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At a $159B valuation, how does Stripe determine what they should build vs. buy? John Collison (John Collison): “I remember asking Aaron Aaron Levie of Box how product prioritization should work. He was like, ‘Make a big list of all the product things you want to do, & then... do the things that'll be most impactful.’” “And you're like, ‘Thanks. Sounds very actionable.’” “But it's a little bit like that on the build vs. buy. You should buy the companies where you're better off buying them than building it in-house. That is where all the taste & nuance is.” “Something that's really in the core of Stripe, we're probably more likely to be good at doing it ourselves. Something that is a brand-new muscle, like token routing, I trust Stripe could learn to get good at that, but it would take much longer.” “In a new & really fast-evolving market, oftentimes by the time you build your internal efforts, it'll be a little bit out of date.”show more

Molly O’Shea

76,462 subscribers

33,876 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen •via X (Twitter)

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3 Kommentare

Profilbild von Aaron Levie

Aaron Levievor 5 Tagen

@collision Always available for profound startup advice 🫡

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bobbyvor 5 Tagen

@collision @levie the privy and bridge buys make a lot more sense after hearing this

Profilbild von Relax_to_Rich

Relax_to_Richvor 5 Tagen

@collision @levie Buying looks quicker, but integrating outside teams and tech carries plenty of hidden costs.

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The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

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Cursor CEO Michael Truell: Programming in the future might not mean programming with an AI helper, but in a new language entirely. "There is a future version of the world where the way you interact with AI is a little bit less like it's a human helper that you're delegating work to... and instead, it's a little bit more of an advance in compiler or interpreter technology." "It can lead you to a world where programming languages actually change. They can start to be a little bit more about what you want and a little bit less about how you do it." "There is a world where direct manipulation of the UI starts to play a little bit more into it." Michael Truell with Patrick Collison

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Kobe Bryant cold-called Jony Ive, Oprah, and Nike's CEO to learn how they think: "I just cold-call people. Absolutely. I just cold-call people and pick their brain about stuff. Some of the questions I'll ask will seem really, really simple and stupid, quite honestly, for them. But if I don't know, I don't know. I have to ask. I want to learn more about how they build their business, how they run their companies, how they see the world." On who he calls: "We could start in the Nike family. I cold-call Mark Parker all the time. Johnny Ive. Dan Wieden. Oprah Winfrey. Arianna Huffington. Hillary Swank. It just goes on and on and on." Kobe explains why he called Jony Ive: "He's obviously unique in what he does. I want to know how does he view product? How does he view the process of designing product? How does he know when he has the product exactly where he wants it to be? How is he seeing the world differently than everybody else who's manufacturing hardware? There's something going on from the moment he sees something to when it goes into his brain, that's a different process than other designers. I'm curious to know what that is." Kobe visited Apple to learn: "I spent the day there, talking with Johnny, picking his brain about product. What makes them who they are? And why? Once you have the passion the thing that you're passionate about, now you can look at other people, other entities, works of art, and draw things from that to help you be better at what you do. By looking for those common denominators." Jony Ive asked Kobe the same questions in return: "Johnny wanted to know, how do I prepare? How do I study? How do I view the game? How do you build your game? My response is much like the way he builds products. You think sequentially. You look at the end result of what you want to create. But in order to create that, there are so many little things that go into this massive entity or device." Kobe continues: "It's no different than building my basketball game. You start with: where do you want your game to be? What would make your game most unstoppable or hard to deal with? Now you work backwards from there. You start building it one piece at a time. One move at a time. One counter at a time. There's a lot of similarities." On building his company, Kobe Inc: "We're just cranking away every day, building out the internal structure. Communicating the culture internally. Where are we going? Building out that model, that plan. We also don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. I have this vision of where I'd like us to go, but it's important for us to go one step at a time." On what he'd tell other athletes about marketing: "For me, doing that, it seems like I should really just do it for free. Because what I'm going to tell them is: be yourself. That's it. Be you. There's no gimmick. You don't have to contrive anything. Who are you? Where are you today? What is your story? Where does that come from? Then all you're doing is communicating that story to the public." Kobe reflects on LeBron going back to Cleveland: "It depends how you shape the story. You stay in Miami, there's a great story you can mold around that. You go to Cleveland, there's a way you can mold that too. It really just depends on what his personal truth is. I think he communicated his truth extremely well, and that's what you have to stick to."

