Mike McGuiness @mikemcg0 Twitter profile

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Mike McGuiness

25 days

Going to start writing on my personal blog more. Latest essay: "Great Thoughts Time" The famous mathematician Richard Hamming believed many people have greatness within their grasp but fail because they don’t work on important problems. This is why he always carved out time

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Is it better to target a small market or a large one? In the clip below, Peter Thiel (billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) describes his framework for evaluating markets: “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Why are startup ideas worthless? In his essay Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham wrote: “startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Is it worth it to hire exceptionally talented people who don’t always work well with others? Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that companies should “hire the divas”: “If you read any management textbook, it says ‘don’t hire the divas’ because they’re nothing but a pain

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you build effective teams? Keith Rabois, Founders Fund Partner and former COO of Square, has a great framework for building effective teams that he calls: “Barrels and Ammunition.” When most companies begin scaling, they just hire a lot of people. Naively, they expect

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Should startups always raise as much money as possible? In the clip below, Marc Andreessen shares a framework that Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff taught him called "The Onion Theory of Risk". You can think of a day 1 startup as having every conceivable kind of risk:

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Sam Altman on How to Get Your First 100 Users In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through four common strategies to get your fist 100 users in order of best to worst: 1. Use your network. Email everyone you know and call in favors from anyone you can think of. But if it’s a

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you design an amazing user experience? In the clip below, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains that one route to a great UX and word-of-mouth growth is designing the perfect experience for one person: “How do you make something for a million people? I don’t

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Best advice for a pre-product/market fit startup? One of my favorite pieces of advice on this topic comes from Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong: “Action produces information. Just keep doing stuff.” He borrows this from Paul Graham who said: “Startups are like sharks. If

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What's your favorite counterintuitive startup advice? In this interview clip, Mark Zuckerberg shares the best piece of advice Peter Thiel ever gave him: "In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Whenever you're in a

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Why is it easier to start a hard company than an easy company? In the clip below, Sam Altman tells the class at Stanford: “It’s easier to start a hard company than an easy company. Most people—especially young people—want to pick something that doesn’t sound too ambitious.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: What startup category is continually underestimated? In the clip below, Peter Thiel explains why he believes “complex coordination” is a company category that’s continually underestimated. “The question we always focus on is ‘can this company become a monopoly?’” He then

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are VCs looking for in the companies they fund? Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and venture firm a16z, explains in the clip below that venture capitalist business is a game of outliers: “The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Should startup founders be able to code? In the clip below, Naval Ravikant gives advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What factors explain the PayPal Mafia? The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. In the clip below, David Sacks—founding COO and product

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Peter Thiel on the biggest lesson he learned in 10+ years of venture capital In the clip below, Thiel explains how his biggest miss as a VC (not doing Facebook’s full Series B) led to a key insight: “Once something works, people often underestimate it. And when things aren’t

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you convince people to join your startup when most startups fail? The founders of Pinterest and Stripe shared their answers to this question in the clip below. I really liked Stripe CEO Patrick Collison's point that joining a startup is one of the best ways for people

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: What should you look for in the first 10 hires of a company? Ben Silbermann (founder of Pinterest) and Patrick & John Collison (co-founders of Stripe) share their answers in the clip below. Ben Silbermann starts it off: “I think one big misconception is that people think

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How do the best startup founders make it through the dark times? As Sam Altman puts it in the clip below: “No one is as honest about how bad the early days are as they should be because it’s so embarrassing in retrospect.” Even though Open AI is rumored to be worth $80-90

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: I’m 19 today and want to have a big impact on the world. Should I start a company? Even though Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Does my startup need a growth team? Mark Zuckerberg has said that one of the best things Facebook did was invent the idea of a growth team. In the clip below, he elaborates on this further: “Making it so that we could grow faster was the most important product feature we

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Marc Andreessen explains why warm referrals to venture capitalists are important As Marc explains in the clip below: “The way the top-end venture capitalist firms work is they’ll basically take you seriously if you come in introduced by somebody they’ve worked with before, and

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: What does customer obsession look like? This clip of Jeff Bezos is the best example of customer obsession I’ve come across: “If there’s one thing Amazon is about, it’s obsessive attention to the customer experience end-to-end… It doesn’t matter to me whether we’re a pure

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: Best advice for someone interested in startups who is about to enroll in or graduate from college? Here’s Marc Andreessen’s advice from 2016: “If I’m 22 again, I think what I do is I go try to find the company in the Valley that’s growing the fastest, has a really good

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do I know if my startup is working on a worthwhile problem? Former Google CEO Larry Page uses a simple framework called "The Toothbrush Test" to decide whether he likes a business. He asks himself if the product is, like a toothbrush, "something you will use once or twice

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Why is company culture important? In the clip below, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz argues that culture drives how people in your company behave on a daily basis—and particularly, how they behave when you’re not looking. Is that phone call so important I need to return it today

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Facebook VP of Growth on how to prioritize power users vs marginal users As Alex Schultz puts it in the clip below: “The thing that everyone in the Valley gets wrong is that we think about ourselves when we optimize for growth.” His favorite example is notifications: “Every

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

2 years

You can shut it all down via the Plaid access console if you can't do it through your bank UI too. @Plaid are you all taking action here?

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are some alternatives to raising venture capital? Ryan Peterson is the founder and CEO of Flexport, which was valued at more than $8 billion last year. In the clip below, he talks about how he adopted Paul Graham’s “be a cockroach” philosophy and aimed for “ramen

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Why will a good product with great distribution always beat a great product with bad distribution? LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company In the clip below, Ben Silbermann shares what surprised him the most in starting a company after reading about overnight startup successes like Facebook and Instagram: “It can take a really, really

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What should a startup measure? My favorite talk on measurement for startups is Quora founder & former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo's Stanford CS183F lecture. He argues that the most important thing to measure is the **users getting value from your product today**. This can be

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

Why #ETH is More Secure than #BTC This 23-tweet thread summarizes the second of four arguments in my essay "Why ETH Will Win Store of Value"

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Why is it so important to get the first few hires of a startup right? Stripe CEO Patrick Collison explains it really well in Startup School’s Hiring and Culture Lecture. It’s critical to get the first 10 hires of a startup right because each of those people will hire or

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you identify great talent within your company? In his Startup School Lecture: How to Operate, @rabois tells a story of how a talented intern solved a problem that had stumped multiple people at the company for months. Even though the problem seemed trivial to the

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Is there a formula for startup success? In the clip below, Founders Fund GP Keith Rabois explains the viral tweet that’s pinned to his profile, which reads: “Formula for startup success: Find large highly fragmented industry w low NPS; vertically integrate a solution to

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What’s your favorite management insight? In the clip below, Keith Rabois shares the focusing framework he learned from Peter Thiel. At PayPal, Peter gave everyone at the company exactly one thing to prioritize at a time. Naturally, everyone rebelled—bright people want to do

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you create a great startup pitch? In the clip below, YC Partner Michael Seibel breaks down the two types of pitches every startup founder needs: a 30-second elevator pitch and a two-minute pitch for investors. “A lot of people practice 10-minute, 30-minute, hour-long,

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Naval Ravikant shares the common thread he sees across the great companies “I definitely believe that, as an entrepreneur, you’ll never accomplish anything great in life unless you stick with it through the end.” In this clip from a 2011 interview with @Jason on @twistartups ,

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

2 years

Just to make sure everyone sees this:

Plaid

@Plaid

2 years

@mikemcg0 Yes, we have suspended FTX’s access to all consumer data via Plaid. FTX can no longer access any financial data about you via Plaid, regardless of the status of your account connections through Plaid.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How important is experience when hiring? I really like the way Mark Zuckerberg puts it in the clip below: “I started Facebook when I was 19, so I can’t really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How often do pivots work? Instagram founder Kevin Systrom famously pivoted from his mobile check-in app Burbn to build one of the most successful social networking products of all time. In this clip, he posits that most successful companies are pivots. He points out that

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

7 months

“Winners act like winners before they’re winners…The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

7 months

What Twitter founder Jack Dorsey learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers, they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years, they were Super Bowl Champions. In his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, he writes: “Winners act

