Confluent just sold for $11 billion. Jay Kreps built it by learning a...

Uploaded: 2026-03-26T18:12:16.000Z
Duration: PT4476.300S
Channel: Brett Berson

1:50

Ben Horowitz on the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video source: UC Berkeley (2009)

Startup Archive

36,789 views • 5 months ago

1:11

The labs want to rent you intelligence. Palantir is building the stack for you to own it. “We are building a stack that is fully aligned with you capturing and maintaining the alpha of your business. Every single technology decision we are making is aligned with that.“ That is AI sovereignty. We have the product. We have the scale. We know how to do it. Now we take the market.

Chad Wahlquist

43,085 views • 1 month ago

1:50

Ben Horowitz explains the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video Source: UC Berkeley

Startup Archive

77,268 views • 2 years ago

2:43

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

17,333 views • 7 months ago

0:52

Sequoia founder Don Valentine: “The art of storytelling is incredibly important” “The art of storytelling is incredibly important. And many—maybe even most of the entrepreneurs who come to talk to us can’t tell the story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories.” The founder of Sequoia founder explains that the story is how you explain what you want to do, how long it’s going to take, who the competition is, and how much money you need. a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz shared a similar view in a 2014 Forbes interview: “Storytelling is the most underrated skill… Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy.” He continues: “The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we’re doing and why is it important?… You can have a great product, but a compelling story puts the company into motion. If you don’t have a great story it’s hard to get people motivated to join you, to work on the product, and to get people to invest in the product.” This is the job of the founder and CEO: “The CEO must be the keeper of the story. The CEO is responsible for getting the story right, that it’s up to date, compelling, and can move the hearts of men and women. That’s the fundamental responsibility of the chief executive… The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better you make the strategy better.” Video source: Stanford Graduate School of Business (2010)

Startup Archive

258,577 views • 1 year ago

2:15

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 views • 7 months ago

0:42

Renowned investor and philanthropist Mohnish Pabrai on the single worst reason to start a company: "When we embark on a startup, we should never do a startup to make money. It's the worst reason to start a company." It's a bold claim, especially in a world where valuations, funding rounds, and exit strategies dominate the startup conversation. So if money shouldn't be the goal, what should be? "The purpose of business is not to make money. The purpose of business is to deliver an incredible product or service to humanity." The distinction matters. Founders who chase profit first tend to optimise for the wrong things, while founders who chase genuine value creation tend to build something people actually want. And when you get that right, the financial reward takes care of itself: "If you do that, the money is a side effect. It'll happen. We don't need to focus on it." Mohnish Pabrai leaves aspiring founders with one essential question to ask themselves before starting anything: "Do we have a product or a service that we are thinking about that we could bring into this world that is going to improve the world in some way?" That's the filter. Not "can this make money?" but "can this make a difference?"

Big Brain Business

29,118 views • 5 months ago

1:53

Marc Andreessen: Most successful companies started “product first” “There are products that become companies, and then there are companies that come up with a product. One of the interesting things over the years is that many of the most successful technology franchises were products first, way before they ever became companies.” In this talk, Marc gives a few examples: • His team at the University of Illinois worked on the research project that became Netscape for three years before it became a company • Bill Gates and Paul Allen were deep into PCs before there was a software business • Jobs and Wozniak built the first Apple computer as hobbyists • Mark Zuckerberg was running Facebook out of his dorm room before he ever thought of starting a company • Twitter was a side project at the failed podcasting app Odeo Marc believes that this “product becomes a company” template is successful because “it’s a demonstration that the product has to exist. The market needs the product so badly that somebody actually built it and deployed it and you can actually see evidence that people want it before there was an economic motivation to do so.” He contrasts this with the failure cases he often sees when entrepreneurs try to figure out the idea after starting a company. “It’s very easy in that process to fool yourself into believing that there’s a market because you want to find something and you have a very strong motivation to come up with an answer. It’s hard to go through that process for three months and then say, ‘you know what, we can’t come up with any good ideas.’” There are of course there exceptions. Marc gives Hewlett Packard as an example. But that’s more the exception than the rule. As Marc explains: “The moral of the story is it has to be a really good idea. That often will be an idea that is preexisting at the time you decide to start a company. And if it isn’t, be really careful because you’re walking on sharp rocks at that point with a high risk of falling off the cliff into the ocean.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2010)

Startup Archive

35,823 views • 1 year ago

2:06

Steve Jobs on how he learned to run a company: Question: "You're 21. You're a big success. You know, you've just sort of done it by the seat of your pants. You don't have any particular training in this. How do you learn to run a company?" Steve Jobs: "You know, throughout the years in business, I found something, which was that I always ask why you do things. And the answers you invariably get are, oh, that's just the way it's done. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That's what I found. I'll give you an example. When we were building our Apple I's in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accounting had this notion of a standard cost, where you'd kind of set a standard cost and at the end of a quarter you'd adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, well, why do we do this? And the answer was, well, that's just the way it's done. And after about six months of digging into this, what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don't really have good enough controls to know how much it costs. So you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don't know how much it costs is because your information systems aren't good enough. But nobody said it that way. And so later on, when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost to the second. So in business, a lot of things are, I call it folklore. They're done because they were done yesterday and the day before. And so what that means is if you're willing to sort of ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It's not the hardest thing in the world. It's not rocket science. It's not rocket science."

