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Marc Andreessen on the idea maze and getting a prototype working before raising money “You see people sometimes who say, ‘I want to start a company’ and then they work through the process of coming up with an idea. Generally those don’t work as well as the case where...

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Startup Archive1 year ago

Watch the full interview with Marc Andreessen on the @lexfridman podcast here:

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Startup Archive1 year ago

Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read our free newsletter here:

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Raj Jha1 year ago

I made $4.2M from $500 this way: - Idea - FB Ad Test - Iterate - Statistical Analysis - Revenue Experiment - Scale a Winner This isn't a vague feel-good tweet This is how you use the scientific method to start a profitable business on the cheap

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growthesque1 year ago

This was exceptional. @curious_vii

XODEX | Become Smart Money.'s profile picture
XODEX | Become Smart Money.1 year ago

Businesses rooted in ideas rooted in passion 🩵💙

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Burak Akbulut1 year ago

Legend.

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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)
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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

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Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
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Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

93,460 views • 1 year ago

Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator
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Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator

Startup Archive

133,596 views • 1 year ago

Marc Andreessen on how the best founders navigate the “idea maze” “Entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists call decision making under uncertainty. Both parts of that are important. Decision making: you’re going to make a ton of decisions… And then uncertainty: the world’s a complicated place. In mathematical terms, the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops.” Military commanders call this the fog of war: “You’re just dealing with a situation where the number of variables is just off the charts.” And, as Marc explains, the best innovators deal with this in two steps. First, they “try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can.” Marc and his partners at a16z call this “navigating the idea maze.” In their head, the best founders try to have as complete of a map of possible futures as anybody possibly could. Then on Day 1, they’re in the fog of war, and a lot of the assumptions of that idea maze turn out to be wrong. So the founder must reconstruct it on the fly day-by-day as they learn and discover new things. “The great ones course-correct every single day. They take stock of what they’ve learned. They modify the plan.” The great ones also tend to think in terms of hypotheses. They tend to think: “OK, I’m going to go into the world and announce that I’m doing this for sure… And then I’m going to try it. And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I need to test to find out whether it’s going to work. And if it’s doesn’t, then I have to go back to all of those people and say we’re actually not going left, we’re going right.” And then they have to run this loop thousands of times. “You course-correct, you adjust, you evolve. Often, the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan. But that’s part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality.” Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)
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Marc Andreessen on how the best founders navigate the “idea maze” “Entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists call decision making under uncertainty. Both parts of that are important. Decision making: you’re going to make a ton of decisions… And then uncertainty: the world’s a complicated place. In mathematical terms, the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops.” Military commanders call this the fog of war: “You’re just dealing with a situation where the number of variables is just off the charts.” And, as Marc explains, the best innovators deal with this in two steps. First, they “try to pre-plan as much as they possibly can.” Marc and his partners at a16z call this “navigating the idea maze.” In their head, the best founders try to have as complete of a map of possible futures as anybody possibly could. Then on Day 1, they’re in the fog of war, and a lot of the assumptions of that idea maze turn out to be wrong. So the founder must reconstruct it on the fly day-by-day as they learn and discover new things. “The great ones course-correct every single day. They take stock of what they’ve learned. They modify the plan.” The great ones also tend to think in terms of hypotheses. They tend to think: “OK, I’m going to go into the world and announce that I’m doing this for sure… And then I’m going to try it. And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I need to test to find out whether it’s going to work. And if it’s doesn’t, then I have to go back to all of those people and say we’re actually not going left, we’re going right.” And then they have to run this loop thousands of times. “You course-correct, you adjust, you evolve. Often, the businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan. But that’s part of the process of a really smart founder basically working their way through reality.” Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)

Startup Archive

80,675 views • 7 months ago

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."
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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 views • 3 months ago

Marc Andreessen on why we shouldn’t encourage people to be entrepreneurs “The idea of being an entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how fun it was. And people ask questions, ‘How do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?’ And my answer was always: no, we shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can’t not do it.” Marc continues: “It’s tremendously painful. Most of the experience of being in business as a startup is being told no. You need all these things: employees, financing, customers. Then you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Half the time they don’t even respond. And then just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts punching you square in the face. The minute you think your product is working, there’s a problem in it, and you have to do a recall. It’s just this constant rolling horror story.” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)
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Marc Andreessen on why we shouldn’t encourage people to be entrepreneurs “The idea of being an entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how fun it was. And people ask questions, ‘How do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?’ And my answer was always: no, we shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can’t not do it.” Marc continues: “It’s tremendously painful. Most of the experience of being in business as a startup is being told no. You need all these things: employees, financing, customers. Then you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Half the time they don’t even respond. And then just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts punching you square in the face. The minute you think your product is working, there’s a problem in it, and you have to do a recall. It’s just this constant rolling horror story.” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)

Startup Archive

252,702 views • 9 months ago

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
5:32

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

167,320 views • 10 months ago

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.”
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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

17,333 views • 5 months ago

Marc Andreessen explains IBM founder Thomas Watson‘s famous “Wild Ducks” program Marc believes that the organizational complexity is one reason you don’t see innovation at large companies. But that’s not the only reason: “I think there’s another deeper thing underneath that that people really don’t like to talk about, which is the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company… You’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe.” Marc learned this early in his career at IBM, which was one of the most powerful companies in the world and had over 440,000 employees at the time. “They had a system that worked really well for 50 years. Most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules… But they had this category of people they called ‘Wild Ducks.’ This was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson came up with. They often had the formal title of an IBM Fellow and they were the people who could make new things.” He continues: “There were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new, they didn’t have to report back, they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them, they got budget when they needed it, and they reported directly to the CEO.” Marc recalls one wild duck, Andy Heller, putting his cowboy boots on the conference room table “amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.” It was fine for Andy Heller to do that, but it was not fine for you to do that. “They very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules… Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. We, IBM management, know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it’s going to be crazy Andy Heller and his cowboy boots.” Marc believes companies like IBM and HP ultimately collapsed when venture capital emerged as a parallel funding system for these wild ducks to start their own companies. Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)
2:49

Marc Andreessen explains IBM founder Thomas Watson‘s famous “Wild Ducks” program Marc believes that the organizational complexity is one reason you don’t see innovation at large companies. But that’s not the only reason: “I think there’s another deeper thing underneath that that people really don’t like to talk about, which is the sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company… You’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe.” Marc learned this early in his career at IBM, which was one of the most powerful companies in the world and had over 440,000 employees at the time. “They had a system that worked really well for 50 years. Most of the employees in the company were expected to basically follow rules… But they had this category of people they called ‘Wild Ducks.’ This was an idea that the founder Thomas Watson came up with. They often had the formal title of an IBM Fellow and they were the people who could make new things.” He continues: “There were eight of them and they got to break all the rules and invent new products. They got to go off and work on something new, they didn’t have to report back, they got to pull people off of other projects to work with them, they got budget when they needed it, and they reported directly to the CEO.” Marc recalls one wild duck, Andy Heller, putting his cowboy boots on the conference room table “amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.” It was fine for Andy Heller to do that, but it was not fine for you to do that. “They very specifically identified almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules… Their job is to invent the next breakthrough product. We, IBM management, know that the 6,000 person division is not going to invent the next product. We know it’s going to be crazy Andy Heller and his cowboy boots.” Marc believes companies like IBM and HP ultimately collapsed when venture capital emerged as a parallel funding system for these wild ducks to start their own companies. Video source: Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (2023)

Startup Archive

358,782 views • 1 year ago

Jeff Bezos explains the idea of “paper cut” teams “There are big things that are really important to manage — and by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus on just the big things. Even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these tiny customer deficiencies. We call those ‘paper cuts,’ and we make long lists of them. Then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. That’s because the teams that are working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list. They’re working on big things — as they should and as you want them to — so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)
0:51

Jeff Bezos explains the idea of “paper cut” teams “There are big things that are really important to manage — and by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus on just the big things. Even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these tiny customer deficiencies. We call those ‘paper cuts,’ and we make long lists of them. Then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. That’s because the teams that are working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list. They’re working on big things — as they should and as you want them to — so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

110,499 views • 10 months ago

.Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸: "The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power." "There are so few people who will just like write down the thing. And so we see this at companies all the time, which is, one of the ways you find the up-and-comers at a tech company is just, okay, who wrote down the plan? And, you know, that doesn't mean they came up with everything. And that doesn't mean that they had all the ideas, but they're actually able to organize their thoughts and then actually have the energy and the motivation and the skill to be able to communicate in a written form. That actually stands out." With David Perell
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.Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸: "The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power." "There are so few people who will just like write down the thing. And so we see this at companies all the time, which is, one of the ways you find the up-and-comers at a tech company is just, okay, who wrote down the plan? And, you know, that doesn't mean they came up with everything. And that doesn't mean that they had all the ideas, but they're actually able to organize their thoughts and then actually have the energy and the motivation and the skill to be able to communicate in a written form. That actually stands out." With David Perell

a16z

166,936 views • 3 months ago

Jeff Bezos explains the idea of “paper cut” teams “There are big things that are really important to manage — and by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus on just the big things. Even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these tiny customer deficiencies. We call those ‘paper cuts,’ and we make long lists of them. Then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. That’s because the teams that are working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list. They’re working on big things — as they should and as you want them to — so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.” Source: Lex Fridman (Dec 2023)
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Jeff Bezos explains the idea of “paper cut” teams “There are big things that are really important to manage — and by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus on just the big things. Even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these tiny customer deficiencies. We call those ‘paper cuts,’ and we make long lists of them. Then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. That’s because the teams that are working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list. They’re working on big things — as they should and as you want them to — so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.” Source: Lex Fridman (Dec 2023)

Startup Archive

79,376 views • 2 months ago

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.”
2:44

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 views • 1 year ago

"I became very fascinated with the idea of the brain computer interface and what consequences that might bring to the world. And this is one of the reasons The Brain Show came up, so that people will have a chance to see some of the realization of these ideas, see how they feel about it, and where we should be leading things."
1:21

"I became very fascinated with the idea of the brain computer interface and what consequences that might bring to the world. And this is one of the reasons The Brain Show came up, so that people will have a chance to see some of the realization of these ideas, see how they feel about it, and where we should be leading things."

Peter Gabriel

24,897 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”
1:24

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Startup Archive

34,567 views • 6 months ago

What started as a standard White House announcement quickly turned into one of the most revealing Oval Office moments of the year. Trump was there to declare that Washington, D.C. will host the 2027 NFL Draft. But when reporters started firing off questions, the real fireworks began. First up: immigration. A reporter asked Trump about a new program offering undocumented immigrants $1,000 to self-deport. His answer was blunt—and surprisingly layered. “Yeah, we have millions of people that have come into this country illegally through an administration that didn't know what they were doing. They didn't have a clue. And now we find out officially they didn't, because the president was incompetent. But I could have told you that before.” He explained the idea behind the plan: offer people money to leave—and if they take the offer and prove to be hard-working, they might be allowed back in the right way. “But what we thought we'd do is to self-deport where we're going to pay each one a certain amount of money, and we're going to get him a beautiful flight back to where they came from. And they have a period of time.” “And if they make it, we're going to work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in if they're good people, if they're the kind of people that we want in our company, industrious people that could love our country. And if they're not, they won't. But it will give them a path to becoming, you know, to coming back into the country.” He made it clear that there would be no second chances for those who ignore the opportunity. “So we're going to have, self-deportation, where they deport themselves out of our country, and we'll work with them, and we're going to try. And if if we think they're good, they have, you know, the people we want in our country, they're going to come back into our country. We'll give them a little easier route. But if they don't work and if we take them out after the date, then, they're never coming back.”
1:59

What started as a standard White House announcement quickly turned into one of the most revealing Oval Office moments of the year. Trump was there to declare that Washington, D.C. will host the 2027 NFL Draft. But when reporters started firing off questions, the real fireworks began. First up: immigration. A reporter asked Trump about a new program offering undocumented immigrants $1,000 to self-deport. His answer was blunt—and surprisingly layered. “Yeah, we have millions of people that have come into this country illegally through an administration that didn't know what they were doing. They didn't have a clue. And now we find out officially they didn't, because the president was incompetent. But I could have told you that before.” He explained the idea behind the plan: offer people money to leave—and if they take the offer and prove to be hard-working, they might be allowed back in the right way. “But what we thought we'd do is to self-deport where we're going to pay each one a certain amount of money, and we're going to get him a beautiful flight back to where they came from. And they have a period of time.” “And if they make it, we're going to work with them so that maybe someday, with a little work, they can come back in if they're good people, if they're the kind of people that we want in our company, industrious people that could love our country. And if they're not, they won't. But it will give them a path to becoming, you know, to coming back into the country.” He made it clear that there would be no second chances for those who ignore the opportunity. “So we're going to have, self-deportation, where they deport themselves out of our country, and we'll work with them, and we're going to try. And if if we think they're good, they have, you know, the people we want in our country, they're going to come back into our country. We'll give them a little easier route. But if they don't work and if we take them out after the date, then, they're never coming back.”

Vigilant Fox 🦊

351,051 views • 1 year ago

“Peter Thiel lived out that PayPal experience where they had investors that were much more of that conservative attitude and didn’t trust the founders of the company to run the company. Founders Fund came about in 2005 with the purpose of empowering founders to run their companies forever. A lot of people ask for a long time, ‘What’s your favorite company in the portfolio?’ And I was biased, but I thought objectively, SpaceX. Apple was founder-led for a very long time. Amazon was still founder-led. And so there is this belief that the founders should run their companies because they have the moral authority and the vision to do that.” Scott Nolan
10:36

“Peter Thiel lived out that PayPal experience where they had investors that were much more of that conservative attitude and didn’t trust the founders of the company to run the company. Founders Fund came about in 2005 with the purpose of empowering founders to run their companies forever. A lot of people ask for a long time, ‘What’s your favorite company in the portfolio?’ And I was biased, but I thought objectively, SpaceX. Apple was founder-led for a very long time. Amazon was still founder-led. And so there is this belief that the founders should run their companies because they have the moral authority and the vision to do that.” Scott Nolan

Shawn Ryan

98,823 views • 1 year ago

AOC: They wanted to issue this statement as though we’re just going after these 30-year-old men on Medicaid playing video games in their basement, right? This was the narrative that we heard. First of all, I think everyone should have healthcare in America, regardless of who you are and what you’re doing. And the idea that there is anyone who is less deserving because of who they are is the problem to begin with. But that’s what they use to justify this, right? Because they want us to do the work for them. They want us to sort ourselves into the idea of deserving and undeserving, or pointing at our neighbors in terms of deserving and undeserving. And that smokescreen — that idea — is how they tried to pass a trillion dollars in healthcare cuts across the board for all of us.
4:19

AOC: They wanted to issue this statement as though we’re just going after these 30-year-old men on Medicaid playing video games in their basement, right? This was the narrative that we heard. First of all, I think everyone should have healthcare in America, regardless of who you are and what you’re doing. And the idea that there is anyone who is less deserving because of who they are is the problem to begin with. But that’s what they use to justify this, right? Because they want us to do the work for them. They want us to sort ourselves into the idea of deserving and undeserving, or pointing at our neighbors in terms of deserving and undeserving. And that smokescreen — that idea — is how they tried to pass a trillion dollars in healthcare cuts across the board for all of us.

Acyn

446,803 views • 4 months ago

Marc Andreessen on why the founder model keeps winning: "You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with a founder and train them on management, than you are to start with the manager and try to train them on being a founder." "All the old incumbent institutions in the last hundred years that are run by managers... they're all collapsing in trust and credibility because they can't adapt." "When Mark [Zuckerberg] started Facebook, he had never had a job before. Not only had he not managed people, he had not worked for anybody." "His learning curve was vertical." "He spends an enormous amount of time learning how to become better at running these things at large scale. He's still the founder and he's still the innovator and he's still like a fountain of ideas on what to do." "He's the classic example of the double threat." "And then what happens is other founders look at that and they're like, 'oh, I could do that.'" Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with David Senra
1:19

Marc Andreessen on why the founder model keeps winning: "You're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with a founder and train them on management, than you are to start with the manager and try to train them on being a founder." "All the old incumbent institutions in the last hundred years that are run by managers... they're all collapsing in trust and credibility because they can't adapt." "When Mark [Zuckerberg] started Facebook, he had never had a job before. Not only had he not managed people, he had not worked for anybody." "His learning curve was vertical." "He spends an enormous amount of time learning how to become better at running these things at large scale. He's still the founder and he's still the innovator and he's still like a fountain of ideas on what to do." "He's the classic example of the double threat." "And then what happens is other founders look at that and they're like, 'oh, I could do that.'" Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with David Senra

a16z

52,867 views • 4 months ago