Video wird geladen...

Video konnte nicht geladen werden

Beim Laden dieses Videos ist ein Problem aufgetreten. Dies könnte an einem vorübergehenden Netzwerkproblem liegen oder das Video ist möglicherweise nicht verfügbar.

Founders and VCs fall into the same growth trap year after year: A startup launches in a niche market. Early traction looks great, everyone’s cheering, and capital chases the curve. Then the curve flattens—because the total addressable market (TAM) is already tapped out. Growth stalls, morale tanks, and the... company fades. "The walking dead". However, the truth is, the growth treadmill never stops. If you raise venture money, you’re stepping on a treadmill that can’t slow down: • $10M in revenue this year? Next year has to be $20M. • $100M this year? Next year needs to be $150M. • Hit $1B? Now shoot for $1.2B—minimum. That pace only works when your market is huge and continues to expand. Otherwise, momentum dies the moment you hit the ceiling. Take a certain company that raised $15M+ to build a...precision tea infuser. The early signs were great: • Design awards • Media buzz • 500K servings brewed across 20 countries But most casual tea drinkers didn’t want a $999 machine, and true tea lovers preferred hand-brewing. The TAM was tiny. Growth flat-lined, and the company shut down in 2017, not because the product was bad, but because the ceiling was low. Whether you’re building the company or investing in it, the growth trap looks the same: early numbers sparkle, emotions spike, and rational TAM math goes quiet. Here’s how to keep your footing on either side of the table: Founders: • Decide upfront: is it a lifestyle business (great!) or venture-scale machine? • If it's venture-scale, remember revenue must compound aggressively every single year. • Validate the ceiling, not just initial demand. VCs: • Don’t get hypnotised by the first uptick. • Pressure-test the TAM and the speed at which it caps out. In other words - if you concentrate on building a company that can truly have world impact - you'll escape the gravity of the growth trap. But incremental ideas simply will not. It's what people call "a feature not a product". Early traction is proof you’ve built something people want. It is NOT proof there’s enough headroom to keep doubling. If the honest answer to “Can this keep compounding?” is no, then change the plan—or the funding model—before the treadmill throws you off.show more

seth sternberg

6,874 subscribers

21,432 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr •via X (Twitter)

Bildung Finanzen Wissenschaft & Technologie

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

3 Kommentare

Profilbild von Grow Scale Win

Grow Scale Winvor 1 Jahr

@sethjs, this is such a common pitfall; constant innovation is key to sustaining growth.

Profilbild von TappAlpha

TappAlphavor 1 Jahr

Designed to generate daily income while capturing the growth potential of the S&P 500, $TSPY helps unlock new financial opportunities. For important information about the fund visit: #ETFs #Investing #IncomeGeneration

Profilbild von btcMGTOW

btcMGTOWvor 1 Jahr

@TheWealthLadder I no longer Trust news group when it comes to Investments. I consider every investment closer to a shitcoin scam than a real opportunity. #Bitcoin has become and is becoming the #standardInvestmentThesis. If you can't put Capital to work in a better way it stays in Bitcoin

Ähnliche Videos

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."

Patrick OShaughnessy

33,016 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Sam Altman just handed every startup founder a one-question autopsy. Altman: “If you’re building something on GPT-4 that a reasonable observer would say we’re going to steamroll you.” Not might. Not could. Going to. He said it with the calm of someone describing weather. Because to him it is weather. The model improves. Whatever was built on the old version’s weaknesses gets washed away. That is not strategy. That is erosion. And most founders are building on the erosion line. They find a gap in the current model. They wrap a product around it. They raise money. They hire. They scale. Then OpenAI releases the next version and the gap closes and the product has no reason to exist anymore. Altman: “When we just do our fundamental job, which is make the model better with every crank, then you get the ‘OpenAI killed my startup’ meme.” He is telling you directly. They are not hunting you. They are not even thinking about you. They are just improving the model. You happen to be standing where the improvement lands. That is the part founders refuse to hear. OpenAI does not need to compete with you. It just needs to keep doing exactly what it was already doing and your entire company disappears as a side effect. You are not a competitor. You are a temporary symptom of incomplete intelligence. The moment the intelligence completes you become nothing. Then Brad Lightcap delivered the cleanest diagnostic ever spoken in venture capital. Lightcap: “Ask if a 100x improvement in the model is something they’re excited about.” One question. The entire investment thesis reduced to a single binary. Does the next model make your company more powerful or does it make your company pointless. There is no middle ground. Lightcap: “We know the companies that come to us saying, ‘We want the next model. When is it coming out? I want to be the first to try it.’” These companies built something that feeds on intelligence. The smarter the model gets the more their product can do. They are not threatened by progress. They are starving for it. Then there are the companies Lightcap never hears from. The ones who go quiet when a new model drops. The ones who read the release notes like a death sentence. The ones privately praying the next generation takes longer because every improvement shrinks the ground beneath them. If you are hoping the model stays roughly where it is you have already told the market everything it needs to know about your company. You are not building on intelligence. You are building on the absence of it. Altman: “95% of the world should be betting on the latter category.” The latter category is simple. Assume the model keeps getting better at the pace it has been getting better. Build for that world. Not the world where GPT-4 is the ceiling. The world where GPT-4 is the floor and the ceiling has not been built yet. Then Altman told a story that should be framed on the wall of every startup in the country. A medical AI company came to him that morning. They were not complaining about the model. They were not worried about being replaced. They were demanding it improve faster. Altman: “Here’s how many people are dying every day you delay.” That is what alignment with the trajectory looks like. A company so deeply built on intelligence improving that every day the model stays the same is a day someone dies who did not have to. They are not building on a flaw. They are building on a future that has not arrived fast enough. That is the difference. The wrapper startup patches what the model cannot do today. The real company builds what the model will unlock tomorrow. One is running from the train. The other is laying the track. Altman told you the train is not slowing down. Lightcap told you exactly how to know which side you are on. One question. Does a 100x smarter model make you more valuable or erase you. If you had to pause before answering you already did.

Sam Altman just handed every startup founder a one-question autopsy. Altman: “If you’re building something on GPT-4 that a reasonable observer would say we’re going to steamroll you.” Not might. Not could. Going to. He said it with the calm of someone describing weather. Because to him it is weather. The model improves. Whatever was built on the old version’s weaknesses gets washed away. That is not strategy. That is erosion. And most founders are building on the erosion line. They find a gap in the current model. They wrap a product around it. They raise money. They hire. They scale. Then OpenAI releases the next version and the gap closes and the product has no reason to exist anymore. Altman: “When we just do our fundamental job, which is make the model better with every crank, then you get the ‘OpenAI killed my startup’ meme.” He is telling you directly. They are not hunting you. They are not even thinking about you. They are just improving the model. You happen to be standing where the improvement lands. That is the part founders refuse to hear. OpenAI does not need to compete with you. It just needs to keep doing exactly what it was already doing and your entire company disappears as a side effect. You are not a competitor. You are a temporary symptom of incomplete intelligence. The moment the intelligence completes you become nothing. Then Brad Lightcap delivered the cleanest diagnostic ever spoken in venture capital. Lightcap: “Ask if a 100x improvement in the model is something they’re excited about.” One question. The entire investment thesis reduced to a single binary. Does the next model make your company more powerful or does it make your company pointless. There is no middle ground. Lightcap: “We know the companies that come to us saying, ‘We want the next model. When is it coming out? I want to be the first to try it.’” These companies built something that feeds on intelligence. The smarter the model gets the more their product can do. They are not threatened by progress. They are starving for it. Then there are the companies Lightcap never hears from. The ones who go quiet when a new model drops. The ones who read the release notes like a death sentence. The ones privately praying the next generation takes longer because every improvement shrinks the ground beneath them. If you are hoping the model stays roughly where it is you have already told the market everything it needs to know about your company. You are not building on intelligence. You are building on the absence of it. Altman: “95% of the world should be betting on the latter category.” The latter category is simple. Assume the model keeps getting better at the pace it has been getting better. Build for that world. Not the world where GPT-4 is the ceiling. The world where GPT-4 is the floor and the ceiling has not been built yet. Then Altman told a story that should be framed on the wall of every startup in the country. A medical AI company came to him that morning. They were not complaining about the model. They were not worried about being replaced. They were demanding it improve faster. Altman: “Here’s how many people are dying every day you delay.” That is what alignment with the trajectory looks like. A company so deeply built on intelligence improving that every day the model stays the same is a day someone dies who did not have to. They are not building on a flaw. They are building on a future that has not arrived fast enough. That is the difference. The wrapper startup patches what the model cannot do today. The real company builds what the model will unlock tomorrow. One is running from the train. The other is laying the track. Altman told you the train is not slowing down. Lightcap told you exactly how to know which side you are on. One question. Does a 100x smarter model make you more valuable or erase you. If you had to pause before answering you already did.

