PRODUCT

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

Speed is the ultimate feature. If your product is 10x faster, it's almost certainly 10x better.

The hard part isn't building the product. The hard part is building a company that continuously builds great products.

Build something that people want. That's the best business advice I ever got, and the only business advice you'll ever need.

It's easier to teach a merchant about technology than to teach a technologist about retail.

Every piece of software we build is an opinion about how people should work.

We don't sell saddles here. We sell the experience of riding.

We sell the reduction of information overload, the relief from stress, and the ability to work more effectively.

The best way to sell anything is to solve someone's problem. And the biggest problem in offices is that email is terrible.

We built Discord because we wanted a better way to talk to our friends while playing games. That was literally it.

The best products are built by people who are solving their own problems. We were our own first users.

Community is the killer app. Not features. Not technology. Just people who want to be around other people.

Our goal is to make Zoom meetings better than in-person meetings. That's the bar.

The pandemic didn't make Zoom successful. It just made everyone else realize they needed what we had already built.

Keep the product simple. If your grandmother can't use it, you've failed.

We think of Notion as Lego blocks for productivity. You snap together the pieces that make sense for you.

The best tools disappear. You don't think about the tool — you think about the work.

We want to make software that feels like a craft, not a factory.

We don't want to be the best project management tool. We want to be the last productivity tool you ever need.

The magic of Affirm is that you know exactly what you're going to pay before you click buy. No surprises. No fine print.

The best marketing in the world is a product so good that your customers do the marketing for you.

We don't need to sell you twelve products. We need to be the best at one thing: the everyday bank account.

We don't compete with Amex on perks. We compete on making finance teams' lives easier. That's a fight we win every time.

Expense reports are the worst part of every employee's month. We want to make them disappear entirely.

CFOs don't want another credit card. They want someone to make their financial operations suck less. That's what we sell.

The most important thing about Claude is not what it can do — it's what it chooses not to do.

Google gives you ten blue links. We give you the answer. That's the whole pitch.

We're not trying to be a chatbot. We're trying to be the fastest way to go from a question to a reliable answer.

Being from Australia was actually an advantage. We couldn't just rely on the Silicon Valley network. We had to build a product so good that people found us organically.

Pinterest is the only place on the internet where the ads are actually the content people came for. Nobody goes to Pinterest to avoid seeing products.

We started because buying Funko Pops on eBay was boring and full of fakes. Live selling fixes both problems — you see the item, you see the seller, and the energy is addictive.

Authentication was table stakes for us from day one. If someone buys a $500 Pokémon card on our platform, it better be real. Trust is the product.

AIP lets a supply chain manager ask a question in English and get an answer from a billion rows of data. That's not incremental. That's revolutionary.

Fifteen minutes. That's how long it takes to connect your cloud and see every vulnerability, misconfiguration, and exposed secret. Our competitors need fifteen weeks.

Agentless was the breakthrough. Security teams are exhausted from installing and maintaining agents on every server. We said: give us API access and we'll find everything without touching your infrastructure.

The security questionnaire is the bane of every startup's existence. We're building AI that fills them out automatically. You're welcome.

We integrate with over 100 tools. That means we don't ask companies to change how they work. We just observe what they're already doing and prove it meets the standard.

We named it ZenPayroll because running payroll should be zen — calm, simple, stress-free. Nobody believed that was possible. We proved them wrong.

We launched corporate cards because we realized our payroll system already knew every employee and their spending policies. The data was already there — we just built a card.

When you hire someone in Rippling, they get their payroll, benefits, laptop, software access, and corporate card in one click. Try doing that with five different vendors.

The compound startup thesis is simple: when all your systems share the same data, automation becomes trivial. When they're separate, it's impossible.

Every SaaS company thinks they need to be the best at one thing. We think integration IS the thing. Good enough across ten categories beats best-in-class in one.

The give-to-get model was the key. You want to read reviews? Write one first. Every reader becomes a contributor. The content creates itself.

CFOs don't want another dashboard. They want someone to call Salesforce and get the price down. We do both — the data AND the actual negotiation.

Getting credentialed with insurance used to take a therapist 6-12 months of forms and phone calls. We do it in weeks. That's the difference between a therapist accepting insurance and going cash-only.

Group therapy gets a bad reputation because people picture sitting in a circle sharing feelings. What we do is structured, evidence-based, and clinically intensive. It works because the peer connection is part of the treatment.

We credential therapists in weeks. The old way took six to twelve months. That's not innovation — that's just doing the obvious thing that no one bothered to fix.

Digital impressions are more accurate than putty, faster for the patient, and cheaper per unit at scale. The only thing keeping dentists on the old system was inertia. We just had to make switching easy enough.

The best marketing we ever did was making a product good enough that people told their friends about it. We didn't need a Super Bowl ad. We needed great joggers.

We named our flavors Severed Lime and Mango Chainsaw because if you're going to sell flavored water, you might as well have fun with it. Every other brand in the category takes itself way too seriously.

Cold-pressed means we kill the bad stuff without killing the good stuff. Heat processing is cheap and easy but it turns fresh food into something that tastes like cardboard and lasts forever. Real food shouldn't last forever.

We didn't build NBA Top Shot for crypto people. We built it for sports fans. If you have to explain what a blockchain is before someone can use your product, you've already lost.

The technology works. The optics are best-in-class. The field of view is the widest in AR. Our problem was never the product — it was finding the right market for it. Enterprise was always the answer.

Great products are built by teams small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

Design is not decoration. Design is how you communicate that you understand your user's problem better than anyone else.

Most founders build their product in a vacuum and then are surprised that nobody wants it. Talk to your users before you build. Talk to them while you build. Then talk to them again.

We don't do acquisitions. We build everything ourselves. That's slower, but it means everything actually works together.

The best payments experience is the one you don't notice. If you're thinking about the payment, something went wrong.

Spreadsheets are the most popular programming language in the world. We just gave them a real backend.

Our biggest competitor isn't another software company. It's the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet has a 40-year head start.

We spent two years building before we launched anything. Most people thought we were crazy. Turns out the product needed that time.

I'm not a tech guy. I look at technology from the Chinese farmer's perspective. If a farmer can use it, it's good technology.

We spent three years in stealth building the product. Most startups would have shipped in six months. We needed it to be right.

I built an internal task tracker at Facebook that people loved. Then I thought — why does only Facebook get to have this?

A refurbished iPhone costs 40% less, works the same, and doesn't require mining anything from the earth. The only reason people don't buy refurbished is stigma. We're killing the stigma.

We don't let you pick stocks. That's not a limitation — that's the feature. The research is clear: most people lose money trying to be clever.

Headspace had a monk. We had a rainstorm. Turns out people just want to fall asleep. That insight was worth a billion dollars.

People don't want a search engine. They want someone to talk to. We just made the "someone" infinitely customizable.

Our users spend an average of two hours per session. Two hours. Netflix would kill for that kind of engagement. We got it with a text box.

I built an app that rewards you for paying your credit card bill on time. People said that's not a business. Then 22 million high-income Indians signed up.

In Spain, you get a home equity loan in a week. In Brazil, it took six months of paperwork. We brought it down to days. Technology didn't change the product — it changed the speed.

We put water tubes inside a mattress cover and let AI control the temperature throughout the night. It sounds ridiculous until you try it and never go back.

Sleep is the single biggest lever for performance. Not supplements, not meditation, not cold plunges. Sleep. We just made it programmable.

One-click checkout. That's it. One button. No passwords, no forms, no friction. Amazon had Buy Now for 20 years and nobody else did. We were going to change that.

We connect to every tool — Slack, Confluence, Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira — and make it all searchable from one place. It sounds obvious. Nobody had done it well.

Every single sneaker that passes through GOAT is authenticated by hand. Every one. People think we're a marketplace. We're actually a trust company that happens to sell shoes.

Speed is the feature. When you can run inference 10x faster than anyone else, every AI application changes. Real-time conversations. Instant code generation. Things that feel sluggish on GPUs feel instant on Groq.

Our demo went viral because people could see the difference. They typed a question and the answer appeared faster than they could read it. You don't need a benchmark to feel that.

Men won't go to a doctor for hair loss. They just won't. So we brought the doctor to their phone. Vanity is a powerful motivator when you remove the embarrassment.

Pi is not an assistant. It's not a search engine. It's a conversation partner. The difference matters. People don't want a tool. They want something that listens.

We were a wrapper on GPT-3. I know how that sounds. But the wrapper was the product — templates, brand voice, workflows. ChatGPT gave away the raw model. We sold the workflow.

We made the Jambox — a Bluetooth speaker so beautifully designed that people put it on their coffee tables like art. We were a hardware company that cared about aesthetics. That was rare in 2010.

I wanted to build the Keurig of juice. A pod system where you get fresh, cold-pressed juice at home with the push of a button. That was the vision. The execution got complicated.

Bloomberg squeezed the packs by hand and got the same juice without the machine. That video killed us. One video. $120 million in funding destroyed by two hands and a YouTube upload.

We have a waitlist of 400,000 people. We didn't spend a dollar on advertising. The product is so visual — you eat something, you see the spike on your phone — that every user becomes a marketer.

Microsoft has Teams and Planner bundled free with Office. Google has Workspace. We charge $10 a seat and somehow keep winning. Because good enough for free still isn't good enough.

The product isn't project management. The product is clarity. When you open Monday on a Monday morning and can see exactly what's happening across your team — that feeling is the product.

The coral card was a branding accident that became our identity. We picked it because it was different from every other bank card in your wallet. Turns out people love showing it off.

Every diet app counts calories. We count habits. The psychology of why you eat at 11 PM is more important than the number of calories in the chips you ate. That insight built a $4 billion company.

We put a sleep lab on your finger. Heart rate, body temperature, blood oxygen, sleep stages — all from a ring. No wrist strap. No chest monitor. Just a ring you forget you're wearing.

Apple Watch tracks 100 metrics. We track 20. But we track them better because we're always touching your skin. A ring has 24/7 contact. A watch gets taken off. That's the difference.

Every time you connect your bank to Venmo, or Robinhood, or Coinbase — that's us. Plaid is the pipe between your bank and every fintech app you use. You use us every day and don't know it.

We turned your closet into a store. Literally. Take a photo of your old dress, list it, ship it. 80 million people did that. Social commerce before anyone called it social commerce.

We had Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Chrissy Teigen, and Liam Hemsworth. The content was expensive and the content was good. People just didn't want to pay for content they could only watch on their phones.

Stripe was built for the US. We built Razorpay for India. Same developer-first philosophy, completely different infrastructure. India has UPI, net banking, wallets, EMI — Stripe couldn't handle that complexity.

Korean banks had terrible apps. Sending money to a friend took 14 steps. We made it take one. That is the entire product.

The hardest part of fintech is not the technology. It is earning trust. People do not hand their money to apps they do not trust completely.

Every car on Turo is someone's actual car. That means they take care of it. Try saying that about a rental car with 80,000 miles on it.

I built the prototype in a weekend. The idea was simple — what if video had a character limit like Twitter had for text?

Six seconds was not a limitation. It was a creative constraint. The best Vines were brilliant because they had to be short, not in spite of it.

Tax-loss harvesting alone can add 1 to 2 percent to your annual returns. Most advisors do not bother because it is tedious. Our software does it automatically, every single day.

Most ML projects fail not because the model is bad but because nobody can reproduce the results, nobody tracked the hyperparameters, and nobody knows which version of the data was used. We fix all three.

Machine learning without experiment tracking is like software engineering without version control. You are just guessing and hoping you remember what worked.

Recovery is the most important metric in fitness and nobody was measuring it. Everyone counted steps and calories. We measure strain, recovery, and sleep. That is the actual triangle that matters.

We do not have a screen on purpose. A screen turns a health device into a notification device. We want you looking at your body, not your wrist.

Grok is the anti-ChatGPT. It will answer spicy questions that other AIs are too politically correct to touch. An AI that is afraid to say anything interesting is useless.

We have over 10 million customers and we have never spent a single rupee on advertising. Not one. Our product is our marketing. Happy customers bring more customers.

We started as a plagiarism detection tool for universities. Turns out helping people write better was a much bigger business than catching people who write badly.

Google has AI writing in Docs. Microsoft has Copilot in Word. Apple has writing tools in iOS. And 30 million people still use Grammarly every day. That tells you something about how hard it is to build a great writing assistant.

The browser extension was the most important product decision we ever made. It made Grammarly work everywhere — Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Twitter. You install it once and forget it is there until it saves you from sending an embarrassing email.

Scheduling a meeting should not require 8 emails. That is insane. I built Calendly because the problem was so obvious and so universal that I could not believe nobody had solved it properly.

