What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
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Top people in startups
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20 September
19 September
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Their words
The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
16 September
15 September
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korrents.com
Startups and serious tech companies use Slack or Google Chat rather than Microsoft Teams.Their words
I don't know a single startup or serious tech company using Teams sorry they are all on Slack OK, Cloudflare is on GChat
14 September
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Their words
Technologies are not neutral, but political. Money is indeed one of the incentives, but not the only one. A mixture of millennialism, eugenics, search for utopia and for a spread of the specie beyond the confines of the Earth, are all elements we find among the founders’ views.
13 September
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korrents.com
Software is mostly dead; new Silicon Valley startups are building harness or hardware instead.Their words
In the most early adopting tech pioneering place that's Silicon Valley new startups aren't even building software anymore And it's debatable if anyone will actually need a custom harness or it won't just be generically offered by the AI frontier companies So software is mostly dead and hardware it is
12 September
8 September
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Their words
you make more money by being good. In startups you generally do
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korrents.com
Founders are back to coding with AI.Their words
This was when it started, in April. Founders are really back to coding with AI!!
5 September
3 September
From one piece Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
we knew that it was grueling. And you need you need something to drive you through all those obstacles and honestly being dutiful is not enough.
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Their words
If you want to seem cool, like starting a startup is just about the least efficient way to do it.
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korrents.com
Ambition in founders is mostly inborn, which is why stories of a founder acquiring it during a batch are rare.Their words
Those stories are rare because most of this quality is inborn.
+ 1 more
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Their words
there's still a lot of startups in this batch that are not shipping fast enough. And so obviously there's variation in shipping speed. It's not just the rate at which you can produce things. You have to think of these ideas first, right?
1 September
31 August
29 August
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Their words
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
27 August
23 August
20 August
18 August
From one piece Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think it's all about having regulatory clarity and ease for all sizes of of companies. Um and if we can work with Congress to do something like that, I think that would be that would be the biggest boon for for for startups.
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Their words
if if DC is in a vacuum isn't hearing anything from the startup ecosystem or even from big tech ecosystem or even from financial services or all these different industries, we can't make the best decisions.
16 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Lean StartupTheir words
Of course, you can’t not read The Lean Startup if you… actually, in any case! Do read it!
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That WorksTheir words
I prefer and recommend this over the canonical "Lean Startup"
15 August
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Their words
And the type of risk that we are asking investors to take is um, we know the physics works. We know that there's infinite demand and how we go from here to there is technology execution. And guess what? Venture capital in the United States is the best at underwriting tech risk of anywhere in the world.
12 August
10 August
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Their words
Many startups are racing to create foundational world models, but I think the first ones to succeed will likely be the platforms in control of this data bank.
7 August
From one piece Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.
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Their words
And one of the harder lessons as a startup founder, one of the harder things I think to to really deal with is the fact that you cannot delegate your judgment. As as the CEO, you must always make decisions that make sense to you, no matter how much momentum or inertia alternatives seem to have.
31 July
From one piece Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Startup opportunities are not fleeting; Silicon Valley has reliably had a surfeit of them for decades.Their words
You know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition. Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
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Their words
But now, people know that, well, the risk of the status quo is actually extremely high. And so, even if there's risk in doing all the new things, well, this path also looks pretty dangerous. And so, I really think there's never been a better time for startups to to sell um and to have their products get adopted at, you know, pretty meaningful scale right out of the gate.
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Their words
So, I um yeah, I think maybe maybe a better way of saying it is 20 20 years ago that whole lean startup thing was uh was almost the only thing to do because of capital available and you didn't have AI that made, I don't know, spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities so much easier, whereas now I think you can start these much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Many of the most successful companies of the last decade were built against the lean startup playbook, not with it.Their words
many of the companies that were most successful over the last 10 years, so many of them are are very anti-lean startup, right? Uh whether it's, you know, the labs themselves or Anduril or um yeah, you you you you can go down the list. A lot of them have this characteristic.
30 July
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korrents.com
A startup's durable advantage over a general model is having visibility into data the general model will never see.Their words
Yeah, I mean I think uh sometimes it's uh a product that you build that might have access to particular kind of data that the underlying model might not the a general model. So it might be you're building something to help users organize all their own personal information and the model won't necessarily have access to that. And so there you can have a big advantage because all of a sudden your model has visibility or your product has visibility into important data.
