Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.
Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.
On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.
It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.
I think co-working spaces, incubators, and accelerators outside of the Bay Area do a lot to foster a local startup scene - which is really important for early founders, but I also think that exposure to the Bay Area is extremely valuable for startups.
AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.
I aim to combine all the things I do in a comprehensive and holistic fashion that benefits startups and the people who make them grow.
It's a lot easier to figure out how to scale something that doesn't feel like it would scale than it is to figure out what is actually gonna work. You're much better off going after something that will work that doesn't scale, then trying to figure how to scale it up, than you are trying to figure it all out.
Quality and a great product matters, in startups, and in accelerators.
I'm really inspired to build a billion-dollar company. The hardest part is building the vehicle to get you there.
It is important that New York, in addition to its fashion, and finance, and tourism, and communications infrastructure, also begin developing venture infrastructure that's for real.
Creating the right advisory board for your startup can be the single most important step you take in building a new business.
I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.
Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.
As a young analyst just out of Stanford business school in the 1960s, I got to really understand what growth was about. Back then, you had to ask a customer to pay some money. That was the most important thing in getting a company off the ground.
The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.
At Andreessen Horowitz, we talk about the notion of being 'too hungry to eat.' That's to say, we often see startups that are so entrenched in the product that the founders forget they need muscle to grow.
During dark times, real entrepreneurs come out. They are not competing with 10 look-alike companies for engineering talent, so it's a great time to invest and help build companies.
Corporate houses and big companies can be meaningful distribution channels for start-ups.
While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.
Venture capital is about .02% of the U.S. economy invested, and it accounts for 11% of total U.S. jobs and 21% of U.S. economic output. And the reason why is because these companies can get very big, very quickly.