We release 2-3 major new products every year. Most companies our size release one every 2 years. Speed is our competitive advantage — by the time competitors copy our last product, we have shipped the next two.

At my previous job I had to open 15 different tools to figure out why the site was down at 3 AM. I thought — this is insane. What if all of this was in one place? That became Datadog.

I built Grafana as a side project because the existing dashboarding tools were ugly and inflexible. I open-sourced it because I thought maybe 50 people would care. Millions of people cared.

Sentry catches over a billion errors per day. A billion. Every single one of those is a moment where someone's code broke and they need to know about it before their users do.

Our SDK takes 2 minutes to install. Your first error notification arrives 5 minutes later. If enterprise software took this long to show value, every SaaS company would be profitable.

I built Sentry at Dropbox because I was tired of finding out about bugs from angry customer support tickets. By the time a user complains, 1,000 other users already hit the same error and left silently.

The whiteboard is the most democratic tool in any office. Anyone can grab a marker. Anyone can add a sticky note. We made that digital, infinite, and available to everyone regardless of where they sit.

The hardest part of building Loom was not the recording technology. It was convincing people that sending a video was not weird. In 2016, recording yourself talking to your laptop felt awkward. Now it feels natural.

Ask a developer. That was our internal mantra. We did not build what executives wanted. We built what developers wanted. And developers wanted an API that just worked.

Before Twilio, if you wanted your app to send a text message, you had to negotiate a contract with a telecom carrier. That took 5 months. With Twilio, it takes 5 minutes and 7 lines of code.

User experience is everything. If the product is good enough, users will come. If it isn't, no amount of marketing will save it.

I prefer sending emails at 3 AM about product bugs to giving keynote speeches. The product is the speech.

V1 was a proof of concept. V2 was a product. V3 was an optimization. V4 is a platform. Each version solves the problems the last one created.

MetaMask started as an experiment inside ConsenSys. Now it has 30 million users and is basically the front door to Web3. The best products often start as side projects that nobody takes seriously.

The best infrastructure is invisible. If you're using OpenSea, you're using Alchemy. If you're using Shopify's crypto features, you're using Alchemy. You just don't know it. That's by design.

I spent eight years building Rivian in secret. Most of the auto industry didn't know we existed until 2018. We used that anonymity to perfect the product before anyone could copy it or write it off.

Hollywood taught me one thing about investing: know your audience. The best products are the ones that feel like magic the first time you use them.

The green owl is not just a mascot. It is a guilt machine. People do their lessons because they do not want to disappoint a cartoon bird. And it works.

Nobody signs up for a screenwriting course. They sign up for Aaron Sorkin teaching screenwriting. The instructor IS the product.

Our courses have no videos. Every concept is an interactive puzzle. If that sounds harder, it is. It is also how learning actually works.

We treat engagement like a mobile gaming company, not an education company. If the lesson is boring, people stop. Boring is the enemy.

Chrome was my first big bet at Google. Everyone said we did not need a browser. Now it has 65% of the global market. I learned to trust my instincts.

I am an engineer at heart. The best product wins. That is what I tell every team at Google. If we build the best AI, everything else follows.

A salad can be as craveable as a burger. You just have to make it fresh, customize it perfectly, and serve it in under 60 seconds.

Our coating is invisible, tasteless, odorless, and made from plant materials. It is not weird science. It is extremely simple science applied to the right problem.

Small satellites need small rockets. Riding as a passenger on a big rocket is like taking a bus when you need a taxi — you go when they go, where they go.

Stripe started with seven lines of code. The entire pitch was: accepting payments should not require reading a 100-page API document.

I still code. The day a CEO stops understanding the product is the day the product starts dying.

The For You Page is not magic. It is a very good algorithm that learns what you like faster than any other platform. That is our advantage.

On Bluesky, you can choose your own algorithm. If you do not like what you see, switch feeds. That power should belong to users, not corporations.

Live audio requires you to show up at a specific time. That is the opposite of what TikTok taught people — consume content whenever, wherever.

The two-minute timer forces authenticity. You cannot plan, pose, or filter. That constraint is the entire product.

Rides, scooters, food delivery, groceries — we are building the super-app for mobility and convenience in Europe and Africa.

Every email security vendor says they use AI. We are the only ones who build a behavioral model of every employee in the organization. That is the difference between marketing and product.

Advertising is the cost companies pay for being uninteresting.

No ads. No games. No gimmicks. Just messaging. That was the entire product strategy.

We wanted to build something that was not ad-supported. We wanted to build something that our parents could use.

The best product decisions come from being your own customer. We use Linear to build Linear.

Software tools should be fast. Not fast enough. Actually fast. Sub-100-millisecond fast.

Great software is opinionated. If you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no one.

We did not build Linear to compete with Jira. We built it because we refused to use Jira.

We are building the open-source Firebase alternative. Everything Firebase does but you actually own your data.

Every company builds internal tools. Most of them hate doing it. We just made it so they do not have to.

We do not compete with custom code. We compete with the decision to spend two weeks building something that should take two hours.

Deploy on push. That is it. That is the product.

Eighty percent of internal tools look the same. A table some forms and a few buttons. Why is everyone rebuilding this from scratch.

The best DX leads to the best UX. Happy developers build better products for users.

AI can generate a website in 30 seconds. The question is whether that website is any good. We are betting the answer is yes.

WordPress won because it was free not because it was good. We want to win because the product is actually great.

Framer as a prototyping tool was good. Framer as a website builder is transformative.

We are not building a social network. We are building a camera company.

I built Zoom because I was tired of bad video calls. Every terrible meeting I sat through at Cisco was product research.

The product should be so simple that your grandmother can use it. If she cannot we have failed.

The fastest way to spread a product is to make it useful to small groups of friends. Not the whole world. Friends first.

A video call should work the first time every time. Reliability is not a feature. It is the product.

Two hundred million people visit Zillow every month. They check their Zestimate more often than their bank balance.

Selling a home should be as easy as selling a car. Click a button. Get a fair price. Done.

Every agent who joins Compass closes more deals. If we lose that edge we lose everything.

The best agents deserve the best tools. Compass exists to give them an unfair advantage.

Rappi is not just food delivery. We deliver your groceries your medicine and we will send someone to stand in line at the bank for you.

No ads. No games. No gimmicks. WhatsApp was built on one principle: respect the user. Everything else followed.

I built a social app and users started selling clothes to each other. The best products are discovered not designed.

Instagram was always about one thing: making photos beautiful. The moment it became about everything else I knew it was time to leave.

The best products do one thing perfectly. Instagram did photos. Then it tried to do everything. I still believe in the original vision.

What if you could text your therapist at 2 AM when the anxiety hits? That was the original idea.

eBay was about trust. Without the feedback system nobody would have sent money to strangers on the internet.

Brand voice is not a nice-to-have. When Deloitte uses AI the output has to sound like Deloitte not like ChatGPT.

One line of code. That is all it takes to run an AI model on Replicate. Infrastructure should be invisible.

Uber is efficiency with elegance on top.

A restaurant owner shouldn't need an IT department. Toast should be simple enough that the chef can set it up.

Every great developer tool starts by making one thing 10x easier. For us, that was testing APIs.

I built Postman as a side project to scratch my own itch. It went viral because every developer had the same itch.

Our customers don't love Deel because it's cool. They love it because it makes an impossible problem disappear.

The best developer tools disappear into the workflow. You shouldn't notice them — you should notice their absence.

We sell happiness. The bike is just the delivery mechanism.

Boy Brow became a cult product because we listened to what women actually wanted, not what the industry told them to want.

A mattress in a box that arrives at your door sounds simple. Getting the foam right took years of engineering.

TIME Magazine called them the world's most comfortable shoes. We didn't pay for that. We earned it.

The best AI products feel like magic. That's what we optimize for — the moment someone says 'wait, how did it do that?'

5,000 companies trust us with their people data. That trust is earned one great experience at a time.

We build tools that developers love. Everything else follows from that.

Google Analytics tells you what happened. Amplitude tells you why.

Competing with free is hard. But serious teams need serious analytics. Google Analytics is a toy for what we do.

Every great open-source project solves a pain point that the author personally experienced.

If physical therapy was convenient, accessible, and guided by a sensor, more people would do it. That's the insight.

Y Combinator taught us that great products win, regardless of where you're from.

Blockchain gaming needs one thing to succeed: a game people actually want to play.

HR software shouldn't feel like punishment. People actually like using Lattice. That's rare in our category.