29 July
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Their words
And now I actually think with the power of agents um and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like I think but maybe the startup is like a Mecca Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI and you know, the the large companies are the sort of like more traditional Goliath, so to speak. But I think that startups now like if you properly embrace AI agents and um figure out the way to leverage their strengths in the most like ambitious ways, you can easily outcompete incumbents.
28 July
From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Y Combinator's much-mocked insistence that founders move to San Francisco was, in hindsight, plainly correct.Their words
it used to be very heretical that YC told people they had to move to San Francisco. And looking back, it was clearly right.
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Their words
the great startups tend to cluster when the ecosystem shifts and incumbents lose a lot of their advantage.
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Their words
I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um to varying degrees of course but I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed
+ 2 more
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Their words
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
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Their words
In fact, if if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that the power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society and is not just concentrated in a few companies or models.
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Their words
one of the most important things we discovered along the way is it's extremely difficult to iterate with outside suppliers, particularly outside suppliers in aerospace, which are let's just say I have no kind words for them. So we chose to build our own machine shop. And now we can go from a digitally designed engine part to a prototype part in about 24 hours.
26 July
From one piece Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the the big lesson is that for me is technology is changing all the time, and so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn't matter.
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Their words
one of the things I've always believed believed in is what makes great companies is a unique perspective about the world that you deeply believe in. It's not so much the technology, it's not so much uh the market even.
21 July
19 July
18 July
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korrents.com
About 5% is the most common final ownership stake for the founder of a VC-funded startup that works out.Their words
You think this is crazy low but ~5% ownership probably the most common final % most VC funded startups will have when they work out, especially when you have a co-founder
17 July
16 July
3 July
1 July
24 June
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Their words
I think like in startups the term is agency. Like somebody who's high agency who's just going to get things done, who's never going to like say no to something. I think like that attitude is really important of like okay, if I don't know something, I'll just learn it.
18 June
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Their words
And usually I like the customer is hyper scale. They have the scale. If they like what you have, they're willing to pay millions of dollars next few years. And even giving some warrant is worth it because you have a big one customer, you can scale.
17 June
14 June
From one piece The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
if if we're if we're too ambitious and we're at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough humble enough place
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Their words
in the Peter Teal sense it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product you you became a founder an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work
10 June
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Their words
I think part of the theory is like if you're building tools that are this complicated, you kind of want to have a 10 to 15 year time horizon on on building out these efforts.
9 June
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Their words
I think the the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason and because it's a hustle business like there there's there's always a rock you haven't looked under and you know age brings children and homes and and and other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities and you're just not able to go spend 80 hours a week studying YouTube like you just can't.
5 June
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Their words
The value of bureaucracies will go down, and the value of founders will go up.
2 June
From one piece FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it
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Their words
The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.
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Their words
If you're bootstrapping, you should probably have another source of revenue to sustain you.
30 May
27 May
26 May
15 May
10 May
From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
According to Harvard Law School, among venturebacked companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, okay, only 20% of founders are still the CEO 3 years after going public.
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korrents.com
The corporate best practices lawyers and bankers push on founders are younger than the trees in the local park.Their words
so many of the best practices that your lawyers, your bankers, whoever advisers you have, they're going to be pushing best practices on you that are younger than the trees in your local park.
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Their words
I call it the force that no one controls but everyone obeys that tends to drag organizations down into mediocrity to the point that we lose control of them. Now, sometimes we lose control of them because we get fired.
5 May
4 May
1 May
29 April
20 April
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
IncorruptibleTheir words
The Lean Startup helps you build a valuable company. Incorruptible is about how and why to protect it, keeping a company mission-driven over the long term instead of letting it rot from the inside.
15 April
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Their words
Nor nor did I I would say my mistake is I didn't deeply internalize that they they really had no other options that that that a VC would never put in 510 billion of investment into an AI lab with the with the hopes of it turning out to be anthropic. And so that was my miss.
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Their words
The link between venture capital and evangelical Christianity was closer than I thought. They're not just analogous; they deliberately cross-pollinate.
Church Planting: Lessons from the Commentsacesounderglass.com
13 March
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korrents.com
Real-world, human-generated data is becoming the only durable moat for software businesses over the next decade.Their words
I believe that data - real-world data, mostly human-generated, validated, and cleaned - is the only reliable moat we have as software founders in the near and mid-term future.
25 February
25 January
16 January
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korrents.com
Successful founders are distinguished by knowing what to give up and when, not by refusing to ever quit.Their words
The founders who succeed aren't the ones who never give up-they're the ones who know what to give up and when.
9 January
2 January
15 December 2025
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Their words
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
3 December 2025
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Their words
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
17 November 2025
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korrents.com
Only the US and China have substantial startup activity left; the rest of the world cannot really do startups.Their words
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
22 October 2025
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korrents.com
A company's quality is bounded by its team's quality, and a team's quality is bounded by its founders.Their words
We believe that a company is only as good as its team, and a team is only as good as its founders.
12 October 2025
30 September 2025
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korrents.com
Arresting Pavel Durov was a historic wrong and a gigantic PR mistake that will keep founders from building in France.Their words
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
18 August 2025
2 August 2025
23 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Fever Pitch: A Novel About Selling Your Vision, Raising Venture Capital, and Launching Your StartupTheir words
was delightful!
22 April 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global InvestorsTheir words
both of which I recommend
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New EconomyTheir words
I have written forewords for Amir in the past on two of his prior books, Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New Economy and Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global Investors, both of which I recommend.
23 March 2025
From one piece Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And it struck me how the most well-known brands have stood for one clear thing. Like they have a clear position. And so in order for superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy.
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Their words
I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
6 March 2025
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Their words
Making ultra cheap products requires different rules and strategy.
3 February 2025
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Their words
I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.
19 January 2025
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korrents.com
A startup does not need a growth team to start growing, because the first wave of growth has to be founder-led.Their words
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
6 November 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Designing for PeopleTheir words
Memoirs of one of the founders of industrial design.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Dijkstra archiveTheir words
Collected writings of one of the founders of computer science.
14 October 2024
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Their words, before
My suggested approach would be more capital intensive while retaining a lot of risk until fairly late in development. I am not sure it’s fundable.
Their words now
Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.
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Their words
Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX.
10 October 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Invention of the Jewish PeopleTheir words
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
7 October 2024
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
The Social NetworkTheir words
The Social Network is substantially made up, more a source for vibes rather than a source for facts. Even the vibes fail to cohere with reality. And yet it convinced many proto-founders to put in YC applications.
19 August 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Something VenturedTheir words
Something Ventured -- a lighthearted history of the venture capital industry.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980sTheir words
Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s -- a brief history of the venture capital industry since 1973.
19 June 2024
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Their words
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
21 May 2024
26 March 2024
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Their words
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
20 February 2024
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Their words
And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.
12 February 2024
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Their words
In light of the applied nature of current research problems, there is another path that exposes you to cutting-edge AI work: joining a startup.
14 December 2023
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Their words
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
28 November 2022
4 April 2022
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Their words
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
Announcing RedwoodJS 1.0 and $1M Fundingtom.preston-werner.com
25 January 2022
From one piece Inside the Mind of A Famous Investor | Marc Andreessen 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
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Their words
the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.
5 November 2021
5 August 2021
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How to Build an Iconic CompanyTheir words
These are three-minute podcasts that talk about startups, leadership, management, and strategy.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Everything StoreTheir words
The Amazon startup story.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Elon MuskTheir words
This has three startup stories in one book
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Zero to OneTheir words
This is an extremely well-written book focused on startup product strategy.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How I Built ThisTheir words
Like my startup books, each of these podcasts gives insight into product and strategy.
9 June 2021
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Likedrcmnd.app
Startup CXOTheir words
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
23 February 2021
20 November 2020
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Their words
The fast route — venture capital funded — is going to impose constraints on your business that will ultimately make it difficult to remain true to your open-source mission.
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 MillionTheir words
Selling is hard. Building a repeatable model with a team that you attempt to rapidly scale is even harder. Fortunately, Mark Roberge, who was one of the very first employees at HubSpot shares the processes and frameworks he used to build a sales machine. If you like the principles behind Lean Startups, then his data- and experiment-driven approach to sales will be very appealing.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Lean EntrepreneurTheir words
It goes much further and deeper into how to approach actually doing Lean in your business than Eric Ries's The Lean Startup book. It also has some awesome case studies showing how lean can apply to any industry. See my full review here.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Startup Owner's ManualTheir words
This is Steve Blank's textbook to starting a company. It's the Four Steps to the Epiphany, expanded and much more readable. If you want to deep dive into the Lean methodology, this is the book to read.
+ 1 more
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
What Customers WantTheir words
This book was written before the Lean Startup movement, but espouses many of the same concepts. If you feel like you're starting at zero in understanding what to do to become customer driven, this is a good place to start.
27 July 2020
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Startup CommunitiesTheir words
has updated his excellent book on startup ecosystems
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Startup Community WayTheir words
The timing of this book is excellent.
19 June 2020
28 May 2020
15 March 2020
10 September 2018
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
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