Startup Archive

Marc Andreessen on Steve Jobs: "The standards have to be enforced. If the standards aren’t enforced, then the standards slip. This is the role of the CEO in any company. Some care and some don’t. Great CEOs care a lot. Steve cared a lot."

Steve Jobs: “My model of business is The Beatles” “[The Beatles] were four very talented guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s how I see business. Great things in…

Peter Thiel tells the founding story of PayPal “When you start one of these companies, it’s typically not the case that you get the whole idea fully formed instantaneously,” Thiel begins. “There was this incredible internet boom going on in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. It…

Improving retention the old-fashioned way: 16,000 A/B tests… @duolingo

Jensen Huang: digital biology will be “one of the biggest revolutions ever” “Where do I think the next amazing revolution is gong to come? And this is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever. There’s no question that digital biology is going to be it.” Jensen…

Duolingo founder on the key to solving retention “The way we solved [retention] was just through trial and error,” Duolingo founder Luis Von Ahn explains. “By now, some of us have some intuition about what is good for gamification, but the reality is that most of it is just…

Jeff Bezos’s two pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs “The advice that I would give entrepreneurs is don't chase the hot new thing. It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot. Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you.” The…

Patrick Collison on thinking for yourself: "Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you…

"Advice I'd Give Past Me" by Patrick Collison

Elon Musk explains his 5-step algorithm for running companies “First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb… It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.” In this interview…

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan’s advice for startups: “When you’re small, act small” A lot of founders try to emulate large companies, and will do things like use the same terminology as Microsoft to describe their products. But Garry argues this is a mistake: “When you’re starting…

Peter Thiel: The salary of a startup CEO is “incredibly predictive” In this 2012 interview Thiel explains that one of the best questions an investor can ask is “What is the salary of the CEO?” In his view, the right answer is less than $150k, even post Series A. “If you like…

Ben Horowitz on how startup founders should run board meetings As Ben explains, the most valuable thing that comes out of a board meeting is that it’s a forcing function to take a step back and make sure the game plan is right. So the first thing you want to make sure to do is…

Sequoia’s Doug Leone explains what made Drew Houston’s pitch for Dropbox great Dropbox raised a $1.2 million seed round at a $5 million valuation from Sequoia in 2007. Eleven years later, the company went public at a valuation of $9 billion. In hindsight it’s a home run, but in…

David Sacks on what made the PayPal Mafia so successful The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. David Sacks—founding COO and product…

Sam Altman: “Most founders get delegation wrong” “People get delegation wrong one way or the other. Every founder knows that as you scale the company, you need to delegate. But they either do way too much or way too little. And it’s actually quite difficult to do it the right…

Jack Dorsey’s advice to startup founders: edit the team and really focus on analytics Jack shares that one of his biggest mistakes at Twitter was not editing the team: “I think for all startups it’s really easy to consider any hire as [part of the team for] the length of the…

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…

Brian Armstrong's best advice for a pre-product/market fit startup “If you’re pre-product/market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff.” He borrows this from Paul Graham who said: “Startups are like sharks. If…

Citadel founder Ken Griffin: “Every CEO is a salesperson” When Citadel founder Ken Griffin was getting started, his mentor offered Ken anything he wanted from his office. Ken took a $10 plaque off the wall that said, “If we’re all going to eat, someone’s got to sell.” Ken…

Paul Graham on the power of measurement: "Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and…