I'm going to say something that everyone else in Silicon Valley is too scared to say: YC is a giant ripoff. It's absurd to me that naive Founders give away 7% of their company for just $125k in this day and age. It's a super boomer offering: - apply, wait, hope you get in - thrown into a 300 person cohort where you are one tiny cog in their mass portfolio bet - 3 months of 'education' that you can now get completely for free online - A few minutes at the end to hope a VC picks you amidst the cattle room Was YC worth it 10 years ago when knowledge wasn't freely available and you couldn't build distribution for yourself via the internet? Yes. Is it worth SEVEN percent of your company in today's age when you can go from $0 to $1M in weeks with just content and AI? No.
If you're a founder who has great vision but you suck at getting your company to hit goals, read Traction by Gino Wickman. 3 things from this book I use constantly to run Stan (50+ employees, $40M ARR): → Run a Weekly Business Review: set 5-10 key metrics for your team in a scorecard. Numbers that tell you if the business is healthy (like churn, revenue growth, conversion rates, etc) Then have a weekly 60 minute meeting with your team to go through them. Your job is to check which metrics are red or green and then unblock the things that are red. We used to have meandering 2-hour meetings that solved nothing. Now it's 60 minutes sharp. With a clear picture of what's going right and wrong. → Build an Accountability Chart, not an Org Chart: the problem with org charts is that they tell you little about how to solve your problems. Instead, overlay who is accountable for what metric on top of your org chart. So who is accountable for Revenue Growth vs. Churn vs. Conversion Rate. This lets you go straight to the source when something breaks. You know exactly who to go to to fix something. → Cascade Down Goals: I've found the best way to set goals is to go tops-down to bottoms-up. As in, set your company-wide goals every 90 days. Then, have those trickle down through your org so that every single person has goals with their daily work that trickles back up to one of those priorities. Before this, people at Stan were working hard on things that didn't matter. Now an engineer knows exactly why their work matters and what goal it bubbles up to. Hoping any of this helps you in your journey! Also!! LMK if you've found any other great books to read! I'm hungry for more
This is INSANE 🤯 AI Vibe-editing is here. You can now go from unedited clips to a fully finished video in just 60 seconds...
This is my recommended book list for any new Founder: Scaling to >$10M: - Get Scalable by Ryan Deiss - Traction by Gino Wickman - Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson - High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil Product: - Hooked by Nir Eyal Sales: - Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara Classics: - Zero to One by Peter Thiel - Lean Startup by Eric Ries - Navalmanack Podcasts: - Founders by David Senra - Acquired by Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal - 20VC by Harry Stebbings This list is intentionally small. You don't need much more than this. Let your curiosity + hunger carry you into more (Founder biographies, deeper tactical books, etc)...
If you're a founder who's great at building product but terrible at managing people, read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. 3 things from this book I use constantly to manage my team of 50+: → Writing a "working with me" doc: this is a doc about everything you care about - your values, what you expect from people, how to work w/ you etc; it sets up new hires to know exactly what they should expect from you from day 1 → Running structured 1:1s with a shared doc: this makes your meetings way more efficient >>> from "vibing" to "what is our job / goal here?" so you can run through walls together → Building hiring rubrics BEFORE you open a role: this gets you very clear on hiring the right candidate, and you defining success beforehand = higher likelihood the candidate works out Hoping any of this helps you guys so you're not as much of a bumbling idiot as I was going from Employee 10 to 30.
It's very strange watching the frenzy occurring in Silicon Valley right now. Everyone's caught in a vicious cycle of hyperproductivity: you see someone else working 996 and talking about how hard they're working. So then you need to too. You see someone else raise a monster round and talk about "how successful they are". So then you feel the need to too. It's a mix of megalomania and fear. 90% of people are burned out, recognizing that they're working at an unsustainable rate. But capitalism waits for no one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One day we'll all wake up and realize that things we actually wanted... We could have had for free all along: Being Human. Family. Being in Nature. Community. It'll all just be financialized by then... with a data center built on top 🫠
The Founder’s Experience: While people were criticizing me, I was out raising money to make sure they had job security.
I have a firm belief that if you want to start something, it takes: - 2 years to start seeing any real payoff - 5 years to feel like you're getting good at it - 10 years to build a generational run that truly starts to compound Most people will never get to that level of commitment and consistency. Don't be one of them. Pick a game that you actually want to play for that long. Then double down and crush it.
John Hu (@jayhoovy) has 13.1K X followers with a 0.39% engagement rate over the past 12 months. Across 130 posts, John Hu received 12.0K total likes and 3.63M impressions, averaging 92.0 likes per post. This page tracks John Hu's performance metrics, top content, and engagement trends — updated daily.