Startup Archive
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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 Archive32,798,455 Aufrufe • vor 9 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 Archive13,504,332 Aufrufe • vor 8 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 Archive30,760,710 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
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 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 2 Monaten
![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 Archive5,630,677 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
![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 Archive1,094,111 Aufrufe • vor 5 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 9 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 Archive692,498 Aufrufe • vor 3 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 Archive2,421,727 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
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 Archive207,061 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
![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 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 Archive1,506,433 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
![Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to interview and reference check new hires Brian’s first piece of advice comes from Steve Jobs: “Start with the results and work backwards to the people. Most people start with resumes. They start with brands — ‘Oh, this person worked at Google.’ But you should actually ask yourself: What products do I admire? And then who built those products?” With respect to actually interviewing them, Brian’s first tip is to ask follow-up questions: “Ask them to explain how they did something, and then the key is to ask two follow-ups. You never want the first answer. You always want the third answer. And if people don’t know what they’re talking about, they struggle. They might be able to follow-up, but the second follow-up, they become absent of details.” But more important than interviewing, Brian argues, is references: “I prioritize references over interviewing, especially with executives who have more experience BSing you than you have experience detecting their BS.” Brian recalls that Andreessen Horowitz would tell him to do 8 hours of reference checks per employee: “[That’s] probably over the top, but you should probably spend as much time referencing as you do hiring.” He also believes the CEO should interview and reference check new hires as long as possible. Brian interviewed the first 400 people at Airbnb, but he wishes he interviewed longer. And with respect to tactics for reference checks, Brian offers the following advice: “A lot of people are polite. They’re afraid of the feedback getting back. So the first thing to say when you start the call is that everything is off the record — and it should be off the record. It should never be attributed to them. The more it’s unattributed to them, the more honest they’re going to be.” On this topic, Brian recommends avoiding disqualifying questions: “A lot of people don’t want to say somebody sucks or is not good… Say, ‘Okay, separate from this topic, I just want to know who’s the best person you’ve ever worked with?’ Do they say the person’s name you just asked about? They usually tell the truth and if they don’t say that person’s name, they’re not the best, right?” And then ask for specifics: “They said they’re amazing — well why are they amazing? What would you point to? If they have no specifics, maybe they weren’t really good… Then ask questions like, ‘Okay, what do I need to watch out for if I were to hire them?’ or ‘What’s the one area of development you would give them?’ If you say that, they have to tell you something because they’ll feel like they’re not thoughtful enough…. And then you ask them at the end who else you should talk to: ‘Can you give me two more names?’ And then you use that to build a network.” Brian believes recruiting should be more like building a talent network than a sales pipeline.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2081769078298186086/amplify_video_thumb/2081351362323828736/img/ntOky5sAlm8gmp7s.jpg)
Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to interview and reference check new hires Brian’s first piece of advice comes from Steve Jobs: “Start with the results and work backwards to the people. Most people start with resumes. They start with brands — ‘Oh, this person worked at Google.’ But you should actually ask yourself: What products do I admire? And then who built those products?” With respect to actually interviewing them, Brian’s first tip is to ask follow-up questions: “Ask them to explain how they did something, and then the key is to ask two follow-ups. You never want the first answer. You always want the third answer. And if people don’t know what they’re talking about, they struggle. They might be able to follow-up, but the second follow-up, they become absent of details.” But more important than interviewing, Brian argues, is references: “I prioritize references over interviewing, especially with executives who have more experience BSing you than you have experience detecting their BS.” Brian recalls that Andreessen Horowitz would tell him to do 8 hours of reference checks per employee: “[That’s] probably over the top, but you should probably spend as much time referencing as you do hiring.” He also believes the CEO should interview and reference check new hires as long as possible. Brian interviewed the first 400 people at Airbnb, but he wishes he interviewed longer. And with respect to tactics for reference checks, Brian offers the following advice: “A lot of people are polite. They’re afraid of the feedback getting back. So the first thing to say when you start the call is that everything is off the record — and it should be off the record. It should never be attributed to them. The more it’s unattributed to them, the more honest they’re going to be.” On this topic, Brian recommends avoiding disqualifying questions: “A lot of people don’t want to say somebody sucks or is not good… Say, ‘Okay, separate from this topic, I just want to know who’s the best person you’ve ever worked with?’ Do they say the person’s name you just asked about? They usually tell the truth and if they don’t say that person’s name, they’re not the best, right?” And then ask for specifics: “They said they’re amazing — well why are they amazing? What would you point to? If they have no specifics, maybe they weren’t really good… Then ask questions like, ‘Okay, what do I need to watch out for if I were to hire them?’ or ‘What’s the one area of development you would give them?’ If you say that, they have to tell you something because they’ll feel like they’re not thoughtful enough…. And then you ask them at the end who else you should talk to: ‘Can you give me two more names?’ And then you use that to build a network.” Brian believes recruiting should be more like building a talent network than a sales pipeline.
Startup Archive146,015 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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)
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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)
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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 Archive1,572,119 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 Archive1,666,633 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
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 Archive175,614 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
![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 Archive198,971 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten