Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.
To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.
Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea that you feel compelled to explore.
One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.
You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.
A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.
If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.
The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.
1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.
I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.
If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
Why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?
What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.
I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast.
It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.
If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.
A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.
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