept on a couch, and at one point a tent on the roof, but for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk which was out in the open in the factory.” As Elon explains, he did this for an important reason: “I slept on the floor under my desk so that during shift change, the entire team could see me. This is important because if the team thinks their leader is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island [it’s demoralizing]… Since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, they knew I was there. That made a huge difference, and they gave it their all.” This principle that leaders must be visible is something Elon emphasized in a memo to Tesla employees ending remote work and requiring a minimum of 40 hours per week in person: “The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.”](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2066533841804652955/amplify_video_thumb/2066533703044444160/img/vqIabR0u1w5gvFCY.jpg)
Elon Musk on why he slept on the Tesla factory floor for 3 years “I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight. That was my primary residence. I’m not kidding. Literally. I slept on a couch, and at one point a tent on the roof, but for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk which was out in the open in the factory.” As Elon explains, he did this for an important reason: “I slept on the floor under my desk so that during shift change, the entire team could see me. This is important because if the team thinks their leader is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island [it’s demoralizing]… Since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, they knew I was there. That made a huge difference, and they gave it their all.” This principle that leaders must be visible is something Elon emphasized in a memo to Tesla employees ending remote work and requiring a minimum of 40 hours per week in person: “The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.”
Startup Archive198,654 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
![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 Archive600,475 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
![Google founder Larry Page on how he learned to run a business When asked how he learned to run a business, Google cofounder Larry Page responds: “I read a lot of books.” He joked: “[When renaming Google to Alphabet] I read like three books on naming—which is more than anyone else had read. So I decided I was the expert . . . and actually that was useful. I recommend reading things.” It’s an important mindset that is often overlooked. One of the richest ways to learn something is reading things written by people who deeply understand their subject matter. Even Elon Musk was able to teach himself about the fundamentals of rocket design and astrodynamics by reading books. He is often quoted on this topic: “I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there and lots of smart people.” Building a startup is an infinite set of problems that are being thrown at you. Next time you’re facing one of those problems, I’d recommend finding the best book or blog post you can on the topic and reading it. You don’t need an MBA from a fancy school to be an expert in business or startups. You just need to sit down and read. Source: FORTUNE (Nov 2015)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2074836431537578069/amplify_video_thumb/2074836331146944512/img/7Zx2VIh_mII_Z6PJ.jpg)
Google founder Larry Page on how he learned to run a business When asked how he learned to run a business, Google cofounder Larry Page responds: “I read a lot of books.” He joked: “[When renaming Google to Alphabet] I read like three books on naming—which is more than anyone else had read. So I decided I was the expert . . . and actually that was useful. I recommend reading things.” It’s an important mindset that is often overlooked. One of the richest ways to learn something is reading things written by people who deeply understand their subject matter. Even Elon Musk was able to teach himself about the fundamentals of rocket design and astrodynamics by reading books. He is often quoted on this topic: “I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there and lots of smart people.” Building a startup is an infinite set of problems that are being thrown at you. Next time you’re facing one of those problems, I’d recommend finding the best book or blog post you can on the topic and reading it. You don’t need an MBA from a fancy school to be an expert in business or startups. You just need to sit down and read. Source: FORTUNE (Nov 2015)
Startup Archive55,981 просмотров • 10 дней назад
![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 Archive1,658,776 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад
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 Archive1,505,841 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад
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 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
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 Archive696,705 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Jeff Bezos responds to CNBC reporter who says Amazon isn’t a “pure internet company” The CNBC reporter asks Jeff in this 1999 interview: “You’re not really a pure internet company anymore, are you? You’ve got millions of square feet of real estate, a huge and growing inventory of items, and you’ve got thousands of employees now.” Jeff responds: “Yes, we have over 3,000 employees and over 4 million square feet of distribution center space. And those are things I’m very, very proud of. That distribution center space allows us to get product close to customers so that we can ship it to customers in a very timely way, which improves customer service levels. If there’s one thing Amazon is about, it’s obsessive attention to the customer experience end-to-end.” The reporter protests that this approach is more capital-intensive than the “pure internet play” business models that stock market analysts prefer. Jeff responds again: “It doesn’t matter to me if we’re a pure Internet play. What matters to me is whether we provide the best customer service… Our investors should be investing in a company that obsesses over customer experience. In the long term, there’s never any misalignment between customer interests and shareholder interests.” Source: CNBC (1999)
Startup Archive115,258 просмотров • 1 месяц назад