Startup Founders Quotes

In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.

Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.

... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

It turns out that one of the biggest drivers of investors are both successful and non-successful startup founders.

There is very little diversity among founders in the Unicorn Club.

The gender disparity in STEM is depriving our country of talented minds that could be inventing the next breakthrough technology, founding the next big startup or keeping our nation safe from cyberattacks.

The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.

For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don't like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they've built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don't want to hear that anything's wrong with them.

My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.

If you look at the ecosystem, entrepreneurs as a class have gotten younger, younger, and younger. They also as a class have become less and less and less experienced. The good part about that is that you're unlocking this ability to start a company to so many more people. That's an amazing positive. The negative is they're coming to that job with dramatically less experience than they've ever had. So there needs to be someone around the table that can then help them.

I was one of the founders in, in that, the three of us all had the, had the founder's stock.

The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.