Startup Archive

RT @martymadrid: Here is my #1 rule to cofounder relationships ... there is no "winning" and there is no "argument". You are in business to…

RT @mattvaru: This is a must-watch if you have business partners or are considering having some. I could not agree more (and this is prob…

RT @karanperi: This is a very effective strategy for product, design and engineering leaders as well who need to work closely together ever…

RT @rajatsuri: This is the gold standard in maintaining strong relationships in any form of life

RT @prithjourney: True - Important to have productive friction But you have to keep the band together!

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on the rule he had with his cofounders “We [Airbnb cofounders] had a rule. The rule was that winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. And the reason that's important is because if you start a company, you're going to have to debate a hundred thousand things... so no one argument can be the thing. There has to be this larger sense that we're a band.” Brian likens strong relationships to exercise. “I think you gotta really work hard at the relationship, almost like exercising. If you don't keep exercising, you get out of shape. We worked really, really hard. And one of the things we did in 2009 is we said every single Sunday we're gonna meet, no matter how busy we get, and to this day, we still do those calls.” He continues: “I think a lot of human connection requires constant contact, constant connection, a deep sense of respect, a sense that I'm only here because of them, a sense of humility and gratitude, and a sense that I'm never going to try to win. Because if I win alone, I'm not going very far.” Video source: @StanfordGSB (2023)

Watch the full @StanfordGSB interview with Brian Chesky here: https://t.co/xwSFVTXaey

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“Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it's more like the first five.” - Paul Graham

RT @foundertribune: The Real Advantage of Startups by Paul Graham https://t.co/fczPkUxxzj

Peter Thiel on what most founders don’t understand about differentiation “I think you want to have very big differences inside the team, and then from the outside, you want to be seen as very different from the rest of the world.” For example, SpacEx’s mission is to go to Mars: “Everybody at the company thinks: we’re the only place in the world where people are going to go to Mars. And that one idea separates it very sharply from the rest of the world.” And then within a company, you want the roles to be as differentiated as possible. One of the challenges in an early stage startup is that the roles tend to fluctuate a lot. Thiel believes this is one of the ways in which conflicts tend to arise. “If you were a sociopathic boss who just wanted to create conflicts amongst your employees for no reason at all, the formula for creating conflicts is to tell two people to do the exact same thing.” To summarize his point, Thiel concludes: “You want to have roles differentiated sharply differentiated within companies. And you want to have the mission of the company differentiated sharply from the rest of the world.” Video source: @OxfordSBS (2015)

Watch the full @OxfordSBS interview with Peter Thiel here: https://t.co/rfXCWDpxIl

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Mark Zuckerberg: “Start off trying to make something cool, not build a company.” In 2005, a 21 year old Mark Zuckerberg offered his former classmates the following advice: “One cool characteristic of a lot of the companies that end up being really successful… Is that they started off as someone trying to make something cool and not someone trying to make a company.” He gives Google, Yahoo, and eBay as examples—though he admits, “Amazon was a little more calculated.” As Mark explains, the same was true of Facebook: “When it just got started, what I thought was the most interesting thing was just to be able to type in someone’s name and find out information about them. There was hardly any of the stuff that’s there now. There was no groups. There was no messages even.” It’s a bit counterintuitive, but the biggest companies seem to start really small. Paul Graham offers similar advice: “Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with small things and grow them bigger. Want to dominate microcomputer software for decades? Start by writing a basic interpreter for a machine with a couple thousand users. Want to make the universal website and a giant vacuum for people’s time? Start by building a website where Harvard undergrads can stalk one another.” Video source: @cs50 (2005)

Watch the full @cs50 lecture with Mark Zuckerberg here: https://t.co/Rtx3jRwhok

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"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." - Paul Graham

RT @foundertribune: "The Proposition" by Paul Graham https://t.co/mQznivtNjQ

NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang: "We never talk about market share” “We never talk about market share in our company… Why are you fighting people for market share? The whole concept of market share says there’s a whole bunch of other people doing the same thing. And if they’re doing the same thing, why are we doing it? Why am I squandering the lives of these incredibly talented people to do something that has already been done?” Instead Jensen believes in building your company around “doing something that has never been done before.” Sometimes this means walking away from commodity work: “That demonstrates very clearly to your employees that we’re not going to do commodity work. The combination of choosing the right work and walking away from the wrong work is the best way to create the conditions [for employees to do their life’s work.]” Video source: @sanalabs (2023)

Watch the full @sanalabs interview with Jensen Huang here: https://t.co/d7S2gq3K8p

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