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“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.” Video source: @khanacademy (2013) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“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.” Video source: @khanacademy (2013) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
In the clip below, Jeff tells a story from the early days of Amazon when their metrics said customers waited less than 60 seconds after calling customer service. Yet this conflicted with customer complaints, and as Jeff explains: “I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right… If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.” Then one day in a meeting, the head of customer service was defending the metric, and Jeff said, “Ok, let’s call.” Jeff picked up the phone and dialed Amazon’s 1-800 customer service number. Everyone in the meeting proceeded to wait more than 10 minutes before customer service answered. “It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection, and that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right… That’s an uncomfortable thing to do, but you have to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable and you have to get people’s attention and they have to buy into it and they have to get energized around really fixing things.” Video source: @lexfridman (2023) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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In the clip below, Jeff tells a story from the early days of Amazon when their metrics said customers waited less than 60 seconds after calling customer service. Yet this conflicted with customer complaints, and as Jeff explains: “I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right… If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.” Then one day in a meeting, the head of customer service was defending the metric, and Jeff said, “Ok, let’s call.” Jeff picked up the phone and dialed Amazon’s 1-800 customer service number. Everyone in the meeting proceeded to wait more than 10 minutes before customer service answered. “It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection, and that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right… That’s an uncomfortable thing to do, but you have to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable and you have to get people’s attention and they have to buy into it and they have to get energized around really fixing things.” Video source: @lexfridman (2023) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Elon is asked for his advice for entrepreneurs, to which he responds: “I’m a big fan of anyone who wants to build. Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect. That’s the main thing you should aim for: to make more than you take and be a net contributor to society.” He compares it to the pursuit of happiness: “If you want to create something valuable financially, you don’t pursue that. It’s best to pursue providing useful products and services. If you do that, money will come as a natural consequence of that rather than pursuing money directly. You can’t pursue happiness directly. You pursue things that lead to happiness — fulfilling work, study, friends, loved ones.” Elon continues: “It sounds very obvious, but generally if somebody is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard and accept that there’s a meaningful chance of failure. Then just focus on having the output be worth more than the input. Are you a value creator? That’s what really matters: making more than you take.” Video source: @nikhilkamathcio (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Elon is asked for his advice for entrepreneurs, to which he responds: “I’m a big fan of anyone who wants to build. Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect. That’s the main thing you should aim for: to make more than you take and be a net contributor to society.” He compares it to the pursuit of happiness: “If you want to create something valuable financially, you don’t pursue that. It’s best to pursue providing useful products and services. If you do that, money will come as a natural consequence of that rather than pursuing money directly. You can’t pursue happiness directly. You pursue things that lead to happiness — fulfilling work, study, friends, loved ones.” Elon continues: “It sounds very obvious, but generally if somebody is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard and accept that there’s a meaningful chance of failure. Then just focus on having the output be worth more than the input. Are you a value creator? That’s what really matters: making more than you take.” Video source: @nikhilkamathcio (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“I didn’t expect PayPal’s growth rate to be what it was, and that actually created major problems,” Elon explains. “We started PayPal on University Avenue [in Palo Alto], and after the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers.” As Elon explains, the key to PayPal’s viral growth was it referral program: “We started off first by offering people $20 if they opened account and $20 if they referred anyone. Then we dropped it to $10, and then we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.” He continues: “And then we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It’s like bacteria in a petri dish. What you want to do is try to have one customer generate two customers, or three customers ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast.” Elon estimates that PayPal spent $60-70 million to fuel this growth, before the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Video source: @khanacademy (2013) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“I didn’t expect PayPal’s growth rate to be what it was, and that actually created major problems,” Elon explains. “We started PayPal on University Avenue [in Palo Alto], and after the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers.” As Elon explains, the key to PayPal’s viral growth was it referral program: “We started off first by offering people $20 if they opened account and $20 if they referred anyone. Then we dropped it to $10, and then we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.” He continues: “And then we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It’s like bacteria in a petri dish. What you want to do is try to have one customer generate two customers, or three customers ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast.” Elon estimates that PayPal spent $60-70 million to fuel this growth, before the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Video source: @khanacademy (2013) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“To raise the first $1 million of seed capital for Amazon, I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.” Jeff recalls taking 60 meetings to get to those 22 angels who said yes, which means roughly 40 of the investors he pitched said no. “And by the way, the 40 ‘no’s were hard-earned ‘no’s… They were multiple meetings, working really hard to get people to write that $50,000 check. And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.” This was in 1995, and the first question Jeff would always get was, “What’s the Internet?” So Jeff would patiently explain what the Internet was. He would also always tell them he thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think was giving myself better than the real odds.” Video source: @nytimes (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“To raise the first $1 million of seed capital for Amazon, I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.” Jeff recalls taking 60 meetings to get to those 22 angels who said yes, which means roughly 40 of the investors he pitched said no. “And by the way, the 40 ‘no’s were hard-earned ‘no’s… They were multiple meetings, working really hard to get people to write that $50,000 check. And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.” This was in 1995, and the first question Jeff would always get was, “What’s the Internet?” So Jeff would patiently explain what the Internet was. He would also always tell them he thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think was giving myself better than the real odds.” Video source: @nytimes (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“We spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen explains. “It’s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough.” Marc continues: “A core principle of pricing is that you don’t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you’re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you’re creating.” He gives the example of building an AI that can do the job of a programmer, a lawyer, or a radiologist: “Can you price by value and get a percentage of what otherwise would’ve literally been a person? Or equivalently can you price by marginal productivity? If you can take a human doctor and make them much more productive because you give them AI, can you price as a percentage of the productivity uplift?” Marc argues that high prices are under-appreciated by founders: “The naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster. Companies with higher prices and higher margins can actually invest more in R&D and make the product better. Most people who buy things aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. They want something that’s going to work really well.” Marc also emphasizes this point in an interview in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook: “What I hear from companies is, ‘Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.’ I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. Read the full newsletter at startuparchive.org Video source: @a16z (2026)
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“We spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen explains. “It’s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough.” Marc continues: “A core principle of pricing is that you don’t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you’re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you’re creating.” He gives the example of building an AI that can do the job of a programmer, a lawyer, or a radiologist: “Can you price by value and get a percentage of what otherwise would’ve literally been a person? Or equivalently can you price by marginal productivity? If you can take a human doctor and make them much more productive because you give them AI, can you price as a percentage of the productivity uplift?” Marc argues that high prices are under-appreciated by founders: “The naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster. Companies with higher prices and higher margins can actually invest more in R&D and make the product better. Most people who buy things aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. They want something that’s going to work really well.” Marc also emphasizes this point in an interview in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook: “What I hear from companies is, ‘Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.’ I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. Read the full newsletter at startuparchive.org Video source: @a16z (2026)
Keith shares his “Barrels and Ammunition” framework for building effective teams: “Most companies—once they get into hiring mode—just hire a lot of people. And you expect that as you add people your throughput and velocity of shipping things is going to increase. But it turns out it doesn’t work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don’t get that much more done. You sometimes get less done.” Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in a company—even great people—are “ammunition.” But to improve velocity, you need “barrels”. He defines barrels as extremely talented people who can take ideas from inception all the way through to fully shipped product. Most companies start with one barrel (the founder). And when they add another, they can get twice as many things done per week, quarter, etc. But true barrels are incredibly difficult to find: “When you have them, give them lots of equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week because they’re virtually irreplaceable. They’re also very culturally specific. A barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Keith shares his “Barrels and Ammunition” framework for building effective teams: “Most companies—once they get into hiring mode—just hire a lot of people. And you expect that as you add people your throughput and velocity of shipping things is going to increase. But it turns out it doesn’t work that way. Usually when you hire more engineers, you actually don’t get that much more done. You sometimes get less done.” Keith argues that the reason for this is that most people in a company—even great people—are “ammunition.” But to improve velocity, you need “barrels”. He defines barrels as extremely talented people who can take ideas from inception all the way through to fully shipped product. Most companies start with one barrel (the founder). And when they add another, they can get twice as many things done per week, quarter, etc. But true barrels are incredibly difficult to find: “When you have them, give them lots of equity, promote them, take them to dinner every week because they’re virtually irreplaceable. They’re also very culturally specific. A barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Marc is asked how being a founder changes in the age of AI, to which he responds: “I think there are two ways to have a differentiated edge in general — go deep or go broad.” Going deep means becoming a specialized expert in your domain. “There are domains where that really matters,” Marc explains. “In biotech and working on AI foundation models, the deeper you are the better.” But as AI gets more powerful, Marc would bet that “going broad” will be the winning strategy for most fields. He recommends knowing a lot about many different fields and how the world works — then use AI tools to go deep whenever you need to. “If you talk to any of the great CEOs, you see this.” Mark explains. “The really great CEOs are great at product, sales, and marketing people, they’re great legal thinkers, and they’re great at finance and with investors and the press. It’s a multidisciplinary kind of approach.” He continues: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will probably be quite skilled at 6 or 8 things and then will be able to cross-pollinate and combine them.” Video source: @tbpn (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Marc is asked how being a founder changes in the age of AI, to which he responds: “I think there are two ways to have a differentiated edge in general — go deep or go broad.” Going deep means becoming a specialized expert in your domain. “There are domains where that really matters,” Marc explains. “In biotech and working on AI foundation models, the deeper you are the better.” But as AI gets more powerful, Marc would bet that “going broad” will be the winning strategy for most fields. He recommends knowing a lot about many different fields and how the world works — then use AI tools to go deep whenever you need to. “If you talk to any of the great CEOs, you see this.” Mark explains. “The really great CEOs are great at product, sales, and marketing people, they’re great legal thinkers, and they’re great at finance and with investors and the press. It’s a multidisciplinary kind of approach.” He continues: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will probably be quite skilled at 6 or 8 things and then will be able to cross-pollinate and combine them.” Video source: @tbpn (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“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 they stop swimming they die.’” “Even if you’re not sure what to do, just do anything. Because when you do it, it’ll produce some information—people liked it, they didn’t, etc.” Brian shares that there were many times in the early days of Coinbase when he just shipped something rather than debate it endlessly: “There were a couple of times where the minute I shipped it, I knew we built it wrong. But I now had an idea of what to do next. And I only would’ve had that idea by actually going through the exercise of building it.” He concludes: “My other favorite analogy for this is that it’s like you’re at the base of a mountain that’s shrouded in fog. You’re looking up at the mountain and trying to figure out how to get up there, but you can only see three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into the unknown. And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you’ll end up on some local maxima and have to retrace your steps… But most people in life don’t take the steps into the unknown because it’s scary.” Video source: @lexfridman (2022) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“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 they stop swimming they die.’” “Even if you’re not sure what to do, just do anything. Because when you do it, it’ll produce some information—people liked it, they didn’t, etc.” Brian shares that there were many times in the early days of Coinbase when he just shipped something rather than debate it endlessly: “There were a couple of times where the minute I shipped it, I knew we built it wrong. But I now had an idea of what to do next. And I only would’ve had that idea by actually going through the exercise of building it.” He concludes: “My other favorite analogy for this is that it’s like you’re at the base of a mountain that’s shrouded in fog. You’re looking up at the mountain and trying to figure out how to get up there, but you can only see three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into the unknown. And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you’ll end up on some local maxima and have to retrace your steps… But most people in life don’t take the steps into the unknown because it’s scary.” Video source: @lexfridman (2022) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” As Marc explains, VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is investing in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension. Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” As Marc explains, VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is investing in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension. Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“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 continues: “For the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science. When something becomes engineering, not science, it becomes less sporadic and exponentially improving. It can compound on the benefits of the previous years. And every researcher’s contributions compound on each other… We’re going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology—which is very chaotic and constantly changing and diverse and complex—into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound.” He tells the student audience at Berkeley: “If you happen to love this intersection, I think it’s going to be rich with opportunities. It’s going to be a giant industry.” Video source: @berkeleyhaas (2023) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“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 continues: “For the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science. When something becomes engineering, not science, it becomes less sporadic and exponentially improving. It can compound on the benefits of the previous years. And every researcher’s contributions compound on each other… We’re going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology—which is very chaotic and constantly changing and diverse and complex—into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound.” He tells the student audience at Berkeley: “If you happen to love this intersection, I think it’s going to be rich with opportunities. It’s going to be a giant industry.” Video source: @berkeleyhaas (2023) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Sam walks through four common strategies to get your fist 100 users in order of best to worst: 1. Use your network. Email everyone you know and call in favors from anyone you can think of. But if it’s a paid product, make sure you charge them. “People who are inclined to do you favors are going to be too nice in what they tell you. So if it’s a paid product, charge them.” 2. Research people who might use your product and email them asking them to try it. “Conversion rates are low—maybe 2-3%—so you’ll have to reach out to more people. But you can send targeted emails saying ‘Hey, I just made this new product. I’d really appreciate if you would try it out.’ Most people want to be helpful.” 3. Social media outreach, posting to HN, forums, PR, etc. “The important thing to look for here is a traffic source that is sustainable rather than one big pop that then promptly goes away.” Airbnb is an example of a company that made PR work as an ongoing process—they were able to come up with press stunt after press stunt. But it’s hard. 4. Buy ads and point them at your website. “This is the ‘laziest’ and least impressive thing you can do… This is not what I’d recommend. I don’t know of any startup that has gotten big starting this way. I include it because it’s the idea that most people try.” This may sound basic, but I think this advice is important. Getting your first 100 users is mostly hard work. As Sam puts it: “Everyone thinks they’re going to put up this website, tell one person about it, and it’s going to take off like wildfire. But that’s not what usually happens.” For a more detailed guide on customer acquisition, I’d recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo). It walks through nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and offers a framework to figure out which ones will work best for your business. Video source: @officialstanfordonline (2017) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Sam walks through four common strategies to get your fist 100 users in order of best to worst: 1. Use your network. Email everyone you know and call in favors from anyone you can think of. But if it’s a paid product, make sure you charge them. “People who are inclined to do you favors are going to be too nice in what they tell you. So if it’s a paid product, charge them.” 2. Research people who might use your product and email them asking them to try it. “Conversion rates are low—maybe 2-3%—so you’ll have to reach out to more people. But you can send targeted emails saying ‘Hey, I just made this new product. I’d really appreciate if you would try it out.’ Most people want to be helpful.” 3. Social media outreach, posting to HN, forums, PR, etc. “The important thing to look for here is a traffic source that is sustainable rather than one big pop that then promptly goes away.” Airbnb is an example of a company that made PR work as an ongoing process—they were able to come up with press stunt after press stunt. But it’s hard. 4. Buy ads and point them at your website. “This is the ‘laziest’ and least impressive thing you can do… This is not what I’d recommend. I don’t know of any startup that has gotten big starting this way. I include it because it’s the idea that most people try.” This may sound basic, but I think this advice is important. Getting your first 100 users is mostly hard work. As Sam puts it: “Everyone thinks they’re going to put up this website, tell one person about it, and it’s going to take off like wildfire. But that’s not what usually happens.” For a more detailed guide on customer acquisition, I’d recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo). It walks through nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and offers a framework to figure out which ones will work best for your business. Video source: @officialstanfordonline (2017) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“Most people think that [being CEO] is about leading, being in command, and being on top,” Nvidia founder Jensen Huang begins. “But none of that is true.” Jensen explains: “You’re in service of the company. You’re creating conditions for other people to do their life’s work. You’re inspiring through example. Most of the examples are making difficult decisions during very difficult times. It’s mostly about sacrifice. It’s also about strategy. And strategy is not just about choosing what to do. It’s about choosing what not to do — which is sacrifice.” He