Harry Stebbings
@HarryStebbings • 656,309 subscribers
🎤 @twentyminutevc, 🏦 @20vcfund, @projecteurope_😇 @fuseenergy @linear @wearelegora @factoryai @lovable @airwallex @mercor_ai @workos @fomo @fireworksAI_HQ
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You need $500,000 a year as a salary just to live in San Francisco today! “Rents in the mediocre apartments in Dogpatch are $10,000 a month now. If it’s $10,000 a month to rent a one-bedroom at The Avalon, how much do you have to make to feel rich? A lot. You need $240K in California pre-tax just to pay the rent. You probably need $480K to feel good about yourself.” Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin Love to hear your thoughts Kim-Mai Cutler Garry Tan sam lessin 🏴☠️ Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Harry Stebbings275,795 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
Why Remote Work is White Collar Fraud. "I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. The idea that I could do any work at my house is like a total fantasy. The kids come home at 3pm, your work day needs to keep going. I'm highly against it." Ryan Petersen
Harry Stebbings5,473,744 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose". Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups. - The company works 7 days per week. - Founder (nico laqua) lives and sleeps in the office. - He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7. - 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo. Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years. My condensed notes below: 1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose: Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it. 2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre: Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers. 3. Lead from the Front Lines You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them. 4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning. 5. Lifespan vs. Victories Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories." 6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting." If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility. Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.
Harry Stebbings3,121,410 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
My first day at Sequoia and a lesson from Doug Leone "I show up to the office at maybe 4:30 AM. I felt very happy about myself hustling to the office that day. As I'm about to push the door, I see a man on the other side, and he looks at me and goes, 'What are you doing here so early?' I tell him, 'I'm here to take my first call. What are you doing here so early?' And he says, 'I've already taken my first call.'" Julien Bek One thing, single biggest lesson from Doug, what would it be Shaun Maguire Gili Raanan // Cyberstarts David Cahn
Harry Stebbings182,625 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
Who is the best sourcer in Sequoia? "I will pick Dean Meyer, my partner who sits in Tel Aviv but basically lives on a plane. He's just a phenomenal human being. He has the competitive juices of Messi, coupled with the technical depth of someone who's been working in tech his whole career, and that's a very dangerous combination. He's just amazing at reading people. He's got this ability to connect with founders, both the very young, spiky people and the guys who sold companies for billions of dollars." Julien Bek Single most impressive element about Dean Pat Grady Shaun Maguire Bogomil Balkansky
Harry Stebbings58,141 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
"Triple, triple, double, double is dead. Going from $1M to $3M to $9M is not interesting. You have to go $1M to $15M to $100M." Chetan Puttagunta Ho Nam Keith Rabois Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin Byron Deeter Tomasz Tunguz is triple triple double double dead? Have our growth expectations changed forever?
Harry Stebbings2,067,329 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten
DeepMind stayed in London because it is better for talent than Silicon Valley. "I saw London and the UK as having incredible talent from top universities like Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and UCL. There is a deep heritage of scientific breakthroughs and world-class thinkers. There was less competition for that talent, which made it a huge structural advantage for building DeepMind." Demis Hassabis What is the single biggest advantage of building in Europe for you T. Anton Osika Max Junestrand @matiii Chris Parsonson Chris Pedregal Matt Clifford T.reil Alan Chang
Harry Stebbings721,062 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
"Credit to Shaun for bringing in the SpaceX investment. We vote on companies, and I think someone voted a one. I've seen fours, of course. I've seen threes. Never seen a two. After that proposition occurred, he didn't give up. He just kept pushing. He forced all the partnership to fly over to see with their own eyes. We ended up doing a smaller investment that led to a big investment, and now, a couple of years later, that's one of the best investments in the history of the firm." Julien Bek What did you see that got you so excited? What is the upside from here? 10 years out, where is SpaceX Shaun Maguire
Harry Stebbings35,081 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
What Role Does Not Exist Today But Will Be So Common in Five Years Time: "500K-1M jobs will be created for agent operators. This person will be somewhat technical. They will be deep in the AI world. They're gonna have to understand MCPs and CLIs and they are going to have to know how to write skills. It's going be this group of people that will know how to go into your marketing team or your legal team, or your operations team, or your life sciences research team and this is the person that is basically going to enable that function to get leverage from agents." Aaron Levie Where is this right? Where is this wrong? Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin GREG ISENBERG Amjad Masad Anjney Midha
Harry Stebbings357,114 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
was once valued at $15BN. Today with $1.3BN in ARR and $1.5BN in cash, Monday is valued at just $3.8BN. A 70% decline. One of the hardest hit public SaaS companies. Today I sat down with Monday CEO, Eran Zinman, to ask the really hard questions that no one is asking. Spotify 👉 Youtube 👉 Apple Podcasts 👉 Eran Zinman
Harry Stebbings446,616 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
"You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to get outcompeted. Once they do that, they create three to four videos a week, and we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies. E-commerce has been doing this for over a decade. UGC, creator programs, hundreds of thousands of variations of creative." Matt Swulinski Single biggest advice to founders on how to crush UGC at scale Roman Khaves Roy Zach Yadegari
Harry Stebbings42,196 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen
What does Uber need to do to get to 500 million users? "Taking an UberX to and from work every day in New York City for $35 a direction, that's still a luxury product. If we want to get to 500M users, and go from using us six times a month to 25 times a month, the average cost of that transaction has to come down." Andrew Macdonald I would love to hear your thoughts @jason Cyan Banister Bill Ackman Shervin other than price, what is the single biggest barrier to Uber hitting 500M users?
