Startup Archive
@StartupArchive_ • 156,868 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 Archive32,805,190 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten
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 Archive13,505,251 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
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 Archive30,797,175 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
![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 Archive5,631,020 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten
Peter Thiel on why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure “This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.” PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives: “PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.” “You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber: “Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.” And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace: “You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.” Source: Mercatus Center (Apr 2015)
Startup Archive596,197 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Archive1,470,169 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Travis Kalanick on the 2 things he looks for when investing in a startup 1. Would I cofound a company with this person? “Is the entrepreneur that sits across the table from me somebody that - either right at this moment in time or I see has the potential to be - somebody that I could see being a cofounder of myself? Somebody I could get excited about working with.” 2. Does this startup make for a good cocktail story? “Is your idea disruptive? Does it shake things up? Will it make big impact? And does it make for a good cocktail story? That’s sort of a litmus test - if I tell a story, am I excited about it? Do my eyes sparkle when I tell the story of what this founder is doing?”
Startup Archive765,661 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten
![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 Archive2,423,367 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
![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 Archive1,094,303 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
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 Archive693,329 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
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 Archive1,506,777 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
![Jensen Huang on how he motivates employees who are already rich “How do you keep your employees motivated and energetic when they’ve probably become richer than they ever expected?” the moderator asks Jensen. Jensen replies: “My direct reports include 55 people. I write no reviews for any of them. I give them constant [feedback], and they provide the same to me… Many of our executives are paid the same—exactly to the dollar. I know it’s weird. And I don’t do 1-on-1s with any of them, unless they need me. Then I’ll drop everything for them. I never have meetings with them alone, and they never hear me say anything to them that is only for them to know. There’s not one piece of information that I secretly tell ‘E-staff’ that I don’t tell the rest of the company. That way, our company is designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, for people to be empowered by what they do—not what they know. So that’s the architecture of our company.” With respect to motivation, Jensen explains: “The answer for that is my behavior. How do I celebrate and talk about success? How do I celebrate failure? How do I talk about setbacks? Every single day, I’m looking for opportunities to instill the culture of the company — What is important? What’s not important? What’s the definition of good? How do you compare yourself to good? How do you think about good? How do you think about the journey? How do you think about results? All of that, all day long.” Source: Stanford University (Mar 2024)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2100552849516044743/amplify_video_thumb/2099824765930229760/img/tAdEt2ytXnBYCu7D.jpg)
Jensen Huang on how he motivates employees who are already rich “How do you keep your employees motivated and energetic when they’ve probably become richer than they ever expected?” the moderator asks Jensen. Jensen replies: “My direct reports include 55 people. I write no reviews for any of them. I give them constant [feedback], and they provide the same to me… Many of our executives are paid the same—exactly to the dollar. I know it’s weird. And I don’t do 1-on-1s with any of them, unless they need me. Then I’ll drop everything for them. I never have meetings with them alone, and they never hear me say anything to them that is only for them to know. There’s not one piece of information that I secretly tell ‘E-staff’ that I don’t tell the rest of the company. That way, our company is designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, for people to be empowered by what they do—not what they know. So that’s the architecture of our company.” With respect to motivation, Jensen explains: “The answer for that is my behavior. How do I celebrate and talk about success? How do I celebrate failure? How do I talk about setbacks? Every single day, I’m looking for opportunities to instill the culture of the company — What is important? What’s not important? What’s the definition of good? How do you compare yourself to good? How do you think about good? How do you think about the journey? How do you think about results? All of that, all day long.” Source: Stanford University (Mar 2024)
