Startup Archive

Joe Lonsdale on the most important hiring lesson he learned from Peter Thiel “When we talk about lessons from Peter Thiel, I think one of the most important ones I’ve seen from him — that I’ve definitely taken to heart in what I’ve done — is hiring for talent, ambition, and hard work rather than hiring for expertise.” But as Joe explains, there are exceptions: “If you have a company that’s already working and scaling — and there’s a machine that has to be run — you want to hire the guy who knows how to run the machine. That’s fine. That’s the operator who knows what they’re doing already. But before you’ve actually built the machine, you want to hire for raw IQ and hard work — someone who can just iterate and figure things out. That’s a different skillset than the people who run the machines.” Video source: My First Million (2024)

Former YC CEO Michael Seibel explains the goals of a pre-launch startup Your first goal should be to launch quickly: “This is something that’s been part of the YC ethos from the very beginning. It’s been great advice for 10 years, and it continues to be great advice. If you walk away with one thing from this presentation, it’s launch something bad quickly.” The second goal is to get some initial customers: “Get anyone interacting with your product and seeing if they can get value out of it… You’d be surprised at how many founder’s journeys end before a single user has actually interacted with a product they’ve created. It’s very, very common. So please get past this step. It’s extremely important.” The third goal is to talk to your users: “This one is also an extremely common mistake because most founders have in their heads an idea of what they want to build. So they have this weird feeling that if they haven’t built the full thing, getting feedback on the initial thing is kind of useless.” The reality is that the idea you have in your end might turn out to be something customers don’t want at all. Michael has a saying: “Hold the problem you’re solving tightly. Hold the customer tightly. Hold the solution you’re building loosely.” The last step is to iterate and make sure you don’t fall in love with your solution. He gives an example of founders trying to build a screwdriver for a mechanic. If the screwdriver isn’t good, don’t ask yourself what other problems it can solve (e.g. “maybe I can use it to cook or to clean?”): “If your screwdriver doesn’t help the mechanic solve the problem, keep the mechanic, keep the problem. Fix the screwdriver! That’s the thing that’s broken… Continue improving on your solution until it actually solves the problem.” Video source: Y Combinator (2019)

Jeff Bezos: “Focus on the controllable inputs to your business instead of the outputs” Jeff gives the example of companies trying to drive up their stock price by actually going out and trying to sell their stock: “[A higher stock price] is the final output…. That’s not going to be sustainable. It’s a silly approach.” Jeff recommends working backwards from a higher stock price to its controllable inputs instead: “What are the inputs to a higher stock price? Okay, well, free cash flow and return on invested capital are inputs to a higher stock price. Let’s keep working backwards. What are the inputs to free cash flow? And you keep working backwards until you get to something that’s controllable.” He points out that a controllable input to free cash flow would be something like a lower cost structure: “If we can improve our picking efficiency in our fulfillment centers and reduce defects - reducing defects at the root is one of the best ways to lower cost structure - that starts to be a job you would accept. If you’re a reasonable person, you would say, I have no idea how to drive up the stock price - I can’t manage that directly. It’s not a controllable input. But I can make your picking algorithms more efficient, and that will reduce cost structure. And then you follow that chain all along the way. That’s what you do in all of these businesses.” Video source: Business Insider (2014)

Balaji Srinivasan on what he looks for in the founders he backs “You’re really looking for people who are very fast, very resourceful, very positive… And obviously high intelligence, work ethic, all that type of stuff, but I think the positivity thing [is really important].” As Balaji explains, startups are so hard and you need to be positive and resilient. “Lots of people will break if you put enough pressure on them and you don’t really know who has titanium adamantium skeletons until that pressure actually arrives.” He continues: “As a VC, an investor, or an angel, what you really want to do is throw coins into a hot air balloon in the sense that you want to back somebody who has independent lift and who’s going to take off on their own… The money is a help but it’s not even necessary for you to do it. They would be able to do it even with you. That’s a person who, as an investor, you want to bet on typically.” Video source: Startup Grind (2017)

Sequoia Partner Doug Leone on a common fundraising mistake founders make “First of all, I think founders have a right to maximize price… The founder needs to take care of maximizing price… But they have to understand that the very best deals are win-win deals… When I find founders optimizing for their own ownership at the cost of everything else, it shows me they just have no long-term perspective and that they don’t understand how business is carried out.” Video source: Derek Andersen (2025)

