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Y Combinator accepts or rejects a company after just a 10 minute interview. Sam admits he didn’t think you’d be able to do much better than random with only 10 minutes, but he doesn’t think that’s true anymore. “It turns out that in 10 minutes if the only question you’re trying to answer is: Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.” Sam continues: “The obvious thing is intelligence… You can tell that really quickly, much less than 10 minutes… The hardest trait that we’re looking for is determination, and when we’re really wrong one way or the other on a founder, it’s because we were miscalibrated on how determined that founder seemed.” As Sam explains in the clip, he also looks for clarity of vision, communication skills, and non-obvious brilliance of the idea. Video source: @khoslaventures (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Y Combinator accepts or rejects a company after just a 10 minute interview. Sam admits he didn’t think you’d be able to do much better than random with only 10 minutes, but he doesn’t think that’s true anymore. “It turns out that in 10 minutes if the only question you’re trying to answer is: Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.” Sam continues: “The obvious thing is intelligence… You can tell that really quickly, much less than 10 minutes… The hardest trait that we’re looking for is determination, and when we’re really wrong one way or the other on a founder, it’s because we were miscalibrated on how determined that founder seemed.” As Sam explains in the clip, he also looks for clarity of vision, communication skills, and non-obvious brilliance of the idea. Video source: @khoslaventures (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“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
Sam is asked what a founder should do if they have an idea but don’t want to talk about it because a big company might steal it. He responds: “Here is one of the things that takes founders a long time to learn: No matter how great your idea is, no one cares. Everybody is so distracted that you could probably put that idea with exact instructions for how to implement it on Tim Cook’s desk and take no risk.” Sam continues: “Extreme secrecy among founders is a bad sign. You want to keep some things secret for sure, but you should be willing to talk about the broad sketches of what you’re doing because you need that to recruit people, to get investors, to get customers.” Talking about your idea is also how you get feedback from other really smart people. Sam gives his own experience with Y Combinator as an example: “We at YC talk about everything we do. We talk about how to operate. We give our best possible advice. I have given talks before to rooms of people that want to start accelerators. And I say: ‘If you want to start an accelerator, here is exactly what to do step by step, and here are the mistakes to avoid step by step.’ And people always say, ‘Are you crazy? You’re giving away YC secrets.’ And we are, and yet no one ever listens… It was hard for me to learn this lesson of not fearing this… But don’t be afraid of telling people what you do.” Video source: @washuengineers (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Sam is asked what a founder should do if they have an idea but don’t want to talk about it because a big company might steal it. He responds: “Here is one of the things that takes founders a long time to learn: No matter how great your idea is, no one cares. Everybody is so distracted that you could probably put that idea with exact instructions for how to implement it on Tim Cook’s desk and take no risk.” Sam continues: “Extreme secrecy among founders is a bad sign. You want to keep some things secret for sure, but you should be willing to talk about the broad sketches of what you’re doing because you need that to recruit people, to get investors, to get customers.” Talking about your idea is also how you get feedback from other really smart people. Sam gives his own experience with Y Combinator as an example: “We at YC talk about everything we do. We talk about how to operate. We give our best possible advice. I have given talks before to rooms of people that want to start accelerators. And I say: ‘If you want to start an accelerator, here is exactly what to do step by step, and here are the mistakes to avoid step by step.’ And people always say, ‘Are you crazy? You’re giving away YC secrets.’ And we are, and yet no one ever listens… It was hard for me to learn this lesson of not fearing this… But don’t be afraid of telling people what you do.” Video source: @washuengineers (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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 the people, you like the business model, you like the technology, you like everything. I’ve found that that single question is incredibly predictive because it ends up setting the culture. Are people doing it for equity or cash? It drives the people who are being hired… And you always want to get to this question of motivation. Do people actually believe in what they’re doing?” He cites Reid Hoffman founding LinkedIn as an example: “Reid was taking a salary of $15,000 a year. It was the minimum wage so you could get health insurance. And maybe he didn’t need more money [after PayPal], but it was setting the right tone for the company.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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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 the people, you like the business model, you like the technology, you like everything. I’ve found that that single question is incredibly predictive because it ends up setting the culture. Are people doing it for equity or cash? It drives the people who are being hired… And you always want to get to this question of motivation. Do people actually believe in what they’re doing?” He cites Reid Hoffman founding LinkedIn as an example: “Reid was taking a salary of $15,000 a year. It was the minimum wage so you could get health insurance. And maybe he didn’t need more money [after PayPal], but it was setting the right tone for the company.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