4 million members use Current. In a market with 50 neobanks, that means our product is working.

Seven lines of code. That's all it should take to accept a payment on the internet.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. If you can explain it to your grandmother, you've got something.

Facebook wasn't about technology. It was about identity. People wanted to be themselves online.

I got into Uber before the Series A. It wasn't about the numbers — it was about watching how people reacted when they used it.

SKIMS started because I couldn't find shapewear that matched my skin tone. Simple problem, billion-dollar solution.

I knew headphones could be a fashion accessory, not just an audio device. Nobody else saw that.

I invest in products I love. If I'm using it every day, other people probably will too.

Quality sells itself. We tasted 700 tequilas before we made our own.

On Running wasn't just an investment. I genuinely love the product. That matters more than any spreadsheet.

My name opens doors, but the product has to keep them open.

Philosophy taught me more about product design than any engineering course ever could.

The best products come from solving your own problems. If you need it, others probably do too.

We didn't set out to build a chat tool. We set out to build a game. But the chat tool was what actually worked.

The best technology is invisible. Borrowers don't care about blockchain — they care about getting money fast.

iPhone chargers in 10 minutes. Birthday cakes in 10 minutes. We're not a grocery app anymore.

Sell the bridge before selling the destination. Passage gets us into data centers; full photonic computing comes next.

Passage connects GPUs at the speed of light. Same chips, dramatically faster data transfer.

The Stock-Back card is our stickiest feature — spend money, get stock. It makes investing invisible.

Quick commerce works for 10 items. BigBasket works for the weekly family shop of 40 items.

The Kushner name brought attention. The product kept customers.

We sell tenant-occupied homes — buyers start earning rental income on day one.

Y Combinator taught us that the best B2B products solve problems the founders experienced firsthand.

We show companies the gap between how they think they work and how they actually work. The reaction is always horror.

One API, 40+ carriers, best rates. We're the Stripe of shipping.

Live classes with real teachers, real-time quizzes, and AI tracking attention. Not passive video — active learning.

The best study tool is the one you actually use. We optimized for daily habit, not fancy features.

We update Royal Match weekly. New levels, new events. A game is never finished — it's a living product.

Amazon knows where every package is in real time. We give every company that same capability.

SideScanning reads cloud infrastructure directly from the provider. No agents, no gaps, no excuses.

Software robots that log in, copy data, fill forms, and process invoices. No human boredom required.

Quarterly dividends from rental income delivered to your phone. Passive income shouldn't require $50K.

Composable commerce means you use the pieces you need. Not every retailer wants a monolithic platform.

A $2,499 device that images every organ in your body. The stethoscope of the 21st century.

The last mile is the hardest mile. Anyone can build an app. Building the logistics to get food from point A to point B in 30 minutes — that's the real product.

If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

The camera is the new keyboard. That was our bet from the beginning.

The Reva flat is named after my mother. She taught me that style doesn't require suffering.

Scrub Daddy is the most successful Shark Tank product ever. $200,000 investment. Over $200 million in sales. I knew in the first minute.

A hero is someone whose product solves a problem so well that the customer can't imagine life without it.

Enterprise software should be as easy to use as the apps on your phone. That was a radical idea in 2005. It shouldn't have been.

The best products make complex things simple. The worst products make simple things complex.

I left Instagram because the product I built stopped being mine. At some point, you have to choose between the company and your vision.

We built Instagram in eight weeks. The lesson is that simplicity wins. Every feature you don't add is a gift to the user.

At Facebook, I learned how to build products for billions. At Instacart, I learned how to build a business that actually makes money. Both skills matter.

We don't have a sales team. If your product is good enough, customers come to you. If you need a sales team, your product isn't good enough.

I use every product before I invest. If I don't love it as a user, I won't back it as an investor.

When a child asks why, that is the beginning of learning. Our platform exists to answer that why.

Budget does not mean bad. It means efficient. OYO's entire model is about making affordable mean excellent.

Startups that solve for the top 10% of users always look stupid at first. That is the point.

The best decision I made was to stay in hundreds of budget hotels before I built one. You have to live the problem.

Credit scores are a proxy for trustworthiness. CRED's entire model is built on the hypothesis that trust compounds.

The biggest mistake founders make is solving for the median user. The median user is already served. Solve for the extreme user.

If your product needs a pitch to explain why it's better, it's probably not better enough.

Gamers are the most demanding consumers in the world. If your product is not actually the best, they will tell you — loudly, publicly, and correctly.

The best products are adopted bottom-up by developers before the CTO even knows they exist. That’s real product-market fit.

WhatsApp had 450 million users and 55 employees. That ratio told me everything I needed to know.

I don’t invest in business models. I invest in products people love. The business model comes later.

The best companies are built by engineers who hate the tools they’re forced to use and decide to build something better.

I invested in Uber because the product felt like magic. You press a button and a car appears. That’s what I look for — magic.

Instagram started as a check-in app with a photo filter feature. The genius was in knowing which feature to keep.

I studied music at Yale. Turns out, understanding harmony and composition is weirdly useful for understanding product design.

Instagram succeeded because it made everyone feel like a photographer. The best products make ordinary people feel extraordinary.

At LinkedIn and Facebook, I saw what happens when a product hits network effects. As a VC, I’m looking for that same moment.

The first mile of any product — the signup, the onboarding, the first five minutes — determines whether a billion people will use it.

Design isn’t decoration. It’s how it works. The best founders understand this. The rest add a nice font and call it design.

The best SaaS founders are obsessed with one customer problem. The worst are obsessed with their competitor’s features.

The Cold Start Problem is the single hardest challenge for any network-effect business. Solve it and you’re unstoppable. Fail and you’re nothing.

Thrive taught me to invest in companies where the product is so good that sales teams are almost unnecessary. Pull, not push.

At Uber, I learned that growth isn’t about tricks. It’s about building a product so good that people tell their friends.

The atomic network is the minimum viable community that makes a product useful. Find it and you’ve found the key to everything.

A farmer does not need a computer in his tractor. He needs a machine that starts in minus 40 and pulls a 60-foot air drill through heavy clay. That is what Versatile builds.

We didn't build Juro for lawyers. We built it for everyone who has to deal with lawyers.

We're not building self-driving cars. We're building the eyes for self-driving cars. There's a big difference.

FlexiPerk lets you cancel any booking for any reason and get 80% back. In the post-COVID world, flexibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's a requirement.

Rowing uses 86% of your muscles. Nothing else comes close. The reason nobody rows is because indoor rowing is boring. We fixed that.

Indoor cycling was millions of people staring at walls. We turned it into a multiplayer game where you actually get fit. The concept sounds crazy until you try it.

If you build a product that works, people will find you.

I started Lululemon because the clothes people wore to yoga were terrible. That's the whole origin story.

Beauty does not need to be complicated. Four products. That is enough.

Disruptors come and go. Good products last. The best response to disruption is to make something better.

Great software helps teams do their best work. That sounds simple. Getting there is anything but.

We got sick and needed a doctor. We could not find a trustworthy recommendation. That frustration was the original idea.

You can't wait for perfect. If you wait for perfect, someone else ships first and owns the market.

The check-in was never the point. The point was understanding where people go and why — and turning that into something useful.

I built Mint because I wanted to understand my own finances. I kept a spreadsheet and thought, there has to be a better way. Most great consumer products start with the founder solving their own problem.

We did not set out to be disruptive. We set out to solve a real problem. The disruption was just what happened when the solution worked.

Skype is not about technology. It is about making human communication more affordable and accessible.

The best products do not need advertising. They spread because people genuinely love them and tell their friends.

Safety and helpfulness are more complementary than they are at odds. We don't see them as a tradeoff.

We're going to make the best camera in the world. I don't care if anyone believes that today.

I was the last guy out of the locker room every day — not because I was the worst player, but because I was solving the cotton problem.

In-play betting was the product the market was waiting for. We just got there first and built it properly.

Building products has become easier and cheaper, but building brands is harder than ever.

At the end of the day, we are all product companies. We all solve a problem. And if you don't understand your product, it's very hard to build a great business around it.

Super apps don't get built by offering multiple services at the start. They get built by cracking the core service first and then adding other adjacencies based on customer need, ability to execute and competition.

The best consumer companies are not sold, they are loved. Users pull them in.

Puzzle & Dragons proved one great product can change everything overnight.

We've always looked at venture capital as a product, and that's why we've built our own tools.

We could not win in Korea by copying the global players. We had to build something they could not.

I don't want to create services just for technology's sake, but services that make convenience accessible to people.