Dustin

39,109 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

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)

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

36,753 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

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

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 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Greg on why building a consumer company is brutally hard. You have to be world-class at product and growth. "In consumer, there are no quick fixes. Growth hacks are not a real thing. You have to be black belt at building products and growth. You have to love extracting information and creating solutions. It's not "I think it should be." That's how consumer companies die because they just freaking guess. And it doesn't match what the consumer is looking for. Great product, no growth. Doesn't get funded. Great growth engine, no product. Leaky bucket doesn't become a big company. Both those things have to be true. It's not going to be six months or a year. It's 10 years of constantly problem solving along the way."

Greg on why building a consumer company is brutally hard. You have to be world-class at product and growth. "In consumer, there are no quick fixes. Growth hacks are not a real thing. You have to be black belt at building products and growth. You have to love extracting information and creating solutions. It's not "I think it should be." That's how consumer companies die because they just freaking guess. And it doesn't match what the consumer is looking for. Great product, no growth. Doesn't get funded. Great growth engine, no product. Leaky bucket doesn't become a big company. Both those things have to be true. It's not going to be six months or a year. It's 10 years of constantly problem solving along the way."

Patrick OShaughnessy

37,742 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Nebius will be a trillion dollar company (Save this). The neocloud market, purpose-built AI cloud infrastructure, separate from legacy hyperscalers generated roughly $25 billion in revenue in 2025, up 223% year over year. Synergy Research projects it will approach $400 billion by 2031, compounding at 58% annually one of the fastest sustained growth rates ever recorded for an infrastructure category of this scale. The CEO's explanation for why they win is worth understanding in detail. GPU compute is scarce and that part everyone knows but Nebius is not simply renting GPUs by the hour and marking them up, which is what most neocloud imitators do. They have built their own physical capacity for inference, optimized the full technology stack from the software layer all the way down to the rack hardware and recently acquired a company called Agen specifically to push inference latency even lower and throughput even higher. The CEO frames the core problem directly that in 2026, every product you build is powered by tokens, AI intelligence and while you can get those tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic via a simple API call, the moment you want to run open source models, specialized vertical models, or anything other than the two dominant frontier labs, you run into a wall. You can download the weights from Hugging Face and assemble the pieces. But getting those workloads to run at scale, at the economics you need, with the reliability your product requires, is an extraordinarily complex engineering challenge that most companies cannot staff or afford to solve in-house. That is the problem Nebius is solving, and that is why their inference product called Token Factory exists. The financial results are among the most dramatic growth numbers reported by any public company this year. In Q1 2026, Nebius posted $399 million in revenue, a 684% increase from the same quarter a year earlier. In the span of twelve months, the company swung from a $104 million net loss to $621 million in net income. Cash from operations went from negative $184 million to positive $2.26 billion in the same period meaning this is not growth funded by burning investor capital, it is growth that is now generating its own fuel. For the full year 2026, Nebius is guiding for an annualized revenue run rate of $7 billion to $9 billion, with pipeline creation tracking to surpass $4 billion. The contracted backlog sits at $49 billion, anchored by a $27 billion agreement with Meta, a deal worth up to $19.4 billion with Microsoft, and a public endorsement from Jensen Huang at NVIDIA's GTC conference in 2026. The current market cap is approximately $56 billion. A company with $7 to $9 billion in annualized revenue, growing at 684%, turning cash-flow positive, sitting on $49 billion in contracted backlog, operating in a market compounding at 58% annually toward $400 billion, that company has a credible path to 20x from its current valuation if execution holds. That is the trillion dollar case, and it does not require any heroic assumptions and it requires Nebius to keep doing what it is already demonstrably doing. Milk Road Pro called this one early. Our analysts added Nebius to the portfolio when it was still flying under the radar, and we are sitting on a massive gain on that position right now. If you want to see what else we are building conviction on before the rest of the market catches up, come join us at Milk Road Pro using the link below!

