Garry Tan

Founderhood is truly a game with escalating levels of difficulty Before you start: you must learn to do things well, then learn to be a part of a team Then eventually you must build your own team, and when that team is good, you’ve got to scale that team It always gets harder

Sometimes the best strategy when you and another startup have exactly the same name is: Keep working on your startup. Most other startups die, so as long as you succeed and they die, that'll be a clean resolution to a name collision, often in the course of just a year or two. 🎀

If you hire for what someone can do, they work for money. If you hire someone because they believe what you believe, they work for meaning.

Death of high fliers Oyster and Quirky should be a warning to all startups. Great brand and top line growth is not enough. Get profitable.

Startup stock is either life changing or worthless. VCs have a portfolio but employees only have one shot. Choose well and make it count.

There’s a direct relationship between how deep your minimum viable product must be and how crowded your market is— Novel? Release what is new first. Iterate. Crowded? Focus on what is novel—you must be clearly better than some of the alternatives for some customers even if few.

The sweet spot: Get to $10M ARR without giving up control of your startup and it makes it possible to get to $100M easier. No meddling.

If your fire in your belly burns longer than your adversaries, you will prevail. 5 years or 10 years but definitely by 20 years... nobody has staying power except those driven by something other than just power and money and fame.

There’s a direct relationship between how deep your minimum viable product must be and how crowded your market is— Novel? Release what is new first. Iterate. Crowded? Focus on what is novel—you must be clearly better than some of the alternatives for some customers even if few.

When hiring most positions, raw talent and energy beats the resume. There are a lot of diamonds in the rough waiting to be found out there.

An uncharitable but very useful view of your potential users are ultimately that they are lazy, not very smart, and totally selfish. So if that's the case, the only way our product can see success is if it's easy, clear/understandable, and totally satisfies a fundamental need.

Early stage startups should probably keep track of two types of runway: * Optimal plan (includes revenue) * Worst case (no new revenue) Be able to execute to take advantage of good opportunity (optimal) but know what happens if it fails— and have a plan B.

People often ask if a startup idea is viable based on a description alone. Hard to answer without knowing all of these— 🧲 Can you get customers (CAC)? 🤩 Will they be delighted (NPS)? 🗓 Will they stick with it (long term cohort retention)? Only then can you answer viability.

Great experiences require makers who have taste, vision and execution. Taste is discernment. Vision is the ability to articulate a future. Execution is the ability to realize it. We meet teams that can do some partial set every day. When you meet a team with all 3? Magic 💎

Beware work that feels good but has no tangible result.