Kobe Bryant cold-called Jony Ive, Oprah, and Nike's CEO to learn how they think: "I just cold-call people. Absolutely. I just cold-call people and pick their brain about stuff. Some of the questions I'll ask will seem really, really simple and stupid, quite honestly, for them. But if I don't know, I don't know. I have to ask. I want to learn more about how they build their business, how they run their companies, how they see the world." On who he calls: "We could start in the Nike family. I cold-call Mark Parker all the time. Johnny Ive. Dan Wieden. Oprah Winfrey. Arianna Huffington. Hillary Swank. It just goes on and on and on." Kobe explains why he called Jony Ive: "He's obviously unique in what he does. I want to know how does he view product? How does he view the process of designing product? How does he know when he has the product exactly where he wants it to be? How is he seeing the world differently than everybody else who's manufacturing hardware? There's something going on from the moment he sees something to when it goes into his brain, that's a different process than other designers. I'm curious to know what that is." Kobe visited Apple to learn: "I spent the day there, talking with Johnny, picking his brain about product. What makes them who they are? And why? Once you have the passion the thing that you're passionate about, now you can look at other people, other entities, works of art, and draw things from that to help you be better at what you do. By looking for those common denominators." Jony Ive asked Kobe the same questions in return: "Johnny wanted to know, how do I prepare? How do I study? How do I view the game? How do you build your game? My response is much like the way he builds products. You think sequentially. You look at the end result of what you want to create. But in order to create that, there are so many little things that go into this massive entity or device." Kobe continues: "It's no different than building my basketball game. You start with: where do you want your game to be? What would make your game most unstoppable or hard to deal with? Now you work backwards from there. You start building it one piece at a time. One move at a time. One counter at a time. There's a lot of similarities." On building his company, Kobe Inc: "We're just cranking away every day, building out the internal structure. Communicating the culture internally. Where are we going? Building out that model, that plan. We also don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. I have this vision of where I'd like us to go, but it's important for us to go one step at a time." On what he'd tell other athletes about marketing: "For me, doing that, it seems like I should really just do it for free. Because what I'm going to tell them is: be yourself. That's it. Be you. There's no gimmick. You don't have to contrive anything. Who are you? Where are you today? What is your story? Where does that come from? Then all you're doing is communicating that story to the public." Kobe reflects on LeBron going back to Cleveland: "It depends how you shape the story. You stay in Miami, there's a great story you can mold around that. You go to Cleveland, there's a way you can mold that too. It really just depends on what his personal truth is. I think he communicated his truth extremely well, and that's what you have to stick to."

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John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

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Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Startup Archive

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Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

45,833 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)

Startup Archive

32,350 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Coinbase CEO Explains “Reverse Prompting” and the Rise of the AI CEO Brian Armstrong: “One of the big pushes we made in the last year was we got our own internal hosted AI model that was connected to all of our data sources, right?” “So it's like every Slack message, every Google doc, Salesforce data, Confluence, you know.” “So now the data is all aggregated and I've started to ask it really… it's not just like prompting it, ‘Hey, can you write this kind of memo for me,’ or something.” “I'm asking these AI agents now, ‘As CEO, what should I be aware of in the company that I might not be aware of?’ And it'll tell me, ‘Did you know that there's actually disagreement on this team about the strategy?’ And I was like, actually, I didn't know that.” “This is like reverse prompting. So instead of telling the AI agent what you want it to do, you ask it what you should be thinking more about.” @jason: “It's a mentor. It's a coach.” Brian: “Yeah. Like, what could make me a better CEO? And it's like, ‘Well, I looked at how you spent your time in the last quarter and here's how you said that you wanted to spend it, but you actually spent 32% of your time on this instead of 20%.’” “I've asked it other questions like, ‘What's the thing that I changed my mind on the most over the last year?’ Things like that.” “It'll prompt you with information you should be thinking about instead of the other way around.” Thanks to our partner for making this happen!: Our episode is sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE 🏛.