continues: “The determination, conviction, pain, and suffering that goes along with overcoming obstacles is all sacrifice. I’m not trying to talk anybody out of the profession — if you are to do it, it’s the greatest honor. But you have to realize that it’s not about fame and glory. It’s mostly about pain and suffering.” Video source: @cambridgeunion (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“Most people think that [being CEO] is about leading, being in command, and being on top,” Nvidia founder Jensen Huang begins. “But none of that is true.” Jensen explains: “You’re in service of the company. You’re creating conditions for other people to do their life’s work. You’re inspiring through example. Most of the examples are making difficult decisions during very difficult times. It’s mostly about sacrifice. It’s also about strategy. And strategy is not just about choosing what to do. It’s about choosing what not to do — which is sacrifice.” He continues: “The determination, conviction, pain, and suffering that goes along with overcoming obstacles is all sacrifice. I’m not trying to talk anybody out of the profession — if you are to do it, it’s the greatest honor. But you have to realize that it’s not about fame and glory. It’s mostly about pain and suffering.” Video source: @cambridgeunion (2025) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
John believes current consumer product thinking can be harmful: “You have users by the wheelbarrow. You treat them in aggregate. You talk about MAUs. Everything is statistical and everything - like LinkedIn with the dark patterns and complete your profile - is nudging you towards some business outcome.” He continues: “What we really try to clobber people over the head with at Stripe is that [our users] are people starting a business who are generally really talented… And you can just see it if you go talk to any of them. And so we have another value at Stripe that we try to really inculcate, which is talking up to the user.” To stay connected to their users, Stripe will invite one user to their weekly fireside chats, and they have a conversation about how they use Stripe and what they’d like to see Stripe do better. “I think it’s important to stay connected to this because I think the classic technology product management domain - it’s a bit, I would say, not respectful enough of who the users actually are and how capable they are.” Video source: @millionstoriesmedia (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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John believes current consumer product thinking can be harmful: “You have users by the wheelbarrow. You treat them in aggregate. You talk about MAUs. Everything is statistical and everything - like LinkedIn with the dark patterns and complete your profile - is nudging you towards some business outcome.” He continues: “What we really try to clobber people over the head with at Stripe is that [our users] are people starting a business who are generally really talented… And you can just see it if you go talk to any of them. And so we have another value at Stripe that we try to really inculcate, which is talking up to the user.” To stay connected to their users, Stripe will invite one user to their weekly fireside chats, and they have a conversation about how they use Stripe and what they’d like to see Stripe do better. “I think it’s important to stay connected to this because I think the classic technology product management domain - it’s a bit, I would say, not respectful enough of who the users actually are and how capable they are.” Video source: @millionstoriesmedia (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Marc Andreessen recounts a story from an xAI employee: “Elon spent 18 hours at the office in five-minute chunks. Each person had a five minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.” Marc reflects on why this is such a powerful thing for a leader to do: “Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort. Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing. And there’s no place to hide.” He continues: “[Silicon] Valley companies are quite well-run by business standards. But that’s a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren’t even close to.” Video source: @joerogan (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Marc Andreessen recounts a story from an xAI employee: “Elon spent 18 hours at the office in five-minute chunks. Each person had a five minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.” Marc reflects on why this is such a powerful thing for a leader to do: “Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort. Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing. And there’s no place to hide.” He continues: “[Silicon] Valley companies are quite well-run by business standards. But that’s a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren’t even close to.” Video source: @joerogan (2024) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp and their 450 million MAUs for $19 billion. “A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison says in this interview that took place a few months after the acquisition closed. Ellison points out that you have to take into consideration how much traditional businesses (e.g. cable TV companies) pay to acquire customers: “This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.” He continues: “There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.” As of 2025, WhatsApp has approximately 3.1 billion MAUs globally. --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp and their 450 million MAUs for $19 billion. “A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison says in this interview that took place a few months after the acquisition closed. Ellison points out that you have to take into consideration how much traditional businesses (e.g. cable TV companies) pay to acquire customers: “This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.” He continues: “There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.” As of 2025, WhatsApp has approximately 3.1 billion MAUs globally. --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
The four co-founders started working on Cursor in January 2023. “It was about 2-4 months of experimenting, trying different things and finding something that fit,” Aman recalls. “Then we shipped it and it had an okay launch.” The initial version of Cursor got some initial buzz because they shipped it with GPT-4 at a time where very few products were using Open AI’s latest model. But then usage tanked. The team began to doubt their approach after the failed launch. Aman explains: “The entirety of that summer was just incredibly slow growth, and that was somewhat demoralizing. The big question in our minds was, ‘Are we being too ambitious?’ We were trying to build this general purpose thing for all engineers, but with this really small team, maybe we should focus more narrowly on some particular use case like tests or bug detection.” But the fact that they were users of the product gave the team the confidence to keep going down their initial path: “The really magical thing about this product was that we were users of it. So we could iterate incredibly quickly, and we tried all these different things that summer. Then we found this core set of features that worked incredibly well.” The two key features were Command K for instructed edit ability and code-based indexing that let you ask questions about your whole code base. “After we integrated those two features and launched them, growth kind of just took off.” Aman continues: “A lot of the work of Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible. For everything you see in the product, there’s like 10 failed experiments that didn’t work… All of our work for the first 6 months to a year was trying to find new ways to harness these models and make these models better for programming.” Read the full newsletter at startuparchive.org Video source: @peakxvpartners (2025)
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The four co-founders started working on Cursor in January 2023. “It was about 2-4 months of experimenting, trying different things and finding something that fit,” Aman recalls. “Then we shipped it and it had an okay launch.” The initial version of Cursor got some initial buzz because they shipped it with GPT-4 at a time where very few products were using Open AI’s latest model. But then usage tanked. The team began to doubt their approach after the failed launch. Aman explains: “The entirety of that summer was just incredibly slow growth, and that was somewhat demoralizing. The big question in our minds was, ‘Are we being too ambitious?’ We were trying to build this general purpose thing for all engineers, but with this really small team, maybe we should focus more narrowly on some particular use case like tests or bug detection.” But the fact that they were users of the product gave the team the confidence to keep going down their initial path: “The really magical thing about this product was that we were users of it. So we could iterate incredibly quickly, and we tried all these different things that summer. Then we found this core set of features that worked incredibly well.” The two key features were Command K for instructed edit ability and code-based indexing that let you ask questions about your whole code base. “After we integrated those two features and launched them, growth kind of just took off.” Aman continues: “A lot of the work of Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible. For everything you see in the product, there’s like 10 failed experiments that didn’t work… All of our work for the first 6 months to a year was trying to find new ways to harness these models and make these models better for programming.” Read the full newsletter at startuparchive.org Video source: @peakxvpartners (2025)
“[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 business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” Steve continues: “The Beatles — when they were together — they did truly brilliant, innovative work. And when they split up, they did good work, but it was never the same. And I see business that way too. It’s really always a team.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“[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 business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” Steve continues: “The Beatles — when they were together — they did truly brilliant, innovative work. And when they split up, they did good work, but it was never the same. And I see business that way too. It’s really always a team.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 11,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) Instagram Stats & Analytics

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) has 254K Instagram followers with a 1.81% engagement rate over the past 12 months. Across 326 posts, Startup Archive received 156K total likes and 8.64M impressions, averaging 480 likes per post. This page tracks Startup Archive's performance metrics, top content, and engagement trends — updated daily. To benchmark @startuparchive_ against other accounts, use Socialpruf's Instagram competitor analysis tool.

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) Instagram Analytics FAQ

How many Instagram followers does Startup Archive have?+
Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) has 254K Instagram followers as of November 2026.
What is Startup Archive's Instagram engagement rate?+
Startup Archive's Instagram engagement rate is 1.81% over the last 12 months, based on 326 posts.
How many likes does Startup Archive get on Instagram?+
Startup Archive received 156K total likes across 326 posts in the last 12 months, averaging 480 likes per post.
How many Instagram impressions does Startup Archive get?+
Startup Archive's Instagram content generated 8.64M total impressions over the last 12 months.
Can I compare Startup Archive with other Instagram accounts?+
Yes. Add @startuparchive_ to a competitor set with Socialpruf's Instagram competitor analysis tool and benchmark it side by side with any other public accounts on views, engagement rate and follower growth, with history back to each account's first post.