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: Does my startup need a business plan? In this clip from the Acquired podcast, NVIDIA founder & CEO Jensen Huang shares that he had no idea how to write a business plan when he first started the company. However, he believes business plans can be useful for teasing out

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Is a nice office worth it or a waste of money? In the clip below Airbnb founder Brian Chesky talks about how Airbnb sought to make its office a competitive advantage: “A really cool, interesting space can be a huge differentiator for hiring people. You’ll also spend more

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Which customers should a startup go after first? As former CEO of Y Combinator Michael Seibel puts it in the clip below: you should go after the easy ones! “A lot of founders are confused by this question… For some reason, a lot of people’s first instinct is to go after the

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How can a startup build a great brand? My favorite talk on branding is Steve Jobs's announcement of the "Think different" campaign after re-joining Apple in 1996. He opens with the statement: “To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated and noisy world.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How should an early stage startup run a product development cycle? There’s no one best way to run a product development cycle, but one of my favorite descriptions of a good process for early stage startups comes from Michael Seibel (former CEO of Y Combinator). As he puts it

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What goes into a great company strategy? I love this insight from Jeff Bezos that “you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.” Bezos rallied the entire company around the idea that customers will always want low prices, fast delivery and

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What's the best way to grow my startup? Alex Schultz is CMO and VP of Analytics at Facebook. He's viewed by many as one of the world's leading experts on growth. In the Startup School lecture clip below, he explains why retention is the single most important thing for

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How do you resolve product roadmap disagreements? Emmett Shear is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitch. In the clip below, he argues that disagreement on what to build is actually quite rare after everyone has talked to users and looked at the data. Most disagreements in

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What is the most common mistake founders make? “The #1 mistake that great founders make is waiting too long to fire bad people.” - Sam Altman In the clip below, Sam explains that he doesn’t believe this is a learnable lesson—”you’re just going to have to make the mistake and

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you decide which customers to listen to? As Superhuman founder & CEO Rahul Vohra puts it: “In a world where you’re drowning in feedback—and most startups are drowning in feedback—you have to filter it down to only the stuff that’s going to increase the number of

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What does good retention look like? As Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz explains: “Businesses in different verticals require different terminal retention rates. If you’re in e-commerce and you’re retaining on a monthly active basis 20-30% of your users, you’re probably

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are five great questions you can ask in every user interview? In the clip below, Eric Migicovsky outlines five great user interview questions and why they’re so valuable: 1. What’s the hardest part about [doing this thing]? The problem you’re working on should be

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What qualities do the best founders have? @sama observed thousands of founders as President of @ycombinator and believes the following are incredibly important 1/ Clarity of vision 2/ Determination & passion 3/ Raw intelligence 4/ The ability to get things done quickly

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How much attention should founders and investors pay to TAM when evaluating a startup? As legendary investor Bill Gurley puts it in the clip below: “I’ve found that TAM conservatism hurts you more than it helps you as an investor. If you feel like something is super

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you create a great product hook? In the clip below, venture capitalist David Sacks explains that a good hook is one of the key things he looks for when evaluating a product: “What you’re looking for here is a simple behavior that users will repeatedly engage in… The

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.” - Paul Graham

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

10 months

Reid Hoffman on why the best founders don’t have work-life balance In the clip below, the founder of LinkedIn addresses the classic question on work-life balance at startups: “I actually think founders have no balance… If I ever hear a founder talking about how ‘this is how I

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are the benefits of starting a software company? In this Stanford lecture (Competition is for Losers), Peter Thiel argues that there are two types of businesses that tend to result in monopolies: 1. Vertically integrated complex monopolies (e.g. Ford, Standard Oil,

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: How will I know when it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea? Tony Fadell is the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. As he puts it in the clip below: “Great ideas chase you.” He continues: “In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: What is data debt and how do you avoid it? As Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman explains in the clip below: “There are a lot of corners you can cut when creating your MVP… But data debt can haunt you because you can’t make up missing data and eventually your intuition will

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

9 months

The Peter Thiel question: “How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?” Is such a good thought exercise

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

9 months

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains how he uses 5-year plans to predict if a startup can become a $100B+ company “If you went to business school, you would’ve been taught: build a great product, organize a sales force, charge a fair price, make the customer happy.” But Eric

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

4 months

“The most important thing is to have smart people. As technology becomes more generic and less expensive, the leverage point becomes the people.”

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

4 months

21 year old Mark Zuckerberg explains why he isn’t worried about competition from Google When asked if he was worried about Google eventually competing against Facebook in a 2005 guest lecture at Harvard, a 21 year old Mark Zuckerberg gave the following reply: “I think that one

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: When should you grow an employee into a leadership role rather than hire somebody above them? Founders Fund general partner Keith Rabois answers this question in the clip below: “The way to think about this is: every company has its own growth rate and every individual has

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How much should I worry about what my competitors are doing? Here are a few of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Paul Graham on why companies shouldn't focus on their competitors. Bezos also sums it up perfectly in the video clip below. “If

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 months

“Storytelling is the most underrated skill… Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy.”

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

3 months

Sequoia founder Don Valentine: “The art of storytelling is incredibly important” “The art of storytelling is incredibly important. And many—maybe even most of the entrepreneurs who come to talk to us can’t tell the story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are four common pricing mistakes startups make? In the clip below, Y Combinator Partner Kevin Hale discusses four common pricing mistakes startups make: 1. Pricing products too low. Most startups price their products too low because they think it’ll help them grow

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

We're currently burning 27 $ETH per minute

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Should startups buy ads? In the clip below, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff explains how the $10B+ company got its initial traffic: “Very deliberately—and this is the advice I would give to any founder—we did no advertising. The philosophy for the first three years of the

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

What's one thing Solana does better than Ethereum outside of txn throughput? Once a single zkRollup on Ethereum offers greater TPS than Solana (e.g. StarkEx), will there be any advantage? Solana will be slower, more expensive, less scalable, less secure, and less decentralized.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What made Steve Jobs great? Tony Fadell is the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. In the clip below, he describes some of the things that made Steve Jobs great: “Really pushing you. Relentless on the details. Challenging you for the right reasons. It wasn’t bullying,

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What are good case studies for solving the cold start problem? In the clip below, a16z general partner Andrew Chen walks through three awesome examples of how companies solved the cold start problem. Tinder is his first example. Interestingly, Tinder had all of the features

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you build something 100 people love? Paul Buchheit is the creator of gmail. In the clip below, he talks about how he built the first version of gmail in a single day and iterated his way to 100 people who loved the product. The first version was an email client that

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Are the best founders generalists or specialists? Sam Altman answered this question in a lecture a few years ago: “I think that the best founders are generalists all the way through. Maybe you’re a specialist in a particular technology that you develop, but when you

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: What are are three principles of visual design that founders can use today? In this clip from his “Design for Startups” lecture, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan explains: “Visual design is not necessarily about expressing yourself. The key thing is the information you’re trying

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

10 months

Q: What is the difference between a logo and a brand? As Seth Godin puts it in the clip below: “If Nike opened a hotel, I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like. If Hyatt came out with sneakers, we’d have no clue what they’d be like. That’s

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What characteristics do many of the greatest products of all time share? In this clip, Google CEO Eric Schmidt posits: "If you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them." Uber is one

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How can a startup build a great recruiting pipeline? In the clip below, Naval Ravikant explains: "You have to build a great pipeline. Your best pipeline is going to come from your personal contacts. You literally have to sit everyone at your company down and tell them to

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

2 years

To be completely clear, no funds were withdrawn. Only information was accessed. I received the message below, checked my bank account, saw that my information had been accessed as well and sent this tweet. Everyone should still revoke access to be safe.

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

Interesting to see the Solana folks pivot: "hey, we're doing rollups too!" after FUDing Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap for months Now that L2s are executing, they realize they have no choice Rollups will still choose ETH for security, decentralization, & data availability

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 months

Marc Andreessen on software: - Individual engineers are going to get 1,000x more productive. Groups of 1-2 people will be able to build things that were inconceivable 5 years ago. - A software engineer transmutes labor into capital and creates permanent value: "Somebody sits

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

3 months

Marc Andreessen explains why software is our “modern Philosopher’s stone” Marc observes that the most revolutionary software in history was often written by individuals or very small groups: “for the really creative work, I think it’s 2-3 people.” Brenden Eich wrote the first

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: Is it normal to feel like you’re failing as a startup founder and want to quit? Yes! In the words of Elon Musk: “Trying to build a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” In the clip below, he elaborates on this further: “What tends to happen is that it’s

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

1/8 A short thread on "Economic Sustainability" I believe this is a factor often overlooked when people compare $SOL to $ETH. Shoutout to @epolynya for calculating the numbers I use here and coining the term (screenshot & link below)

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: How do the best founders craft visions for their companies? One of the key responsibilities of a founder is to define and evangelize the vision for their company. @sachinrekhi (founder of Notejoy) argues in a blog post that one of the most powerful ways of defining a

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

8 months

“Getting 100 people to love you means you need to meet them and understand their problem. We would fly during Y Combinator from Mountain View to New York and we would go door to door and meet with everyone of our hosts and literally live with them.”

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

8 months

The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit “He basically said: ‘It’s better to have 100 customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you.’” In the clip below, Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky explains: “If you have 100 people

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you design a culture that’s right for your company? As a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz explains in the clip below, the first step in designing the culture that’s right for your company is knowing who you are and where you’re trying to go: “You really have to start with:

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Watch the full @ycombinator lecture with @peterthiel here:

Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup...

Lecture Transcript: http://www.tech.genius.com/Peter-thiel-lecture-5-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory-annotatedPeter Thiel, founder of Paypal and Palant...

www.youtube.com

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What makes for the best cofounder relationships? Max Levchin co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel in 1998. In the clip below, he describes what he believes made their co-founder relationship so special: “The most successful cofounding relationships are very similar to the most

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 months

Having a lot of “competitors” without one clear winner may actually be an indicator of a good market to enter. Validates demand exists and suggests there are still big unsolved problems. For example, there were dozens of search engines before Google’s PageRank breakthrough.

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

3 months

Dropbox founder Drew Houston’s response to investors who told him online storage was a commodity “Frankly, I agreed with them. I was like, yeah, Google can probably do this. Yeah, we don’t really have a lot of structural advantages. Yeah, we’re not really sure how we’re going to

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: Startups are tough. Is it worth it? Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook and Asana. In the clip below, he walks through the common motivators of founders and why starting a company usually isn’t the best way to achieve their goals. Motivator #1 : Financial Outcome A lot of

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: What’s the optimal number of interviews? In the clip below, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells a story from the early days of Google where they interviewed a candidate 16 times and decided to not hire him. Realizing they could no longer do this to people, Google declared

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

11 months

Q: What does Naval Ravikant look for when deciding to invest in a founder? In a Tim Ferris interview from seven years ago, Naval outlined the four things he looks for in the founders he invests in: #1 Intelligence “You have to be smart, which means you have to know what you’re

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How do you handle negativity and criticism toward your startup or idea? When Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston posted his demo video on Hacker News, he received an infamous comment telling him why Dropbox wouldn’t work: ”For a Linux user, you can already build such a system

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

5 months

"Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something."

Startup Archive

@StartupArchive_

5 months

Paul Graham explains why you shouldn’t try to be a visionary “Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with small things and grow them bigger. Want to dominate microcomputer software for decades? Start by writing a basic interpreter for a machine with a

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

1 year

Q: How should hiring change as a startup scales? In the clip below, Stripe CEO & co-founder Patrick Collison describes how one of the things that took him by surprise early on at Stripe was how quickly time horizons change: “In your first month, you’re largely thinking about

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Mike McGuiness

@mikemcg0

3 years

Fails to account for fact that L2s require ETH/gas for settlement. As number of L2 txns grows, so will demand for ETH to settle those txns. ETH burn 🔥 will also increase as L2s (amortizing settlement gas across all txns) will be able to pay higher gas fees than individual users

Tascha

@TaschaLabs

3 years

A L2 w/o token will find it hard to get traction. A L2 w/ token will be bearish for ETH as users sell ETH for L2 coin to chase growth. Alt L1s don't have such dilemma (yet) & thus remain more attractive. If you think L2s are the cure to declining ETH dominance, wake up.

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