STARTUPS

A great startup idea is one where the founder is the only person in the world who could have had that specific insight at that specific moment.

Startups are not about working hard. They are about working on the right things.

The best time to start a business was yesterday. The second best time is today. Stop planning. Start doing.

Validation before building. Get someone to pay you before you build the product.

Bet on the founder, not the idea. Ideas change. Great founders adapt.

Every billion-dollar company looked like a terrible idea at the beginning. That's the point.

There's a version of this that works and a version that doesn't. And both of them require the same amount of work.

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

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

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

We built Spark because we were frustrated users ourselves. The best companies come from people solving their own problems.

We spent three years building the rendering engine before we had a product. Most startups would have died. But we knew if we got the foundation right, everything else would follow.

I dropped out of college at 20 with a Thiel Fellowship and no idea what to build. It took pivoting from drones to flight search to design tools before we found it.

We started by making yearbooks in Perth, Australia. Not exactly the typical Silicon Valley origin story. But the lesson was the same — make complex things simple and people will love you for it.

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.

WeWork was a real estate company that somehow convinced Silicon Valley it was a tech company. The S-1 was the moment the spell broke.

We didn't ask restaurants for permission to list them. We just put up their menus and started delivering. You can apologize later for making someone money.

I ordered a six-pack of beer through the app and delivered it to the YC partner's house during my application. Sometimes the demo IS the pitch.

We put a giant pink mustache on every car. People thought we were insane. But nobody forgot us.

We left Google because we realized the fastest path to autonomous driving wasn't the one with people in the car.

Mark Zuckerberg offered us three billion dollars. I said no. My board thought I was insane. But you don't sell the future for three billion.

Our co-founder lawsuit settled for $157.5 million. Most expensive fraternity argument in history.

I personally emailed the first 5,000 users and gave them my phone number. Some of them actually called. That's how you learn what people want.

Coming from Romania was an advantage. We didn't have Silicon Valley overhead. We could build enterprise software at a fraction of the cost while the market matured.