Sam Altman recalls: “I remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and it’s a viral app and that’s just going to kill it right there.” But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth: “I know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that don’t crash. So that we could build a product that doesn’t drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.” A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: “They were doing colleges only, and they weren’t open to the entire world.” WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing: “We wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and it’s fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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Sam Altman recalls: “I remember in 2011, people would say WhatsApp is never going to work because they charge a dollar and it’s a viral app and that’s just going to kill it right there.” But Jan explains that charging $1 was a very intentional lever WhatsApp used to slow growth: “I know it sounds very counterintuitive - why would you want to slow your growth? We wanted to slow our growth so we could better support our existing users. So we could build servers that don’t crash. So that we could build a product that doesn’t drop messages. So that we could answer their customer support emails.” A lot of people told Jan and the WhatsApp team this was a bad strategy, but Jan compares it to what Facebook did in the early days: “They were doing colleges only, and they weren’t open to the entire world.” WhatsApp wanted to do the same thing: “We wanted to make sure that we have our existing users happy, and that when people sign up, they have a great experience, and that the app works, and it’s fast, and the servers are up and running all the time. And I think that worked for us because we were really able to focus on the product.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had too many ideas. Then Jeff Wilke, a new Amazon executive at the time, told his boss, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” “This was just a shocking idea for me,” Bezos recalls. “As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me.” When Bezos asked Wilke what he meant by this, Wilke responded, “You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.” Bezos reflects on this point: “Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction . . . This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas.” He continues: “I also started figuring out how to build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and leadership and giving those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit of time. And that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of ‘releasing the work’ was very profound for me. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.” Video source: @reuters (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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In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos had too many ideas. Then Jeff Wilke, a new Amazon executive at the time, told his boss, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” “This was just a shocking idea for me,” Bezos recalls. “As a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. I would hire these experienced, senior executives . . . And I would listen to them and they would teach me.” When Bezos asked Wilke what he meant by this, Wilke responded, “You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.” Bezos reflects on this point: “Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction . . . This sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me. So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, and keeping ideas to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas.” He continues: “I also started figuring out how to build an organization that can be ready for more ideas. That’s about having the right senior team and leadership and giving those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit of time. And that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of ‘releasing the work’ was very profound for me. It made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.” Video source: @reuters (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
“This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.” PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives: “PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.” “You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber: “Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.” And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace: “You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.” Video source: @mercatuscenter (2015) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“This is a slight aesthetic thing that I believe in very strongly: the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.” PayPal and Napster are the first example Thiel gives: “PayPal was a very friendly name — it was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name — you nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing, and it’s no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years.” “You want to be very careful of how you name companies,” Thiel warns founders. In the context of the sharing economy, he likes Airbnb more than Uber: “Airbnb sounds very innocent like this virtual bread and breakfast — this very light, non-threatening sort of company. Uber sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. What are you exactly above? Maybe the law? This is probably something that, again from a regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber.” And on the social networking side, Thiel likes Facebook more than MySpace: “You can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing… Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you — about their real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves and a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that. And because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. There’s a certain version where the whole arc of the company and the whole product arc was implicit in the names.” Video source: @mercatuscenter (2015) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ 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
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 10,000+ 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 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility,” Jeff Bezos begins. “Wandering sounds so inefficient, but the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you’re going.” Jeff continues: “Sometimes you know where you’re going. But sometimes you don’t. And wandering is the acknowledgement that — in life, business, invention, and building a company — a lot of the time you can see the mountain top, but you can’t see the trail. So you have to explore and wander. It may feel very inefficient. But it’s actually very valuable.” Ultimately, Jeff explains, you need to balance execution and exploration: “When you know where you’re going, yes, you should be very efficient . . . You just need to do both [exploration and determined execution]. And they actually do feed each other. It’s the things that come out of the execution that give you new data and ideas about what the next steps should be in your exploration. The two things don’t work against each other. They work together.” Video source: @reuters (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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“Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility,” Jeff Bezos begins. “Wandering sounds so inefficient, but the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you’re going.” Jeff continues: “Sometimes you know where you’re going. But sometimes you don’t. And wandering is the acknowledgement that — in life, business, invention, and building a company — a lot of the time you can see the mountain top, but you can’t see the trail. So you have to explore and wander. It may feel very inefficient. But it’s actually very valuable.” Ultimately, Jeff explains, you need to balance execution and exploration: “When you know where you’re going, yes, you should be very efficient . . . You just need to do both [exploration and determined execution]. And they actually do feed each other. It’s the things that come out of the execution that give you new data and ideas about what the next steps should be in your exploration. The two things don’t work against each other. They work together.” Video source: @reuters (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
When junior team members at Khosla Ventures ask Vinod if they can serve on portfolio company boards, Vinod responds: “You haven’t earned the right to advise an entrepreneur. Just because you got an MBA and joined a venture firm doesn’t mean you’re qualified to advise an entrepreneur.” Vinod believes one of the best ways to earn that right (but not the only way) is to build a large company yourself: “Have you gone through how hard it is, how uncertain it is, how traumatic it is to go through?… If somebody has never dealt with this decision-making under ambiguity, they’re not qualified to help you… Whose advice to trust on what topic is the single hardest decision an entrepreneur makes. It’s also where the right investors can really help you.” He gives the example of asking a marketing executive at IBM for marketing advice: “They’ve never dealt with things where the market isn’t established… They’re not qualified to invent whole new markets.” He also recalls a recent argument with a co-investor who wanted their healthcare portfolio company to hire a healthcare executive from an established company: “They wanted this healthcare person who had never dealt with change beyond 2% a year, and I’m like, experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters [for a role like this].” Video source: @ycombinator (2019) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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When junior team members at Khosla Ventures ask Vinod if they can serve on portfolio company boards, Vinod responds: “You haven’t earned the right to advise an entrepreneur. Just because you got an MBA and joined a venture firm doesn’t mean you’re qualified to advise an entrepreneur.” Vinod believes one of the best ways to earn that right (but not the only way) is to build a large company yourself: “Have you gone through how hard it is, how uncertain it is, how traumatic it is to go through?… If somebody has never dealt with this decision-making under ambiguity, they’re not qualified to help you… Whose advice to trust on what topic is the single hardest decision an entrepreneur makes. It’s also where the right investors can really help you.” He gives the example of asking a marketing executive at IBM for marketing advice: “They’ve never dealt with things where the market isn’t established… They’re not qualified to invent whole new markets.” He also recalls a recent argument with a co-investor who wanted their healthcare portfolio company to hire a healthcare executive from an established company: “They wanted this healthcare person who had never dealt with change beyond 2% a year, and I’m like, experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters [for a role like this].” Video source: @ycombinator (2019) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“No other commitments outside of work. No attachment to money. Obsessively curious about the work. Willing to work for very long periods of time with no success. No ego attachment to outcomes.” Spenser imagined an extreme — almost fanatical — archetype. A persona almost no sane person would attempt to emulate. His reasoning: The fewer distractions, the greater the chance of building something great. Spenser adds: “Peter Thiel said CEO pay is anti-correlated with company success. I thought — great, I’ll just not pay myself anything.” He wanted to stack every advantage, even small ones: “The more I can be this person, the more likely it is I’ll build a successful company.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“No other commitments outside of work. No attachment to money. Obsessively curious about the work. Willing to work for very long periods of time with no success. No ego attachment to outcomes.” Spenser imagined an extreme — almost fanatical — archetype. A persona almost no sane person would attempt to emulate. His reasoning: The fewer distractions, the greater the chance of building something great. Spenser adds: “Peter Thiel said CEO pay is anti-correlated with company success. I thought — great, I’ll just not pay myself anything.” He wanted to stack every advantage, even small ones: “The more I can be this person, the more likely it is I’ll build a successful company.” --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“In my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last 250 years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so.” The first is vertically-integrated, complex monopolies, which people started building at the end of the second industrial revolution—like Standard Oil and Ford at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. As Peter points out, this is done surprisingly little today: “It’s typically fairly capital intensive and we live in a culture where it’s very hard to get people to buy into anything that’s super complicated and takes very long to build.” But if you can pull it off—as Elon Musk has done with Tesla and SpacEx—these companies can be very valuable. “Vertical integration is a very under-explored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more.” The other category Thiel has come up with new things and made money doing so is software. “There is something about software itself that is very powerful. Software has these incredible economies of scale and low marginal cost. And there is something about the world of bits—as opposed to the world of atoms—where you can often get very fast adoption.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“In my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history of the last 250 years where people have actually come up with new things and made money doing so.” The first is vertically-integrated, complex monopolies, which people started building at the end of the second industrial revolution—like Standard Oil and Ford at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. As Peter points out, this is done surprisingly little today: “It’s typically fairly capital intensive and we live in a culture where it’s very hard to get people to buy into anything that’s super complicated and takes very long to build.” But if you can pull it off—as Elon Musk has done with Tesla and SpacEx—these companies can be very valuable. “Vertical integration is a very under-explored modality of technological progress that people would do well to look at more.” The other category Thiel has come up with new things and made money doing so is software. “There is something about software itself that is very powerful. Software has these incredible economies of scale and low marginal cost. And there is something about the world of bits—as opposed to the world of atoms—where you can often get very fast adoption.” Video source: @ycombinator (2014) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“The question that investors usually ask is: ‘How big is your market?’ I think this is a terrible question. You would never ask a startup, ‘How big is your current revenue?’ and make your investment decision based off of that. You’d want to know how it was going to grow. It’s the same thing for markets.” Sam continues: “The markets that are best for startups are markets that are small today and going to grow explosively over the next 10 years.” The other factor Sam has found to be predictive of startup success is whether or not the startup has already captured a significant part of some small market: “Airbnb by the end of YC had captured a significant amount of pre-existing apartment renters in New York City. Stripe had captured nearly 100% of YC companies in their current batch that wanted to process payments. We look for something like that, but you don’t always see it.” Video source: @khoslaventures (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“The question that investors usually ask is: ‘How big is your market?’ I think this is a terrible question. You would never ask a startup, ‘How big is your current revenue?’ and make your investment decision based off of that. You’d want to know how it was going to grow. It’s the same thing for markets.” Sam continues: “The markets that are best for startups are markets that are small today and going to grow explosively over the next 10 years.” The other factor Sam has found to be predictive of startup success is whether or not the startup has already captured a significant part of some small market: “Airbnb by the end of YC had captured a significant amount of pre-existing apartment renters in New York City. Stripe had captured nearly 100% of YC companies in their current batch that wanted to process payments. We look for something like that, but you don’t always see it.” Video source: @khoslaventures (2016) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ 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
Most executive recruiters, Sam argues, will reverse this order: “If you say I need to hire a CFO, they will bring you people with 20 years of experience as a CFO at vaguely similar companies. But unfortunately, it’s usually like 20 years of the exact same year of experience over and over again.” But if you’re trying to scale fast, values are most important: “You really need someone who is aligned with the values of the company so that when things change or when they have to make a decision, they’ll make the one you would make if you can’t be there or they will be a good team player and go do that thing.” Sam continues: “You need someone who has high aptitude because the role is going to constantly shift. And the rate of learning - the rate of improvement - dominates skills.” And then skills obviously matter, but for Sam it’s third on the list: “The very best companies take this exceptionally far in how much they’re willing to hire a non-traditionally qualified executive.” Video source: @ycombinator (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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Most executive recruiters, Sam argues, will reverse this order: “If you say I need to hire a CFO, they will bring you people with 20 years of experience as a CFO at vaguely similar companies. But unfortunately, it’s usually like 20 years of the exact same year of experience over and over again.” But if you’re trying to scale fast, values are most important: “You really need someone who is aligned with the values of the company so that when things change or when they have to make a decision, they’ll make the one you would make if you can’t be there or they will be a good team player and go do that thing.” Sam continues: “You need someone who has high aptitude because the role is going to constantly shift. And the rate of learning - the rate of improvement - dominates skills.” And then skills obviously matter, but for Sam it’s third on the list: “The very best companies take this exceptionally far in how much they’re willing to hire a non-traditionally qualified executive.” Video source: @ycombinator (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
“The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.
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“The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.
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 10,000+ 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 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
“I found out early on that if you can whittle things down to just one thing, you become unstoppable. Unfortunately, people resist whittling things down to one thing because it’s really hard to decide what that one thing is.” The former Snowflake and ServiceNow CEO continues: “People have a very easy time telling you what their top 3-5 things are because hopefully the right things are in there somewhere… I can’t tell you how many board meetings I’ve been in where the CEO puts a PowerPoint up and it’s one bullet after another listing all of the things that are their priorities. You just know that they’re going to be a mile wide and an inch deep, swimming in glue, moving like molasses. The energy is leaving my body already just watching a long list of priorities… You’ve basically devalued what you should be doing because you’re time-sharing now with all of these other things.” Mr. Slootman urges founders to think really hard about the one thing that matters most to your business and focusing entirely on that. If you can’t decide, just pick one: “I like to do things in sequence. Even if you’re not sure, do it anyways. Because in the process of doing, you’re going to find out whether you’re right, wrong, or somewhere in between, and you can adjust.” When you prioritize just one thing, things move much faster: “Things are going to go much quicker because have a narrower plan of attack. It’s energizing. The pace picks up.” Video source: @thisweekinstartups (2022) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org
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“I found out early on that if you can whittle things down to just one thing, you become unstoppable. Unfortunately, people resist whittling things down to one thing because it’s really hard to decide what that one thing is.” The former Snowflake and ServiceNow CEO continues: “People have a very easy time telling you what their top 3-5 things are because hopefully the right things are in there somewhere… I can’t tell you how many board meetings I’ve been in where the CEO puts a PowerPoint up and it’s one bullet after another listing all of the things that are their priorities. You just know that they’re going to be a mile wide and an inch deep, swimming in glue, moving like molasses. The energy is leaving my body already just watching a long list of priorities… You’ve basically devalued what you should be doing because you’re time-sharing now with all of these other things.” Mr. Slootman urges founders to think really hard about the one thing that matters most to your business and focusing entirely on that. If you can’t decide, just pick one: “I like to do things in sequence. Even if you’re not sure, do it anyways. Because in the process of doing, you’re going to find out whether you’re right, wrong, or somewhere in between, and you can adjust.” When you prioritize just one thing, things move much faster: “Things are going to go much quicker because have a narrower plan of attack. It’s energizing. The pace picks up.” Video source: @thisweekinstartups (2022) --- Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read the free newsletter at startuparchive.org

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) Instagram Stats & Analytics

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) has 262K Instagram followers with a 2.05% engagement rate over the past 12 months. Across 766 posts, Startup Archive received 585K total likes and 26.8M impressions, averaging 764 likes per post. This page tracks Startup Archive's performance metrics, top content, and engagement trends — updated daily.

Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) Instagram Analytics FAQ

How many Instagram followers does Startup Archive have?+
Startup Archive (@startuparchive_) has 262K Instagram followers as of April 2026.
What is Startup Archive's Instagram engagement rate?+
Startup Archive's Instagram engagement rate is 2.05% over the last 12 months, based on 766 posts.
How many likes does Startup Archive get on Instagram?+
Startup Archive received 585K total likes across 766 posts in the last 12 months, averaging 764 likes per post.
How many Instagram impressions does Startup Archive get?+
Startup Archive's Instagram content generated 26.8M total impressions over the last 12 months.