Harry Stebbings
@HarryStebbings • 546,073 subscribers
🎤 @twentyminutevc, 🏦 @20vcfund, @projecteurope_😇 @fuseenergy @linear @wearelegora @factoryai @lovable @airwallex @mercor_ai @workos
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"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 Stebbings3,109,565 views • 1 month ago
Why Wix customers won't churn to vibe-coded solutions: "Most small businesses aren't going to vibe-code their entire software stack. Running a business requires complex workflows that take years to build, not just generating code with AI. The real challenge isn't creating an app, it's recreating the deep business logic that platforms like Wix have already developed." Avishai Abrahami How do you think about this Anton Osika Matan Grinberg tobi lutke
Harry Stebbings37,339 views • 5 days ago
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 Stebbings720,076 views • 3 months ago
"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 Stebbings2,066,668 views • 10 months ago
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 Stebbings150,051 views • 1 month ago
"The unfair advantage young people have coming out of university; you've just had four years to spend unlimited time ... to master of these AI tools. A thousand companies would love to have you infuse what you know into how they're doing things. I can't remember a time when a young person with no work experience, but with the right mindset and experience using some of these tools, has ever been so valued. Some of our most effective employees are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI-pilled and have a comfort and facility with these tools, that many of our more experienced folks don't." Clay Bavor Do you agree and single biggest advice to young people coming out of university today Matan Grinberg Nikesh Arora Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin Cory Levy
Harry Stebbings53,715 views • 13 days ago
How does Benchmark rationalize not being in any of the core model providers? "It f**king sucks. It's a complete and utter failure on our part. You can't be in a situation where you have a chance to make a 30x on scaled capital in four or five years and you don't do that, that's always a failure. It stings especially when all your friends are sending you their implied look-through ownership of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX, eye-watering numbers." Everett Randle
Harry Stebbings117,791 views • 29 days ago
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 Stebbings356,287 views • 2 months ago
The SoftBank pitch that got a billion-dollar check. "First time I met him (Masa) would've been at his house in Woodside. Considering the size of the check, I thought it was a surprisingly short meeting. An hour. He pushed us to 'be cheaper than everybody.' Whatever the price of freight is, just be 10% cheaper, and if someone matches you, beat them by 10%. Which is like a terrible strategy. We would've burned so much money. But he just wanted to push you to go bigger." Ryan Petersen
Harry Stebbings99,907 views • 28 days ago
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 Stebbings446,571 views • 4 months ago
"Everyone gets FDEs wrong. The job of an FDE isn't to make the product work, it's to accelerate customer adoption and time-to-value. If you need FDEs just to deliver the product, you're not running a software company, you're running a services business with a bad product." Matan Grinberg Do you agree and what do people misunderstand most about what it takes to do FDE motion well? Shyam Sankar Chad Wahlquist Niko Barry McCardel Luv Kothari Leo Mehr Kevin Bai
Harry Stebbings111,303 views • 1 month ago
"We spent $3,000 on an Eight Sleep for every employee because we optimize for output, not cost. When you're building a team of exceptional people, every improvement in sleep, focus, and decision-making is worth the investment. The hardest work isn't about grinding more hours, it's about making better decisions, and that starts with getting a great night's sleep." Matan Grinberg What single decisions have had the biggest impact on performance for you Keith Rabois delian Matteo Franceschetti Bryan Johnson
Harry Stebbings102,816 views • 1 month ago
"Most enterprise workflows don't require frontier AI models. Outside of coding, tasks like summarization, document generation, and briefing can often be handled effectively by lower-cost open-source models. The real value is knowing when you need frontier performance and when cheaper models are more than good enough." Michael Mignano What percent of enterprise workflows requires frontier models today Nikesh Arora Matan Grinberg Aaron Katz Lin Qiao
Harry Stebbings36,428 views • 12 days ago
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 Stebbings301,755 views • 3 months ago
Should founders speak to associates? The collusion in venture is wild. "I never had this attitude that you shouldn't talk to associates, mostly 'cause I'm not a dick. I just assumed those people someday will become partners and they'll remember that I was cool. Within an hour of telling one fund I was going a different direction, I got phone calls from three others. The amount of collusion that happens in VC, founders have no idea." Ryan Petersen Should founders go straight to partners Tom Blomfield Mathilde Collin Harj Taggar Francis Davidson
Harry Stebbings66,490 views • 28 days ago
How does Lovable Hack Social Algorithms to Have Viral Posts: "We have a channel called bee swarming where employees post their content and everyone goes to amplify it. We try to turn every engineer into a marketer and get the whole team posting about things they are excited about. Then marketing puts its full firepower behind the biggest launches to tell the story." elena verna Biggest lessons on how to make posts go viral Anton Osika Luke Harries Eric Glyman David Senra?
Harry Stebbings258,375 views • 4 months ago
“We have a crisis of open source models in the Western world. Outside of China, there are no good open source models. We don't even have any in the US now. The talent, the capital and the focus to be best-in-class at pre-training, mid-training, post-training is an extremely scarce skillset. The answer for a lot of countries may just be to take an open weights model from China, post-train or fine-tune their own version, and have that be what they start from." Everett Randle Why does the West have such poor open source models and is it a national security threat to rely on open-source Chinese models Demis Hassabis Yann LeCun Aidan Gomez Lilian Weng Jan Leike
Harry Stebbings63,397 views • 29 days ago
Why investors need to give CEOs better comp packages: "We went public in 21. First year, the stock went up to about 40BN market cap. In 2022, we fell 92% to a little under $4 billion market cap. For the life of the company, I had only taken equity. I had taken no compensation. At the bottom in 22, I made a decision and that was for the first time to ask for compensation. I felt like I'm public. Turning this company around is a big task, and I'd like to align myself with investors to say, I'm gonna get paid, but I'm only gonna get paid if the stock recovers. In order for me to get paid anything, the stock had to clear a certain price. CEOs who are founders originally started a business taking really big risk. If the belief is that the CEO should then never get compensation ever again, it's completely flawed logic." Adam Foroughi, AppLovin What are your single biggest lessons/advice on this Vinod Khosla Brian Halligan Roger Ehrenberg taavet hinrikus Elon Musk?
Harry Stebbings164,612 views • 2 months ago