Startup Archive132,483 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Marc Andreessen on what makes Elon impossible to compete with “I’m not aware of another CEO who operates the way he does.” Marc believes you have to go back in history to the industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s to find founders comparable to Elon Musk (e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt). “Those guys ran very similar to the way Elon runs things… The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does, to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it, and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work to deeply understand the issues. And then be the lead problem solver in the organization. Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem the company’s having that week and he fixes it. He does that every week for 52 weeks in a row and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year.” Marc juxtaposes this process with more conventional CEOs who respond to problems with planning, meetings, and reports. The other crucial factor in Elon’s success that Marc points to is his ability to attract incredible talent: “Many of the best people in the world want to work with him because if you work with Elon the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance. And he is going to know who you are and what you’ve done. He’s going to know what you’ve done this week and if you’re underperforming. And he may fire you in the meeting if you’re not carrying your weight. But if you are as committed to the company as he is, and hard working and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives.” Marc recalls a famous line from somebody who joined SpaceX from another aerospace company and said, “It’s like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Everybody around me is so absolutely competent.” And lastly, as Marc argues, Elon’s technical ability is another competitive advantage versus non-technical CEOs: “When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck… He’s not asking the VP of Engineering to ask the Director of Engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that’s to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn’t do that. What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from especially the technical people who he works with. They’re just like, ‘Wow, if I’m up against a problem I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and help me figure this out.’” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)
Startup Archive1,572,221 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Marc Andreessen on what makes Elon impossible to compete with “I’m not aware of another CEO who operates the way he does.” Marc believes you have to go back in history to the industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s to find founders comparable to Elon Musk (e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt). “Those guys ran very similar to the way Elon runs things… The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does, to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it, and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work to deeply understand the issues. And then be the lead problem solver in the organization. Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem the company’s having that week and he fixes it. He does that every week for 52 weeks in a row and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year.” Marc juxtaposes this process with more conventional CEOs who respond to problems with planning, meetings, and reports. The other crucial factor in Elon’s success that Marc points to is his ability to attract incredible talent: “Many of the best people in the world want to work with him because if you work with Elon the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance. And he is going to know who you are and what you’ve done. He’s going to know what you’ve done this week and if you’re underperforming. And he may fire you in the meeting if you’re not carrying your weight. But if you are as committed to the company as he is, and hard working and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives.” Marc recalls a famous line from somebody who joined SpaceX from another aerospace company and said, “It’s like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Everybody around me is so absolutely competent.” And lastly, as Marc argues, Elon’s technical ability is another competitive advantage versus non-technical CEOs: “When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck… He’s not asking the VP of Engineering to ask the Director of Engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that’s to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn’t do that. What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from especially the technical people who he works with. They’re just like, ‘Wow, if I’m up against a problem I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and help me figure this out.’” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)
Startup Archive1,668,683 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Palmer Luckey explains why founders need to “make themselves obsolete” “When I started Oculus, I thought I was really good at everything… But I was only the best at a lot of things in our company because I had been negligent in my hiring process.” For example, Palmer was the best optical engineer in the company, but he realized that wasn’t something to be proud of. “That was a failure. I failed my company and my investors by making myself a critical dependency for any of our products. And the reality is I’m actually not a very good optical engineer. I was just the best at Oculus.” Once you start scaling your company, Palmer advises founders: “You have to make it your goal to make yourself obsolete, even at the things you like doing.. And that was really tough for me at Oculus because I realized I was basically playing house. I was sitting around doing things that way better people could be doing faster, more effectively.” He continues: “I give my managers the same mindset. I say, ‘Hey, your job is not to do things. It is to get them done in the best way possible. If that means you do it, then you need to do it… If that means that somebody else needs to get hired to do it, that’s what you need to do—even if you like doing it.’”