Coinbase CEO Explains “Reverse Prompting” and the Rise of the AI CEO Brian Armstrong: “One of the big pushes we made in the last year was we got our own internal hosted AI model that was connected to all of our data sources, right?” “So it's like every Slack message, every Google doc, Salesforce data, Confluence, you know.” “So now the data is all aggregated and I've started to ask it really… it's not just like prompting it, ‘Hey, can you write this kind of memo for me,’ or something.” “I'm asking these AI agents now, ‘As CEO, what should I be aware of in the company that I might not be aware of?’ And it'll tell me, ‘Did you know that there's actually disagreement on this team about the strategy?’ And I was like, actually, I didn't know that.” “This is like reverse prompting. So instead of telling the AI agent what you want it to do, you ask it what you should be thinking more about.” @jason: “It's a mentor. It's a coach.” Brian: “Yeah. Like, what could make me a better CEO? And it's like, ‘Well, I looked at how you spent your time in the last quarter and here's how you said that you wanted to spend it, but you actually spent 32% of your time on this instead of 20%.’” “I've asked it other questions like, ‘What's the thing that I changed my mind on the most over the last year?’ Things like that.” “It'll prompt you with information you should be thinking about instead of the other way around.” Thanks to our partner for making this happen!: Our episode is sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE 🏛.

The All-In Podcast

80,524 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Trump goes on unintelligible rant: “Google, nobody called from Google. One of the things like doing a show like yours, your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you're doing right now with me and if I do a good job, they're gonna vote for me, they're gonna vote for me because it's not just on Fox, it's on Fox is a smaller part of it. You're on all over this, those little beautiful cell phones you're on, you're all over the place. You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad. They've been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is gonna be close to shut down”

Headquarters

2,694,034 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."

Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."

The All-In Podcast

407,511 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Founder Mode

39,005 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code): "Latent demand is the single most important principle in product, especially in Facebook's successful products. Every single one has an element of latent demand. For example, Marketplace. It came from this observation that if you looked at Facebook groups at the time, 40% of the posts were buying and selling stuff. Facebook groups were not designed for commerce, but that's what people were using it for. It's kind of cool. Like, you design this product in a way that can be hacked. It can be abused by users a little bit, and then you look at the data, you see how they're abusing it, and then you build a product around it. I think Facebook dating was pretty similar. I think the observation was something like 60% of profile views were people of the opposite gender that were not friends with each other, kind of like creeping on each other. The principle in product is you can never get people to do something they do not yet do. You can find the intent that they have, and then you can steer it to let them better kind of capitalize on that intent." Boris Cherny

Ryan Peterman

76,877 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Founder of Bridge Zach Abrams tells a Stripe acquisition story: “I walked into Stripe to meet John Collison and Patrick Collison. First thing John says: 'Can I tell you a joke? What’s the difference between a bank and Tether? … One of them is this big institution that holds a ton of money and you have no idea where it is, and if you want your money back you might not be able to… and the other one is a stablecoin.’”

Founder of Bridge Zach Abrams tells a Stripe acquisition story: “I walked into Stripe to meet John Collison and Patrick Collison. First thing John says: 'Can I tell you a joke? What’s the difference between a bank and Tether? … One of them is this big institution that holds a ton of money and you have no idea where it is, and if you want your money back you might not be able to… and the other one is a stablecoin.’”

Bankless

59,908 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr