The best time to build a company is when the market doesn't believe the category will be big.
Most companies fail not because of competition but because of internal dysfunction at a critical growth stage.
The role of the CEO shifts dramatically as the company scales. What made you successful at 10 people will actively hurt you at 500.
AI is the new platform shift. The companies that will define the next decade are being built right now, mostly by people nobody has heard of yet.
Founders should spend more time thinking about what breaks when the company actually succeeds than about how to make it succeed in the first place.
The best investors I've seen are the ones who do the work before the deal arrives — the deal shows up and they already know what they think.