Startup Archive96,254 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Archive697,202 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
Frank Slootman: “Being a CEO is a highly confrontational role” “I’ve gone one record a few times and people have taken me to task on it, when I’ve said that being a CEO is a highly confrontational role. But they think that ‘confrontational’ means I’m grabbing people by the lapels and slamming them against the wall and yelling. That’s not what I mean by confrontation.” The former CEO of Snowflake and ServiceNow continues: “Confrontation is about confronting issues and situations. When you see something that is either not good, not good enough, or can be better, you need to talk to the team and people responsible to bring them along in your thinking.” In Frank’s view, the framing should be: “this is why I am saying this, what do you think?” The goal of the conversation is to help them see the problems you’re seeing. You should be driving them to a “higher level of aspiration,” he explains. “I often start the conversation with, ‘How do you think things are going?’ I’m not telling them ‘you suck,’ or ‘things are terrible.’ Let them talk. And then you can say, ‘Well what about this?’ And all of a sudden, the perspective has opened up and changed. So the challenge is bringing them along in your thinking — then it’s not confrontational… Obviously there’s finesse and subtlety. You’re dealing with people. You don’t want to destroy them. You want to build them, not bring them down.” You need to help them grow: “People have a tendency to go sideways. They rinse and repeat and keep doing the same things. You can’t in a high-growth company. You need to become a different version of yourself. I’m trying to help them think through that. What does that look like? What does your organization look like a year from now versus what it looks like today?… In other words, stimulate their thinking. Challenge them to think about what they should do differently next week. Is that confrontation? Yes it is, but it’s dressed up in a way that it engages people.” Frank believes founders should be doing this every single week. Source: Foundation Capital (Nov 2024)
Startup Archive207,201 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
![Telegram founder Pavel Durov on what separates A Players from B Players “I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in productivity,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov begins. He gives an example of two Android engineers building an app that are having a hard time hitting deadlines: “You think, ‘I probably have to hire a third engineer.’ But then you notice that one of [the engineers] is really weird — falling behind schedule, complaining, not assuming responsibility — and you ask, ‘What if I just fired this person?’ Then you fire this person, and in a few weeks you realize you never needed a third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and problems than he solved. It’s so counterintuitive because in developing tech projects, you tend to think that you just throw more people into something and things get solved miraculously.” Pavel continues: “The other thing that people don’t realize is how demotivating working with a B Player is. Everyone can tell if the other engineer they’re working with is really competent. If the person is asking the wrong questions and they keep lagging behind, at a certain point if you’re an A Player, you get get this dissatisfaction and feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential and accomplish what you’re really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you (or pretending to work next to you).” Pavel reflects on what it is exactly that separates these B Players from A Players: “In some cases it’s not because the person is lazy . . . It’s not about experience. More often it’s about natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it’s just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability. So for people who do have this ability, it’s an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they’re responsible for.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2025)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1980240080565641668/amplify_video_thumb/1980237768711192576/img/Tb9OunRszHD_0SCt.jpg)
Telegram founder Pavel Durov on what separates A Players from B Players “I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in productivity,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov begins. He gives an example of two Android engineers building an app that are having a hard time hitting deadlines: “You think, ‘I probably have to hire a third engineer.’ But then you notice that one of [the engineers] is really weird — falling behind schedule, complaining, not assuming responsibility — and you ask, ‘What if I just fired this person?’ Then you fire this person, and in a few weeks you realize you never needed a third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and problems than he solved. It’s so counterintuitive because in developing tech projects, you tend to think that you just throw more people into something and things get solved miraculously.” Pavel continues: “The other thing that people don’t realize is how demotivating working with a B Player is. Everyone can tell if the other engineer they’re working with is really competent. If the person is asking the wrong questions and they keep lagging behind, at a certain point if you’re an A Player, you get get this dissatisfaction and feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential and accomplish what you’re really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you (or pretending to work next to you).” Pavel reflects on what it is exactly that separates these B Players from A Players: “In some cases it’s not because the person is lazy . . . It’s not about experience. More often it’s about natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it’s just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability. So for people who do have this ability, it’s an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they’re responsible for.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2025)
Startup Archive709,472 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Steve Wozniak explains why he gave $10 million of his own shares to early Apple employees after the IPO When Apple went public in 1980, Woz’s 4 million shares were worth some $116M, and he gave away $10M of them to early Apple employees. As he explains in today’s clip: “There were five of us that really ran the company for the first three years, and we pretty much had almost all the stock. So when we went public, I didn’t feel right about it. I felt that everybody who’d been around us was a part of helping.” He continues: “I came from Hewlett Packard and they had profit sharing every quarter. A certain amount of the profit was given to the employees of stock because you as an employee should feel like an owner of your company. And I felt that so strongly. So I gave away a lot of my stock to almost everybody in the company in marketing and engineering jobs… Then I gave huge amounts to a few key people—young people that were in high school and helped enthuse me and helped write code with me in the early days. I wouldn’t have gotten to where I got to without them. And I felt they deserved a part of it too.” Video source: PHP Agency, Inc. (2011)
Startup Archive608,665 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten