STARTUPS

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

Raise prices. The number one thing startups should do that they almost never do is raise prices. If you can't raise prices, you don't have a business. You have a hobby with revenue.

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

The problem with following conventional wisdom in a startup is that a startup's situation is almost never conventional.

Thunder lizards look crazy at the seed stage. They're supposed to. If they looked obviously good, someone would have funded them already.

The unicorn term was meant to convey rarity. I did not expect it to become a goal.

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.

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

The best founders are the ones who can articulate why the existing solutions are broken and why their approach is fundamentally different.

Startups succeed when the founders are more afraid of failure than the incumbents are afraid of disruption.

Make something people love. If people love it, it will grow. If it grows, you can figure out the business model. In that order.

YC companies, a]16z portfolio companies, Sequoia portfolio companies — they all bank with us. When your customer base is the best startups in the world, word of mouth is your entire marketing budget.

Station F is the world's largest startup campus because Paris deserves a tech ecosystem as ambitious as Silicon Valley. France has the engineers. It just needed someone to build the stage.

Amsterdam is a great place to build a company. The talent is here and nobody expects you to move to San Francisco anymore.

We didn't start Stripe to build a payment company. We started it because accepting payments was absurdly hard.

The best businesses solve problems that nobody wants to talk about at dinner parties.

The hardest part of building a company is not building the product. It's building the team.

Speed kills — but only in the good way. The fastest founders win.

The biggest thing that separates successful startups from failed ones is the sheer determination of the founders.

Y Combinator has funded over 4,000 companies. The ones that succeeded all had one thing in common: they refused to die.

The best chips come from small teams that move fast, not from big companies that move safely.

I left Baidu because a startup can solve autonomous driving faster than a corporate R&D lab.

In the early days, I was the delivery driver, the customer support rep, and the CEO. Sometimes all in the same hour.

The best startups solve problems their founders have personally experienced.

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

We nearly ran out of money in 2015. If we had raised one month later, DoorDash wouldn't exist.

I dropped out of USC to run Box from a dorm room. My parents were not thrilled. They're fine now.

ETHLend was wrong. Peer-to-peer matching doesn't scale. Pooled lending does. The pivot saved everything.

Build the smallest possible version and ship it today. If you're spending months building before anyone uses it, you're doing it wrong.

We lived in the store because we couldn't afford both rent and a lease. That's how it starts. You sacrifice everything.

The studio model lets you fail fast on ten ideas instead of spending ten years on one that might not work.

We had 13 employees and 30 million users when Facebook bought us. That ratio tells you everything about how software should work.

I built a company that processed $30 billion in payments. Then I got fired from it. That's startup life in India.

Revenue solves all known problems. If you don't have it, everything else is a distraction.

Being employee #7 at LinkedIn taught me that great companies look like chaos from the inside. The outside narrative is always cleaner.

I look for thunder lizards. Small today but capable of growing so large they reshape the landscape.

Every great startup has a secret. Something the founder understands that nobody else does yet.

Australia punches well below its weight in technology. That is changing, and it needs to change faster.

Australia has world-class founders. What we have lacked is the belief that we can build global companies. That is finally changing.

India has the engineers. What it has lacked is the ecosystem — the funding, the risk culture, the infrastructure. That is changing faster than anyone expected.

Entrepreneurship is not about big ideas. It is about solving a real problem better than anyone else and refusing to stop until you do.

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

Digg taught me what not to do just as much as what to do. Sometimes the most expensive lesson is the most valuable one.

The best founders I know are obsessive. Not ambitious — obsessive. There is a real difference.

Google bought Dodgeball and then did nothing with it. That was painful. But it also proved the idea was right — and that we should build it ourselves.

I built Dodgeball as a grad school thesis. I never thought Google would buy it. But when they did, I assumed that meant it was going to grow. I was wrong about that.

New York has a real startup community. It is not Silicon Valley, and that is actually a strength.

Speed matters. We went from idea to launch in one year. We went from launch to sale in two. There is something to be said for not overthinking.

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.

Healthcare is the hardest problem I have ever worked on. Finance was hard. Healthcare is harder by a factor of ten.

Operations isn't just a support function. It's how you turn a good idea into something that actually survives contact with the world.

The biggest issue for startups is the lack of adequate capital.

What Indian startups have achieved is unprecedented in the world.

For me, Unicorn 2.0 is about deep tech.

Fail fast and spend as little money as possible to get your ideas validated.

Most great businesses look like bad ideas right up until they don't.

India's time is here. Today's new tech role models are the founders of Flipkart, Inmobi, Snapdeal, Mu Sigma and many others.

You've got to survive, you thrive later, but first you got to survive.

The business plan he presents in the beginning is always different from what the business finally evolves into.

Be clear about how you're going to make impact. The lack of clarity is what kills a lot of businesses.