Jack Dorsey’s advice to founders raising venture capital Jack’s first piece of advice is to make sure you have something to show investors: “First and foremost, I always want to go to anyone that I want to work with with something to show.” At Twitter, they made sure they had people using the service at some scale before pitching investors. And at Square, they had 7 merchants and a working prototype that people were actually using. As Jack explains: “If people can’t see it and feel it, it’s very hard to sell. And I don’t want to just go and tell people this is going to be the biggest thing ever. I want to be able to show that and have them feel it and walk away feeling that as well.” Jack’s second piece of advice is to make sure you really like the person you’re raising money from because ultimately investors are like employees you can’t fire. Ask yourself: “Do we really want to work with this person? Is this going to to be someone that really pushes us in the way we need to be pushed?” Jack recounts pitching Square early on and getting several term sheets from VCs that asked zero questions: “I said, I don’t want a term sheet—especially if you’re not asking any questions. That means if they’re on our board that they’re actually not going to be all that constructive in terms of really asking the tough questions. That is the role of the board. It’s to look outside and bring all their insight and wisdom to us and help guide the company.” With Square, Jack decided to work with Vinod Khosla who asked tough questions and would email Jack once a week asking things like: “Have you thought about this?”, “Are you doing this?”, “I know this person, can I make an introduction here?” When people ask Jack which firms they should pitch, Jack responds: “It’s not just about money or the firm. It’s about the individual that you’re ultimately going to work with… Find the people you really want to work with in those firms. And if there’s someone that just really resonates with you and you love the idea of working with them, focus on them. You have to treat it as adding this person to your team.” Video source: The Oxford Union (2015)

Peter Thiel on the difference between the best founders and “professional CEOs” In his book Zero To One, which is approaching its 10-year anniversary, Thiel wrote: “We need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.” And while he doesn’t believe there’s a simple magic formula for what a founder looks like, Thiel observes: “A lot of the great companies that have been built over the last two decades were founded by people where it was somehow deeply connected to their identity - their life’s project.” He contrasts this to Silicon Valley in the 1990s when lots of founders were replaced with professional CEOs. Thiel believes it made a big difference when it became more common for founders run the companies. He gives the example of a 22 year old Mark Zuckerberg turning down a billion dollar acquisition from Yahoo: “If you had a professional CEO, it would have just been: ‘I can’t believe they’re offering us a billion dollars. I’m going to try not to be too eager. We better take the money and run.’” Video source: The Aspen Institute (2024)

Jony Ive explains the importance of giving form to an abstract idea “The way we design to start with is to talk. And it’s fairly exclusive—it only involves a few people.” But, as Jony describes, the greatest change takes place when that abstract idea is given form via a drawing or a plastic model: “What I’ve noticed is this shift is profound. It really galvanizes and provides focus to an entire team. Very often when they’re struggling with these abstract tentative ideas, you’ve got a sort of flag in many ways. It won’t become the final design, but what it does do is describe what we’re trying to do.” Jony continues: “There is just something very special about when you have an object. We’re physical beings, and when there’s an object to touch, everything shifts. It’s always been the case.” Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey gives similar advice to people building something new: “The hardest thing is to get started, and I think the most important thing that I’ve learned is that you have to get the idea out of your head as soon as you have it. Get it on paper and then take it one step further and just show someone.” Video source: Vanity Fair (2014)

Steve Wozniak tells the founding story of Apple and how he invented color on the computer Today Apple is valued at almost $3 trillion. But as Woz recounts, they got started selling $40 PC kits to hobbyists: “I had this computer, and I was giving away all the designs for free. Steve Jobs said ‘Wow, we should sell these PC boards. Build them for $20, sell it for $40.’” To fund the company, both Steves had to come up with a couple hundred bucks each, and Woz sold the most valuable thing he owned: his HP 65 calculator. The first PC boards were impressive—they could actually run software and programs. So impressive that the owner of a local electronics store placed an order for the first batch of Apple Is. But their second product—the Apple II—was their real breakout product, and one of the killer features was color. At the time, color only existed on TVs that cost thousands of dollars. But Woz figured out a way to get color on the Apple II with only a $1 chip. The idea for it came to a sleep-deprived Woz who was working on an arcade game for Atari that Jobs convinced him they could build in 4 days even though building an arcade game normally took six months: “I was in a dreamy state. You know when you lose sleep how you get a little creative thinking?… While my head was sort of half awake and half asleep, I saw this thing on the factory floor of Atari. All the games were black and white TVs, but this one game was going back and forth, changing color… I remember how the frequencies go from high school electronics. And then I came up with this method of taking a little chip and putting ones and zeros in it, and cycling around… I could make it look like color TV.” After building the first Apple II prototype, Woz recounts typing something in memory and a blue dot popping up on the screen: “I called Steve Jobs over and that was a Eureka moment. We were shaking. This was so big. All the colored games are now going to be on computers… That was probably my best patent… That’s why we chose a six color logo for our first logo for Apple. We were the ones that brought color because nobody would’ve ever expected color on an affordable computer… That was so far ahead of its time.” Video source: PHP Agency, Inc. (2010)

Google founder Larry Page explains how he decides what to work on When asked about his philosophy and only working on “10x ideas”, Page invokes the idea of additionality from economics: “It means doing something that wouldn’t happen unless you’re actually doing it. I think the more you can do things like that, the bigger impact you can have. And that’s about doing things people might not think are possible.” Page believes technology is a huge enabler of this impact: “I’ve been amazed… The more you learn about technology, the more you learn what’s possible…. And so for me, I just tried to focus on: What is the future really going to be and how do we create it?” Page’s path to additionality is following your curiosity, working on things nobody else is working on, and being willing to take risks that others aren’t. Video source: TED Conferences (2014)