Nebius will be a trillion dollar company (Save this). The neocloud market, purpose-built AI cloud infrastructure, separate from legacy hyperscalers generated roughly $25 billion in revenue in 2025, up 223% year over year. Synergy Research projects it will approach $400 billion by 2031, compounding at 58% annually one of the fastest sustained growth rates ever recorded for an infrastructure category of this scale. The CEO's explanation for why they win is worth understanding in detail. GPU compute is scarce and that part everyone knows but Nebius is not simply renting GPUs by the hour and marking them up, which is what most neocloud imitators do. They have built their own physical capacity for inference, optimized the full technology stack from the software layer all the way down to the rack hardware and recently acquired a company called Agen specifically to push inference latency even lower and throughput even higher. The CEO frames the core problem directly that in 2026, every product you build is powered by tokens, AI intelligence and while you can get those tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic via a simple API call, the moment you want to run open source models, specialized vertical models, or anything other than the two dominant frontier labs, you run into a wall. You can download the weights from Hugging Face and assemble the pieces. But getting those workloads to run at scale, at the economics you need, with the reliability your product requires, is an extraordinarily complex engineering challenge that most companies cannot staff or afford to solve in-house. That is the problem Nebius is solving, and that is why their inference product called Token Factory exists. The financial results are among the most dramatic growth numbers reported by any public company this year. In Q1 2026, Nebius posted $399 million in revenue, a 684% increase from the same quarter a year earlier. In the span of twelve months, the company swung from a $104 million net loss to $621 million in net income. Cash from operations went from negative $184 million to positive $2.26 billion in the same period meaning this is not growth funded by burning investor capital, it is growth that is now generating its own fuel. For the full year 2026, Nebius is guiding for an annualized revenue run rate of $7 billion to $9 billion, with pipeline creation tracking to surpass $4 billion. The contracted backlog sits at $49 billion, anchored by a $27 billion agreement with Meta, a deal worth up to $19.4 billion with Microsoft, and a public endorsement from Jensen Huang at NVIDIA's GTC conference in 2026. The current market cap is approximately $56 billion. A company with $7 to $9 billion in annualized revenue, growing at 684%, turning cash-flow positive, sitting on $49 billion in contracted backlog, operating in a market compounding at 58% annually toward $400 billion, that company has a credible path to 20x from its current valuation if execution holds. That is the trillion dollar case, and it does not require any heroic assumptions and it requires Nebius to keep doing what it is already demonstrably doing. Milk Road Pro called this one early. Our analysts added Nebius to the portfolio when it was still flying under the radar, and we are sitting on a massive gain on that position right now. If you want to see what else we are building conviction on before the rest of the market catches up, come join us at Milk Road Pro using the link below!

Milk Road AI

28,622 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Absolutely love this bit from Jeff Bezos. The simplest explanation on building a business and being founder. 🎯 "Benjamin Graham the great investor is famous for saying in the short term the stock market is a voting machine in the long term it's a weighing machine and so as founders and entrepreneurs and business people our job is to build a heavy company. We want to build a company that when it is weighed it is a very heavy company we do not want to focus on the stock price" --- From 'DRM News' YT Channel

Absolutely love this bit from Jeff Bezos. The simplest explanation on building a business and being founder. 🎯 "Benjamin Graham the great investor is famous for saying in the short term the stock market is a voting machine in the long term it's a weighing machine and so as founders and entrepreneurs and business people our job is to build a heavy company. We want to build a company that when it is weighed it is a very heavy company we do not want to focus on the stock price" --- From 'DRM News' YT Channel

Rohan Paul

302,890 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

$PLTR this analyst gets it: - Palantir is the AI Operating System - Palantir provides the environment and context layer (ontology + security model) for enterprises to deploy AI models and agents - This is a structural growth opportunity - The ROI for enterprises to deploy AI and use Palantir’s service will become increasingly attractive - (Regarding living up to today’s PE) Revenue growth and margin is unique. “You’ve never seen that type of growth and margin previously for any other companies. Enterprise is a huge market. AI is really shifting from consumer to the enterprise world. Enterprise offers a larger TAM. This is early stage for enterprise to use AI. The TAM could be trillion $$ level…. The path towards that will never be easy, it will be uneven. If you have that long term view, you will still be long term bullish on the company.” - Enterprise opportunities across the world will totally change the business of Palantir in the coming decades I don’t think he’s bullish enough on government based on what we see coming from Gokarp and DV, but at least he acknowledges the importance of the government sector to the company.

$PLTR this analyst gets it: - Palantir is the AI Operating System - Palantir provides the environment and context layer (ontology + security model) for enterprises to deploy AI models and agents - This is a structural growth opportunity - The ROI for enterprises to deploy AI and use Palantir’s service will become increasingly attractive - (Regarding living up to today’s PE) Revenue growth and margin is unique. “You’ve never seen that type of growth and margin previously for any other companies. Enterprise is a huge market. AI is really shifting from consumer to the enterprise world. Enterprise offers a larger TAM. This is early stage for enterprise to use AI. The TAM could be trillion $$ level…. The path towards that will never be easy, it will be uneven. If you have that long term view, you will still be long term bullish on the company.” - Enterprise opportunities across the world will totally change the business of Palantir in the coming decades I don’t think he’s bullish enough on government based on what we see coming from Gokarp and DV, but at least he acknowledges the importance of the government sector to the company.

Jack Prescott

112,551 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten

"The magic of tokens that's not really viable for stocks is that you could keep minting on the other side... totally decoupled from the fees coming in." Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ on the buy-and-burn vs. mint-and-spend, and the lever token networks have that equity doesn't: "The idea of the buy and burn is that you take revenue in one side, you charge whatever you can get away with in terms of your price. You take that revenue and use it to burn the token... reducing its supply, which helps it appreciate." "The mirror of the buy and burn is the mint and spend. And this is where you are minting tokens out of nowhere to pay for whatever you need for growth or for network activities." "You can keep pulling in fees and test your ability to charge in the market while completely separately scaling your spending in order to facilitate the most growth." "In stocks, you can't pay an onboarding bonus to Uber drivers or whatever with your stock... To pay for growth, a conventional company has to do it in a very indirect way. They have to sell the equity to an investor in a private round to get cash to spend on growth. But this allows you to circumvent that completely."

"The magic of tokens that's not really viable for stocks is that you could keep minting on the other side... totally decoupled from the fees coming in." Eddy Lazzarin ☀️ on the buy-and-burn vs. mint-and-spend, and the lever token networks have that equity doesn't: "The idea of the buy and burn is that you take revenue in one side, you charge whatever you can get away with in terms of your price. You take that revenue and use it to burn the token... reducing its supply, which helps it appreciate." "The mirror of the buy and burn is the mint and spend. And this is where you are minting tokens out of nowhere to pay for whatever you need for growth or for network activities." "You can keep pulling in fees and test your ability to charge in the market while completely separately scaling your spending in order to facilitate the most growth." "In stocks, you can't pay an onboarding bonus to Uber drivers or whatever with your stock... To pay for growth, a conventional company has to do it in a very indirect way. They have to sell the equity to an investor in a private round to get cash to spend on growth. But this allows you to circumvent that completely."

a16z crypto

25,281 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Why is Palantir so expensive? You don’t need to look at spreadsheets. Just consider this: The market knows NVIDIA sells the shovels for the AI goldrush. The market is realizing that AI isn’t being monetized at the commercial level because although it’s cool, it’s not unlocking any real insights yet. The market now anticipates that Palantir is selling the maps to find the gold…. Gold being AI-driven insights that actually solve difficult problems. Software that works. Since 2021, NVIDIA’s revenue has exploded from $16B to $96B. Palantir’s TTM revenue is $2.5B. The trajectory of Palantir has changed since AIP released in 2023, which is enabling the company to scale. If NVIDIA sells the shovels, and Palantir provides the maps, then the market believes Palantir will see the same explosion of growth within the commercial market, which the market believes has an almost unlimited TAM for Palantir. A lot of people missed out on NVIDIA. While Palantir’s market cap is expensive at $95B, it is nothing compared to NVIDIA’s $3.26T market cap in terms of size. The market doesn’t want to miss out on the next big thing. At this point, investors have thrown all standard methods of valuation out of the window… Those days were years ago. To me, at this point, buying the stock is betting on NVIDIA-like growth (No I’m not saying the company will shoot to a $3T market cap in 2 years — you get the point). If the company does not show this sort of revenue growth, the stock will be punished. This is the risk investors are willing to take. While I am very bullish on the company in the long run, I, like everyone else, have no clue what will actually happen in the short term. This is not a stock to play on the short term. This is why I continue to hold, regardless of how “expensive” the stock gets. I personally believe Palantir does in fact carry the potential to see explosive revenue growth to more than enough justify its current ratios. I’m not saying it will happen this quarter. But the potential is there. It’s a matter of when, in my opinion. I would never risk selling what I view as my golden ticket to wealth with the justification of “it’s too expensive, the price will come back down and I can buy even more then”. If the stock crashes, I can start buying more shares regardless — I don’t want to get greedy and try to time the market. I would never forgive myself if I sold and the stock ended up soaring so high that even after a crash, it would be far too expensive for me to get back in with my original position size (plus capital gains tax). I don’t care who agrees with me or who thinks I’m crazy for saying this — it’s a real risk to me and I’m not willing to take it. This is not me telling you to buy $PLTR. My average is $8.50. Only you can decide what is right, and your decision should be made on your own level of conviction from studying the company — nothing else. This is me telling you why it’s so expensive. Again, I believe that if the stock does not continue to crush earnings each quarter, even the slightest miss, the stock will be punished in the short term. For longs, it’s another opportunity to accumulate more. This is my opinion, of course. 5-10 years from now, we’ll see who was right. Chips & Ontology.

Why is Palantir so expensive? You don’t need to look at spreadsheets. Just consider this: The market knows NVIDIA sells the shovels for the AI goldrush. The market is realizing that AI isn’t being monetized at the commercial level because although it’s cool, it’s not unlocking any real insights yet. The market now anticipates that Palantir is selling the maps to find the gold…. Gold being AI-driven insights that actually solve difficult problems. Software that works. Since 2021, NVIDIA’s revenue has exploded from $16B to $96B. Palantir’s TTM revenue is $2.5B. The trajectory of Palantir has changed since AIP released in 2023, which is enabling the company to scale. If NVIDIA sells the shovels, and Palantir provides the maps, then the market believes Palantir will see the same explosion of growth within the commercial market, which the market believes has an almost unlimited TAM for Palantir. A lot of people missed out on NVIDIA. While Palantir’s market cap is expensive at $95B, it is nothing compared to NVIDIA’s $3.26T market cap in terms of size. The market doesn’t want to miss out on the next big thing. At this point, investors have thrown all standard methods of valuation out of the window… Those days were years ago. To me, at this point, buying the stock is betting on NVIDIA-like growth (No I’m not saying the company will shoot to a $3T market cap in 2 years — you get the point). If the company does not show this sort of revenue growth, the stock will be punished. This is the risk investors are willing to take. While I am very bullish on the company in the long run, I, like everyone else, have no clue what will actually happen in the short term. This is not a stock to play on the short term. This is why I continue to hold, regardless of how “expensive” the stock gets. I personally believe Palantir does in fact carry the potential to see explosive revenue growth to more than enough justify its current ratios. I’m not saying it will happen this quarter. But the potential is there. It’s a matter of when, in my opinion. I would never risk selling what I view as my golden ticket to wealth with the justification of “it’s too expensive, the price will come back down and I can buy even more then”. If the stock crashes, I can start buying more shares regardless — I don’t want to get greedy and try to time the market. I would never forgive myself if I sold and the stock ended up soaring so high that even after a crash, it would be far too expensive for me to get back in with my original position size (plus capital gains tax). I don’t care who agrees with me or who thinks I’m crazy for saying this — it’s a real risk to me and I’m not willing to take it. This is not me telling you to buy $PLTR. My average is $8.50. Only you can decide what is right, and your decision should be made on your own level of conviction from studying the company — nothing else. This is me telling you why it’s so expensive. Again, I believe that if the stock does not continue to crush earnings each quarter, even the slightest miss, the stock will be punished in the short term. For longs, it’s another opportunity to accumulate more. This is my opinion, of course. 5-10 years from now, we’ll see who was right. Chips & Ontology.

Jack Prescott

258,450 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains how he uses 5-year plans to predict if a startup can become a $100B+ company “If you went to business school, you would’ve been taught: build a great product, organize a sales force, charge a fair price, make the customer happy.” But Eric explains that strategy is insufficiently scalable in the Internet era. “It’ll produce a reasonable business, but it’s not going to produce a huge business. It’s just too hard to hire all of those salespeople, work with every customer, and so forth. You have to have a more clever strategy.” He continues: “All of the really big companies have invented a new way to access information or a new way to do something that didn’t require [a large salesforce].” Eric argues that lots of the startup ideas he hears are good, but not good enough. He tells these founders to create a 5-year plan and map their growth rate. Then try to figure out what a more scalable strategy might be. For example, if you’re building an app that you want to charge $10 for, Eric asks: “Why can’t you give the app away for free and then upsell the users?" This is similar to the advice of Peter Thiel who famously asks founders: “How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?” Thinking big and optimizing for scalability is one key factor that separates the ultra successful companies from the rest. Another way to use a five-year plan to determine if your company can be a $100B+ company is to ask yourself what the big platforms will be five years from now and make sure your company is aligned with those platforms. In this interview from 2016 and he predicted that Android, iOS, and machine learning would be the dominant platforms of the next five years.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains how he uses 5-year plans to predict if a startup can become a $100B+ company “If you went to business school, you would’ve been taught: build a great product, organize a sales force, charge a fair price, make the customer happy.” But Eric explains that strategy is insufficiently scalable in the Internet era. “It’ll produce a reasonable business, but it’s not going to produce a huge business. It’s just too hard to hire all of those salespeople, work with every customer, and so forth. You have to have a more clever strategy.” He continues: “All of the really big companies have invented a new way to access information or a new way to do something that didn’t require [a large salesforce].” Eric argues that lots of the startup ideas he hears are good, but not good enough. He tells these founders to create a 5-year plan and map their growth rate. Then try to figure out what a more scalable strategy might be. For example, if you’re building an app that you want to charge $10 for, Eric asks: “Why can’t you give the app away for free and then upsell the users?" This is similar to the advice of Peter Thiel who famously asks founders: “How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?” Thinking big and optimizing for scalability is one key factor that separates the ultra successful companies from the rest. Another way to use a five-year plan to determine if your company can be a $100B+ company is to ask yourself what the big platforms will be five years from now and make sure your company is aligned with those platforms. In this interview from 2016 and he predicted that Android, iOS, and machine learning would be the dominant platforms of the next five years.

Startup Archive

611,873 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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.”

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 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

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)

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)

Startup Archive

11,811 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten

$Patrick Collison on what he wishes he did differently when scaling Stripe “I think one of the most pernicious mental models you can have is that you are on some growth curve… I think a much better mental model to have is that you’re serving some market, and then there’s the percentage of the market that you’re serving. And whatever percentage you are not serving, you just haven’t built the go-to-market functions and organization that’s brought the product to those market segments.” In the early days of Stripe, they assumed they were on some growth curve, but Patrick believes they could’ve accelerated their growth by viewing growth as a function of their go-to-market apparatus: “What we did not do, but what I wish we did, is six months after launch, we should’ve mapped out the concentric circles of our market.” As he suggests, Stripe should’ve started with very early stage startups then mapped out the larger set of all technical startups - not necessarily very early stage. Then continue this process in successive increments until they got to all companies handling online payments. Each step along the way, figuring out the size of each market, the fraction Stripe was currently serving, what it would take to serve more, and so on. And then work backwards from there: “What would the organization look like that was serving the entire market? Let’s just start building that organization, because the growth curve is under my control. Of course, it’s not 100% under your control, but I think it’s much more under your control than people tend to think.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)$

Patrick Collison on what he wishes he did differently when scaling Stripe “I think one of the most pernicious mental models you can have is that you are on some growth curve… I think a much better mental model to have is that you’re serving some market, and then there’s the percentage of the market that you’re serving. And whatever percentage you are not serving, you just haven’t built the go-to-market functions and organization that’s brought the product to those market segments.” In the early days of Stripe, they assumed they were on some growth curve, but Patrick believes they could’ve accelerated their growth by viewing growth as a function of their go-to-market apparatus: “What we did not do, but what I wish we did, is six months after launch, we should’ve mapped out the concentric circles of our market.” As he suggests, Stripe should’ve started with very early stage startups then mapped out the larger set of all technical startups - not necessarily very early stage. Then continue this process in successive increments until they got to all companies handling online payments. Each step along the way, figuring out the size of each market, the fraction Stripe was currently serving, what it would take to serve more, and so on. And then work backwards from there: “What would the organization look like that was serving the entire market? Let’s just start building that organization, because the growth curve is under my control. Of course, it’s not 100% under your control, but I think it’s much more under your control than people tend to think.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