Harry Stebbings36,810 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen
Every single day at 8:30AM, I walk with an incredible founder, operator, investor around Hyde Park. I learn the most incredible things from the world’s greatest minds. But I do not want to take notes, remove myself from the human interaction. The importance of truly listening is so so important. Total game-changer having Plaud, pin to my shirt and takes the best notes so I can be insanely present in the conversation. One of my must haves along with a pair of short shorts and Oakleys for my park meetings!!! (link in comments)
Harry Stebbings49,591 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
Why a16z Invested $300M into Adam Neumann: "At the height of the WeWork meltdown, I talked to a friend of mine who is one of the legends of the real estate world. He said, "Whatever people say about this whole thing, he said, there are only two people in the history of the world who have built compelling brands where people care about the name on the building for commercial real estate and the history of the entire world. And he said one of them is the President of the United States, and the other is Adam Neumman. This guy is a generational talent in that industry... we got to know him after that. I became thoroughly convinced that he was a generational talent. We're very happy with that investment." Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸
Harry Stebbings301,969 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
"There are the core three of any acquisition engine: Meta, Google, and lifecycle. You can scale to your first million, $10 million ARR just off of those three things. If you do a million channels and you do them all poorly, it's not going to help you out." Matt Swulinski Single biggest advice to founders on channel selection, when to expand and when not to alex schultz 🏳️🌈 KippBodnar.eth Kieran Flanagan 🤘
Harry Stebbings37,902 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
At this stage, I think it is undeniable that Revolut will be a $500BN company. (I do not say that lightly). They are a compound startup. They try 20 new products at a time. They create small 8-10-person teams for each product. They "invest" $2M into each team. They give them 24 months to execute. They monitor them on a weekly basis according to a set of agreed KPIs. What works, they double down on. A machine. 👇
Harry Stebbings150,600 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG, that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape, or form. You can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, and test your positioning, all within a week on paid. Do all of that, but then you have a much faster engine of validation on the paid amplification end." Matt Swulinski Do you agree you should do paid as soon as possible Tomer London Aravind Srinivas Jack Zhang
Harry Stebbings34,210 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
"OpenRouter is really strong in developer-type tools where you want a simple way to pick a model. It's really strong with chatbots where they don't have to be perfect. For frontier-esque models, people don't rotate through 11 models, and I don't think OpenRouter is the right product for that. The risk to Stripe is that they end up owning a successful niche product, and that's not their DNA." Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin Love to hear your thoughts on this and the potential “niche” market Shensi Ding Eric Glyman Jack Zhang Thibault Jaigu Zach Moskow
Harry Stebbings22,579 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
Why the OpenRouter deal does make sense "Stripe actually appears to be very good at acquisitions. It's how it accelerated into crypto and otherwise. They're good at it. If you're good at M&A, and this is 5% of your market cap plus cash, and you want it tomorrow, it makes sense. I love OpenRouter. I'm a customer, I'm a user. It was one of these pieces of software which is just instantly easier to deploy. It's just elegant." Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin What is your bull case on where OpenRouter will be in 5 years, given the acquisition Deedy Anjney Midha Dave Font
Harry Stebbings22,415 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen