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Naval Ravikant explains why startup founders should be able to code Naval Ravikant gave the following advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume...

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Profilbild von Startup Archive
Startup Archivevor 1 Jahr

Watch Naval Ravikant’s full interview, featured by @Forbes, here:

Profilbild von 🧪Juice 🧃
🧪Juice 🧃vor 1 Jahr

Vibe coding changes everything.

Profilbild von Nikhil
Nikhilvor 1 Jahr

Outsourcing should not be the case in the initial days, it's your idea and you have to build it inhouse. Outsourcing makes sense when you are big and have multiple branches to handle.

Profilbild von Helder Perez
Helder Perezvor 10 Monaten

Naval saying founders should code is 2014 advice that founders in 2025 misinterpret. Technical skills help, but the real moat is distribution today. Non-technical founders who own distribution crush technical founders building in basements. Code as edge; ship as strategy > knowing syntax.

Profilbild von osrak.eth
osrak.ethvor 1 Jahr

@MirraTerminal

Profilbild von Cipher Vectors
Cipher Vectorsvor 1 Jahr

nice share

Profilbild von Via Marketing
Via Marketingvor 1 Jahr

@StartupArchive_, founders who can't code are like chefs who can't chop - you'll survive, but with higher costs and less control over your creation.

Profilbild von 🇳🇬 tee from share^
🇳🇬 tee from share^vor 1 Jahr

a lot of that has changed now, maybe not by an extreme degree but i’ll assume 30% is a big change when it comes to innovation.

Profilbild von Himanshu Kumar
Himanshu Kumarvor 1 Jahr

Founders coding early offers crucial product intuition. This deep understanding can be key for navigating the competitive landscape.

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3:05

Jessica Livingston on investing in Stripe when the Collison Brothers were teenagers Jessica reflects on a 19-year old Patrick Collison telling her and the other co-founders of Y Combinator that he wanted to take on the financial industry with his younger brother John. “We were like, ‘Do you realize how hard this is? And you don’t have connections.’ But they were intrepid. They were like, ‘Well, we don’t have connections, but we’ll find connections.’” She recalls their determination and focus: “You think the head of a bank is going to take a 19-year old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.” Determination, Jessica argues, is “by far the most important quality. More than intelligence. More than previous success in school.” When she co-founded Y Combinator, the hypothesis was that they’d just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard and they’d turn out to be great startup founders. But that turned out to not be true. “Determination is the most important thing. Understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important.” Jessica also believes being flexible minded is very important: “You have this idea, you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. You have to be able to say, ‘Okay, I thought I was going to do this, but let’s try this, even though I have a lot of energy vested in this, let’s try this direction. You really have to be open minded.” And then you have to be convincing and a good leader: “You are going to be convincing employees to join you. You’re going to be convincing investors to invest in you. When you get to the point where you’re doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Your whole world is convincing people, and so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

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Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10-year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

407,830 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company “It can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.” Ben Silbermann describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning of building Pinterest: “In March 2010, we launched Pinterest and were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t started building Pinterest in November 2009. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t left my job to start a company in May 2008.” A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon, but Ben disagrees: “The part of the analogy that’s right is that it’s long. But it’s actually really different. When I think about my experience, it’s more like going on a roadtrip in a car that doesn’t have very good headlights and you don’t have much gas and you think you’re going to Toledo, but you find out you’re supposed to be in Miami and if you really have to buy gas you might have to buy gas from someone who might just kick you out of your own driver’s seat.” He continues: “That uncertainty and the fact that every single day you’re dealing with a lot of choices and you don’t have perfect information is the lesson for me that was hardest to learn and continues to be a real challenge in doing a startup today.” Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2012)
1:09

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company “It can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.” Ben Silbermann describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning of building Pinterest: “In March 2010, we launched Pinterest and were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t started building Pinterest in November 2009. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t left my job to start a company in May 2008.” A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon, but Ben disagrees: “The part of the analogy that’s right is that it’s long. But it’s actually really different. When I think about my experience, it’s more like going on a roadtrip in a car that doesn’t have very good headlights and you don’t have much gas and you think you’re going to Toledo, but you find out you’re supposed to be in Miami and if you really have to buy gas you might have to buy gas from someone who might just kick you out of your own driver’s seat.” He continues: “That uncertainty and the fact that every single day you’re dealing with a lot of choices and you don’t have perfect information is the lesson for me that was hardest to learn and continues to be a real challenge in doing a startup today.” Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2012)

Startup Archive

17,789 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Qullamaggie on To Make a Lot of Money, You Need to be in the Best Stocks “LVGO and FSLY are the two best stocks right now. I’m long those; this is why you focus on momentum leaders. You’re not going to get any big moves in this. Random stocks like ZNGA—someone mentioned it yesterday— and this GLUE and stuff like that. These are some random stocks that are just having breakouts. You need to focus on the momentum leaders that you really need to be in. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to be in the best stocks. You can’t trade these random pieces of sh*t stocks that you guys trade, or a lot of you, I know.”
0:34

Qullamaggie on To Make a Lot of Money, You Need to be in the Best Stocks “LVGO and FSLY are the two best stocks right now. I’m long those; this is why you focus on momentum leaders. You’re not going to get any big moves in this. Random stocks like ZNGA—someone mentioned it yesterday— and this GLUE and stuff like that. These are some random stocks that are just having breakouts. You need to focus on the momentum leaders that you really need to be in. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to be in the best stocks. You can’t trade these random pieces of sh*t stocks that you guys trade, or a lot of you, I know.”

Lone

15,828 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten

Q: How will I know when it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea? Tony Fadell is the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. As he puts it in the clip below: “Great ideas chase you.” He continues: “In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement… I used to be like that. But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on… Now I try to run away from a great idea. And then it stalks me. It hunts you down because you’re like: ‘Ah, that’s going to have this problem, I’m going to put it aside.’ And then a few days later, you’re like: ‘Actually I think I know how to solve that problem.’ At some point it just becomes this black hole that sucks you in and you can’t think about anything else but this.” Mark Zuckerberg gave similar advice in a previous Startup Archive answer: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Let great ideas chase you and don’t turn it into a company until it’s working. There’s almost always a ton of work you you can do upfront to de-risk an idea before turning it into a company. And perhaps just as important: you want to make sure you’re still excited about the idea after a few months and the novelty has worn off—it should be all you can think about. Companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work and a 2-3 year project if they fail. It’s worth it to be patient before jumping in with two feet.
1:08

Q: How will I know when it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea? Tony Fadell is the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. As he puts it in the clip below: “Great ideas chase you.” He continues: “In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement… I used to be like that. But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on… Now I try to run away from a great idea. And then it stalks me. It hunts you down because you’re like: ‘Ah, that’s going to have this problem, I’m going to put it aside.’ And then a few days later, you’re like: ‘Actually I think I know how to solve that problem.’ At some point it just becomes this black hole that sucks you in and you can’t think about anything else but this.” Mark Zuckerberg gave similar advice in a previous Startup Archive answer: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Let great ideas chase you and don’t turn it into a company until it’s working. There’s almost always a ton of work you you can do upfront to de-risk an idea before turning it into a company. And perhaps just as important: you want to make sure you’re still excited about the idea after a few months and the novelty has worn off—it should be all you can think about. Companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work and a 2-3 year project if they fail. It’s worth it to be patient before jumping in with two feet.

Michael McGuiness

62,662 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

Paul Graham’s advice for future startup founders: “Just learn” “If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good.” As Paul Graham explains, the way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back: “Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.” You do this by: 1. Learning a lot about things that matter 2. Working on problems that interest you 3. With people you like and respect (this is incidentally how you get co-founders at the same time as the idea) “The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search. And he became an expert on search because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive.” PG continues: “At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is the ultimate advice for young, would-be startup founders reduced to two words: Just learn.” Video source: Y Combinator (2017)
2:12

Paul Graham’s advice for future startup founders: “Just learn” “If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good.” As Paul Graham explains, the way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back: “Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.” You do this by: 1. Learning a lot about things that matter 2. Working on problems that interest you 3. With people you like and respect (this is incidentally how you get co-founders at the same time as the idea) “The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search. And he became an expert on search because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive.” PG continues: “At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is the ultimate advice for young, would-be startup founders reduced to two words: Just learn.” Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Startup Archive

51,423 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Elon Musk on building a company: “There are periods where it’s just awful” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Source: Khan Academy (Apr 2013)
1:52

Elon Musk on building a company: “There are periods where it’s just awful” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Source: Khan Academy (Apr 2013)

Startup Archive

75,027 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Ben Horowitz: Running your company without a board after you’ve raised money is a dangerous idea Jack Altman asks a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz how important boards are for startups. Some venture capital firms pitch it as a selling point that they don’t take a board seat and leave the founders alone. Others believe they can add a lot of value by taking a board seat. Ben responds: “First of all, boards are important for founders. The idea that you’re going to run without a board after you’ve given equity to employees and sold equity to people who are not you is the most dangerous f’ing idea in the world.” He explains: “If you know anything about securities laws, the only protection you have as CEO from going to jail or getting personally sued is that you run material ideas through the board. That’s a massive protection. If you want to give a 2% grant to this person in the company, you have to realize you’re a fiduciary to the rest of the company that you’re diluting . . . If you run that by the board, it’s all good — you’re completely protected, no problem. If you just make that on your own and somebody wants to sue you, they’re going to win. You really have very little defense at that point. The idea that you’re not going to have a board is a bad idea. Once you start not owning the company 100%, you have got to have a board. That’s just how it goes.” Video source: a16z Jack Altman (2026)
1:47

Ben Horowitz: Running your company without a board after you’ve raised money is a dangerous idea Jack Altman asks a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz how important boards are for startups. Some venture capital firms pitch it as a selling point that they don’t take a board seat and leave the founders alone. Others believe they can add a lot of value by taking a board seat. Ben responds: “First of all, boards are important for founders. The idea that you’re going to run without a board after you’ve given equity to employees and sold equity to people who are not you is the most dangerous f’ing idea in the world.” He explains: “If you know anything about securities laws, the only protection you have as CEO from going to jail or getting personally sued is that you run material ideas through the board. That’s a massive protection. If you want to give a 2% grant to this person in the company, you have to realize you’re a fiduciary to the rest of the company that you’re diluting . . . If you run that by the board, it’s all good — you’re completely protected, no problem. If you just make that on your own and somebody wants to sue you, they’re going to win. You really have very little defense at that point. The idea that you’re not going to have a board is a bad idea. Once you start not owning the company 100%, you have got to have a board. That’s just how it goes.” Video source: a16z Jack Altman (2026)

Startup Archive

38,094 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten

Dmitry Balyasny explains what separates a great analyst from a great PM “Yeah, good question. So what makes a great analyst, and I think this is similar to a great PM, is you have to be able to think differently, right? You have to come up with unique, you know, variant ideas, differing views on things that lots of other people are constantly looking at, right?" "And you might not have a differing view necessarily for the next five years, but you should be able to come up with a consistent flow of differing views for the next few months, maybe the next year, maybe the next couple of years in some cases." "So that takes a particular type of wiring where you’re kind of constantly looking at like the other side of the coin and what might cause people to come around to your view and then digging on that.” “So the balance of creativity and investment process discipline is common for both analysts and you need that for PMs as well. So a lot of times people that are really creative and come up with brilliant ideas don’t have process discipline. And they might fall in love with one particular idea. They have a hard time kind of running models on 100 different companies, right? Like you need kind of both things. So that is in common.” “I think the thing that’s different is at a PM level, you certainly need more risk tolerance, right, where you’re comfortable with volatility. And some of that is innate and some of it can be learned. Right. You need the ability to juggle lots of different balls, right?” “As an analyst, the great thing about being an analyst is you can go super deep on a particular thing and not worry about anything else for some period of time." "If it’s a big enough idea you can raise your hand, talk to your PM and say listen, I think we should spend whatever, the next week, I’m just going to work on this. Right? And if you agree that this is like a big potential thing, like, I’m going to spend 90% of my time digging on this until we either prove or disprove this thesis, because I think this could be a really big bet, right?" "As a PM, like, you don’t have that luxury, right? Like every day, there’s something blowing up in your book, hopefully, there’s something going well. You know, there’s a macro problem, somebody tweeted something, you know, there’s constantly 50 different things that you’re juggling." "And so the ability to do deep work and dig in on something but also to zoom out and look at the overall portfolio and constantly, you know, balance those things, that’s like a unique, you know, PM skill.”
2:43

Dmitry Balyasny explains what separates a great analyst from a great PM “Yeah, good question. So what makes a great analyst, and I think this is similar to a great PM, is you have to be able to think differently, right? You have to come up with unique, you know, variant ideas, differing views on things that lots of other people are constantly looking at, right?" "And you might not have a differing view necessarily for the next five years, but you should be able to come up with a consistent flow of differing views for the next few months, maybe the next year, maybe the next couple of years in some cases." "So that takes a particular type of wiring where you’re kind of constantly looking at like the other side of the coin and what might cause people to come around to your view and then digging on that.” “So the balance of creativity and investment process discipline is common for both analysts and you need that for PMs as well. So a lot of times people that are really creative and come up with brilliant ideas don’t have process discipline. And they might fall in love with one particular idea. They have a hard time kind of running models on 100 different companies, right? Like you need kind of both things. So that is in common.” “I think the thing that’s different is at a PM level, you certainly need more risk tolerance, right, where you’re comfortable with volatility. And some of that is innate and some of it can be learned. Right. You need the ability to juggle lots of different balls, right?” “As an analyst, the great thing about being an analyst is you can go super deep on a particular thing and not worry about anything else for some period of time." "If it’s a big enough idea you can raise your hand, talk to your PM and say listen, I think we should spend whatever, the next week, I’m just going to work on this. Right? And if you agree that this is like a big potential thing, like, I’m going to spend 90% of my time digging on this until we either prove or disprove this thesis, because I think this could be a really big bet, right?" "As a PM, like, you don’t have that luxury, right? Like every day, there’s something blowing up in your book, hopefully, there’s something going well. You know, there’s a macro problem, somebody tweeted something, you know, there’s constantly 50 different things that you’re juggling." "And so the ability to do deep work and dig in on something but also to zoom out and look at the overall portfolio and constantly, you know, balance those things, that’s like a unique, you know, PM skill.”

Fireside Tapes

97,054 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen

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.”
2:43

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

Startup Archive

17,333 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)
0:55

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

70,059 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr