You have one job as a founder, fire yourself from as many roles as you can.

Since Q2 2019, Gumroad has grown from $4M in annual revenue to $22M in revenue, and from break even to making $10M in profit a year.

I’ve been documenting the journey with public board meetings you can watch on YouTube here–8 hours so far: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_DfN-mKCGNuswqERc6sIA8urYAKARc6s&si=40-j5imlZ_2Qxi3-

Each one is 30min-1hr long (edited down from 1-2 hours) and goes through numbers, shipments, and learnings.

My goal is to eventually have enough content to rival a semester-long college class. ≈10 more years of public board meetings to go!

(Next one happens in mid-November, live from NYC–Subscribe on YouTube or my email list on Gumroad–http://sahil.gumroad.com–to hear about it)

Go direct. Don't talk to the jornos. You don't need them anymore!

Don't give them your story as content they can advertise on. If you go direct, use your networks, and tell your story, you'll build your own audience not needing them anymore.

Underrated hiring screen: Social screening.

We have our companies review the socials of all full-time employees.

If you find:

• trolling
• victim mentality
• lots of negative posting

You know that will just be coming to your office.

A CEO should never be late to a meeting. You control your schedule, respect other people’s.

The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia is wild:

40 direct reports, no 1:1s

• Believes that the flattest org is the most empowering one, and that starts with the top layer
• Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting
• Does not give career advice - "None of my management team is coming to me for career advice - they already made it, they're doing great"

No status reports, instead he "stochastically samples the system"

• Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.
• Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "top five things" with whatever is top of mind, and he will read it
• Estimates he reads 100 of these everyone morning

Everyone has all the context, all the time

• No meetings with just VPs or just Directors - anyone can join and contribute
• "If you have a strategic direction, why tell just one person?"
• "If there is something I don't like, I just say it publicly"
• "I do a lot of reasoning out loud"

No formal planning cycles

• No 5 year plan, no 1 year plan
• Always re-evaluating based on changing business and market conditions (helpful when AI is developing at the pace that it is)

This org is optimized for (1) attracting amazing people, (2) keeping the team as small as it can be, and (3) allowing information to travel as quickly as possible

If you aren’t rich, every single business you start needs to be cashflow positive within two months.

If it isn’t, go get a job working for somebody who knows how to make money or a rich person with a big idea.

Sounds silly but this is why most people fail. Poor early decisions.

Неймовірно, як часто талановиті підприємці настільки сильно сумніваються у своїх досягненнях, що поступаються місцем тим, хто вміє голосно кричати про себе.

Think like a farmer

On this day 15 years ago, Airbnb launched. It was actually our third launch; nobody noticed the first two

Was talking recently to a founder who sold his VC-backed business for $55 million.

Massive success, right?!

He must be rich, right?!

He walked away with $250,000.

Y'all, the top-line number isn't everything.

Щоб не "застрягнути" на $5,500* назавжди робіть свій стартап або йдіть працювати в існуючий що злітає.

(*) мова про Україну, цифри від Djinni https://t.me/djinni_official/1022

Founder & CEO is a common title, especially in tech.

It happens to be my title too.

I've come to believe it's an impossible title. You're either CEO, or you're Founder. You can't hold both full-time jobs.

Every company should have a page like this that every employee can reference

Imagine having 4 cofounders at a VC funded startup 🥹

Selling for $100M

Diluted to 10% ownership by VCs

Tax takes 50%

Go home with $1.25M cash after 6 years working 7 days a week 12 hours per day or $47/hour

Many people on Upwork make more than that!

There is only one state of mind that makes you a successful entrepreneur:

Problem solving.

Your job as CEO of a startup is to remain calm under pressure because someone has to be cool and collected when things are inevitably on fire.

Average founders focus on competitors.

Great founders focus on customers.

As a legendary founder, I focus on my competitors customers.

Что работает в стартапе: agile, waterfall, авторитарный стиль, коллаборативный стиль, планирование, отсутсвие планирования.

Что не работает в стартапе: надеяться, что придут другие люди и решат твои проблемы.

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic.”

— Michael Gerber, The E Myth

How to build a $1B company:

Don't.

Extreme success is almost all attributable to randomness. And take a look at all the billionaires: do you really envy their lifestyle? Hell no.

Instead, build a lifestyle based on your true preferences. A lot cheaper & more likely to realize.

When I decided to write and sell my first ebook, The Tech Resume Inside Out, I expected to learn about the writing process. How to create a high-quality publication. How to work with editors. Designing a cover and illustrations for the book. And I have, indeed, learned plenty on these topics.

Bezos on experimental vs operational failure. Simple and elegant comparison. I always point out that there are two different kinds of failure. There's experimental failurethat's the kind of failure you should be happy with. And there's operational failure. We've built hundreds of fulfillment centers at Amazon over the years, and we know how to do that. If we build a new fulfillment center and it's a disaster, that's just bad execution. That's not good failure. But when we are developing a new product or service or experimenting in some way, and it doesn't work, that's okay. That's great failure. And you need to distinguish between those two types of failure and really be seeking invention and innovation.

The wrong approach and the right approach to startups

No one is going to pay you what you’re worth. You have to start a company.

Your first business doesn't need to change the world. It just needs to change yours.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Power of focus

At a startup, it’s hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Focus is imperative. Even when the thing you're focusing on seems impossible. Especially then.

First-time founders care most about product.

Second-time founders care most about distribution.

Короче, два главных инсайта для маркетплейса:

1. кто первый встал, того и тапки
2. быть №1 на относительно небольшом рынке Украины куда круче, чем быть №150 на огромном рынке Штатов или Европы. winner takes all.

The Lindy Effect for startups:

The longer you go without shipping product, the more likely you will never ship product.

Age when they co-founded these tech companies:

Bill Gates (Microsoft): 19
Steve Jobs (Apple): 21
Sandra Lerner (Cisco): 29
Jeff Bezos (Amazon): 30
Reed Hastings (Netflix): 36
Robert Noyce (Intel): 41
Diane Greene (VMware): 43
Charles Flint (IBM): 61
Dave Duffield (Workday): 65

Anyone can steal your idea, but no one can steal your execution.

У меня когда-то в профиле было написано “go big or go home”, но чем старше становишься, тем больше начинаешь ценить простые вещи. Семья, хорошая книга, cash-flow business with no outside investors 😁

Ask yourself if you would rather own 50% of a $100m company

Or 10% of a $1b company

Then you will know what you really want to build.

More startups are moving toward:

• alternatives to VC
• remote first
• community driven
• work life balance
• full transparency

I’m excited about this future.

"Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning." - Unknown

Dear tech companies,

Employees don't need ping pong tables or beer fridges at work. 🙅‍♂️🙅‍♀️

Employees need flexibility to do their best work and enjoy life. For instance, working remotely. 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

Please offer trust, not toys. 🙌

Learning to identify super talented people before everyone else does is one of the most valuable skills to develop.

Somewhere in the world, an unknown young person is probably starting a company now that will eventually be as big as today's tech giants.

I like this metric a lot: profit per employee as a measurement of startup success

Мы не раз отмечали, что управляем прибыльной компанией в сегменте, где часто прибыльность откладывают на потом. Нас все время спрашивают, почему мы выбрали для себя прибыль как главную метрику успешности компании. В этой статье я решил рассказать о причинах, по котором мы решили сделать Basecamp прибыльной как можно скорее. За 17 лет существования мы были в плюсе ровно 17 лет. Прибыльность — особенность нашей компании (и продукта).

More money from some customers can be a curse. Be careful what you wish for → https://m.signalvnoise.com/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-72820249456f#---0-148.v8z9de6v1

You can go broke generating revenue. You can’t go broke generating profit.

Let’s just get this out there: on paper, I’m a terrible CEO. I avoid going into the office, I only meet with my team a couple times a week, and I especially hate giving speeches, coming up with vision statements, leading meetings, and all the other CEO-y stuff you read about in HBR. To make matters worse, I rarely start work before noon.

Your company's most valuable resource is people giving a shit. Ask yourself: does your system encourage or discourage that?

Founders: consider adding to your monthly updates a "what we stopped doing this month" section. Subtraction is investment by another name.

1999 - $5M to launch a product, 30M serious computer users. 2014 - $5K to launch, 3B serious phone users. Leverage / $ is up 100,000x.

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing a founder does.

When I started at Facebook in 2006, we had 5M users. MySpace had 100M users. Anything is possible.

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Never in history has the path to market been cheaper or faster.

Visionary. Good at executing/operating. Talented.

Choose two.

Nearly all the most successful founders are revolutionaries. They want power, not money. That makes them hard to stop.

If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times.

The Apple iPod instantly turned the MP3 player market upside down, right? Amazon changed the book selling business like a shot, didn’t it? Well, in fact they didn’t. No matter how it may seem from the outside.

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, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.

Everything in startups comes down to the team. Want the best design? Hire the best designer. Code? The best hacker. It's really that simple.

Almost all the great entrepreneurs I admire are people who put their life's work into one main company.

Apple’s last quarter was the second most profitable quarter of any company ever in US history. Only ExxonMobile topped them slightly in 2008 when oil was at an all-time high. That’s an astounding and awe-inspiring accomplishment.

"Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming." - Richard Branson

Organizations look like their leaders.

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
When Microsoft and Apple were founded.