I have been reading this great book Founders at Work which consists of interviews with many startup founders about their beginnings. I’ve read a little bit over a half and realized I’ve bookmarked too many quotes already. So I decided to put them up here in two parts instead of doing the traditional one “A book read” post.
Livingston: “What can big companies do to preserve a startup culture?”
Levchin: “I don’t know. Less PowerPoints. (…) As you grow larger, you need more structure and organization and meetings. My theory is that you sort of subdivide, and you make smaller units and you give them a lot of power and responsibility. You let them make it or break it. But I have no practical knowledge as to whether this works or not.”
“I think we didn’t know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you’re not really going to build one specific company. The goal – at least the way I think about entrepreneurship – is you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and the the last one was PayPal.
“‘We’re trying this, this week.’ Every week you go to investors and say, ‘We’re doing this, exactly this. We’re really focused. We’re going to be huge.’ The next week you’re like, ‘That was a lie.'”
“‘We changed our business plan.’ And these guys were like, ‘What?’ They just put down $4 million to see something happen, and we said, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do this.'”
Joe Kraus, Excite
“You never know anything. The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, ‘We’re kicking ass.’ And then you wake up the next morning, and you think ‘We’re dead.’ And literally nothing’s changed.”
“Even up to the time when Excite was several hundred people and we were the fourth largest website in the world, it didn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel like you’re really doing something huge. On some level it feels like you’re fooling people – like, are we really doing this?”
“It’s the whole sausage and sausage factory problem: when you’re outside and you only see the sausage coming out you think, ‘That’s pretty tasty.’ When you’re on the inside and you know how it’s made, it’s terrifying. (…) It’s never, ‘We set out this well-orchestrated plan, we’re executing it, it’s going exactly according to plan.'”
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