Founder Mode

32,290 views • 7 months ago

2:32

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

Startup Archive

18,388 views • 9 months ago

1:51

Lex Fridman asked Elon Musk what the meaning of life is. His answer was not what anyone expected. We do not know, he said. And that is exactly why we need to expand consciousness. Not to find the answer. To ask better questions. He believes the universe is full of things we cannot even formulate yet. We are like children trying to understand calculus. The problem is not that calculus is too hard. The problem is that we have not developed enough to know it exists. Consciousness, to him, is a tool for exploring the universe. The more of it we have, the better our questions become. The better our questions become, the closer we get to understanding what any of this means. This is why he builds rockets and brain interfaces and AI. Not because he has the answers. Because he thinks the only way to get them is to expand what we are capable of thinking. Most people spend their lives looking for meaning. Elon is building the tools to look for it at a scale we cannot yet imagine.

Shruti

16,844 views • 2 months ago

0:55

"There are two types of coaches, those who do nothing and those who do a lot of damage. I prefer to be one of those who do nothing. The game belongs to the players, always ⚽. You can introduce them to a certain strategy that we have to implement, and they have to be convinced that they can do it. Then, there is the quality of the player, there is the attitude, the commitment. What a coach can do is make the players understand what teamwork is 🤝. Because we have the quality, Bayern Munich has it, Paris Saint Germain has it. Where is the difference? Where do you want to put this quality? If you want to put it in for yourself, it's not right ❌. If you put it in for the team, you can win 🏆."

Keepitonthedeck

22,374 views • 1 year ago

1:05

Affirm CEO Max Levchin on why PayPal produced so many founders: "As we were interviewing certainly the early team and even the later team, we kept on selecting for entrepreneurs. One of the stock questions I would ask was, 'So what are you going to do after PayPal?'" "The answer that I welcomed the most was, 'Oh, this is the last one. I'm going to start my own afterwards.' If you're coming in here to get your final graduate degree in entrepreneurship, of course we'd love to have you." "That's why so many people that came out of PayPal proceeded to start companies. A hot second after we all dispersed, YouTube and Yelp and... LinkedIn. That was not an accident. We were attracting entrepreneurs by design." Max Levchin

a16z

57,864 views • 10 days ago

1:53

Chamath: "Nvidia is not doing what's in the best interest of the United States." 🇺🇸🇨🇳 "I think we can all do the math. About 47% of all of NVIDIA's revenue goes to China and Chinese-related countries." "And I think when you peel back this onion, what you will find is a whole raft of companies that were stood up to buy these Nvidia GPUs to essentially act as a waystation for China." "And I think that is the big problem." "Let's have a thought starter: if 47% of all of the AI capability and horsepower is being shipped to three Asian countries, where do you think the apps that require that amount of horsepower live?" "Is there a Cursor of Bhutan that we did not know? Is there a great shopping app in Cambodia that's come out of nowhere, that's AI powered?" "I think the answer is no." "Every single time we have an advance in the United States, how is it that Alibaba shows up with something incredible? DeepSeek shows up with something better?" "At every turn and at every step of AI, they are at the same rate or one step ahead." "To be honest with you, I think the real problem that we have is that Nvidia is not doing what is in the best interest of the United States." "You have a American company that has been working around the guidelines at every turn to try to land silicon into the hands of China." "Late last year, they introduced this thing called the H20 that was explicitly designed for China and to be compliant with US rules at the time." "Which again, gives these guys substantial performance." "This is a case where (Nvidia) has plausible deniability. I sell something to a Singaporean registered company? Plausible deniability." "What am I supposed to do? You can't expect me to audit it. I think that's what NVIDIA's answer will be to this question." "But what is the real expectation? At a minimum, the United States should have a mechanism to understand it." "It is implausible that if you did one or two layers of work, you would not find that most of this traffic is being used by Chinese organizations."

The All-In Podcast

910,450 views • 1 year ago

2:26

Every company says they have Forward-Deployed Engineers now. ElevenLabs CEO and former Palantir Deployment Strategist Mati Staniszewski gives one of the best explanations of what an FDE is—and says companies are missing the key piece of what actually makes FDEs valuable: “In our case, FDEs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are deeply embedded in understanding what the roadmap of the product is.” “You want all the FDEs to actually solve the customer problem and stretch your product in that direction. But the second thing you want them to do is bring any of that knowledge back to the product, so the product becomes better for the next generation of companies building on top of it. I feel like the second part is frequently missed.” “The beauty of that is—everybody benefits because you work with one customer, learn, and you bring that into the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having their product optimized for better work.” “The domain expertise they have is still theirs. They can win based on their domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, and can be reusable.”

David Senra

295,601 views • 4 days ago

1:27

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

David Senra

27,151 views • 5 months ago

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