64,296 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

$GOOG's Ruth Porat says the biggest risk in the AI buildout is the ROI question, and focusing on short-term tactics at the cost of building a great company. "I think the biggest risk for everyone is when the question is asked, which it often is, how do you get to an ROI? That's going to force our teams to do something short-term and tactical. You can always do a cost cut to get something to drop to the bottom line, and that is not a way to build a great company." "So I think the risk is don't be so in the moment maniacally focused on what is it, but have a right mix of an engine that's continuing to drive the business, which also explains why you need to start building early for growth so that you can grow into it." ____ Follow Fireside Alpha for more daily highlights of key business and technology conversations.

$GOOG's Ruth Porat says the biggest risk in the AI buildout is the ROI question, and focusing on short-term tactics at the cost of building a great company. "I think the biggest risk for everyone is when the question is asked, which it often is, how do you get to an ROI? That's going to force our teams to do something short-term and tactical. You can always do a cost cut to get something to drop to the bottom line, and that is not a way to build a great company." "So I think the risk is don't be so in the moment maniacally focused on what is it, but have a right mix of an engine that's continuing to drive the business, which also explains why you need to start building early for growth so that you can grow into it." ____ Follow Fireside Alpha for more daily highlights of key business and technology conversations.

Fireside Alpha

38,361 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

ELON: TO ACTUALLY START A COMPANY IS SIMPLER THAN YOU FEAR Elon is stripping away the mystique of the startup world, offering a blunt blueprint for anyone with an engineering mind and the drive to build. He is arguing that the barrier to entry is not as high as the "fear of failure" suggests. By focusing on a compelling prototype and leveraging the world-class venture capital ecosystem in America. Elon believes the next generation of builders can bypass the bureaucracy and start creating value immediately: “If you study engineering and you figure out how to design new things, then it is relatively easy to start a company. You just need to get a few like-minded people with you and then focus on creating a prototype, a compelling prototype as soon as possible. And then there is a strong venture capital industry in this country that will give you funding to take things to the next level. And that is all there is to it. And you might try it a few times, you may or may not succeed, but I think sometimes people fear starting a company too much. You know, what is the worst that could go wrong? You are not going to starve to death. You are not going to die of exposure. What is the worst that could go wrong?” Source: Naruto

ELON: TO ACTUALLY START A COMPANY IS SIMPLER THAN YOU FEAR Elon is stripping away the mystique of the startup world, offering a blunt blueprint for anyone with an engineering mind and the drive to build. He is arguing that the barrier to entry is not as high as the "fear of failure" suggests. By focusing on a compelling prototype and leveraging the world-class venture capital ecosystem in America. Elon believes the next generation of builders can bypass the bureaucracy and start creating value immediately: “If you study engineering and you figure out how to design new things, then it is relatively easy to start a company. You just need to get a few like-minded people with you and then focus on creating a prototype, a compelling prototype as soon as possible. And then there is a strong venture capital industry in this country that will give you funding to take things to the next level. And that is all there is to it. And you might try it a few times, you may or may not succeed, but I think sometimes people fear starting a company too much. You know, what is the worst that could go wrong? You are not going to starve to death. You are not going to die of exposure. What is the worst that could go wrong?” Source: Naruto

Mario Nawfal

205,115 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Fantastic breakdown from Ben Horowitz on the history of venture capital and how the industry has evolved over time If you are building a VC firm or an entrepreneur thinking about raising money from venture capital, this is worth a listen "In venture capital, the fundamental thing you have to be is top tier. If you are not top tier, the best entrepreneurs will not take your money. There are times when the market is so blazing hot that you can be a not-important VC firm and jump into good deals to make money. But most times, if you are not top tier, you will go out of business."

Fantastic breakdown from Ben Horowitz on the history of venture capital and how the industry has evolved over time If you are building a VC firm or an entrepreneur thinking about raising money from venture capital, this is worth a listen "In venture capital, the fundamental thing you have to be is top tier. If you are not top tier, the best entrepreneurs will not take your money. There are times when the market is so blazing hot that you can be a not-important VC firm and jump into good deals to make money. But most times, if you are not top tier, you will go out of business."

Boring_Business

21,897 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”

Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”

Startup Archive

36,050 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr