Tech Startup Quotes

Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

You’ll become the head of the number one tech start-up in all of China, and I’ll be a renowned, award-winning journalist or English professor. Together, we’ll—” “Be the nation’s greatest power couple?” he offers. “I was going to say conquer the world,” I admit. “But sure. I guess we can start small.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.

There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.

In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel.

One common mistake we see new entrepreneurs especially tech entrepreneurs making is focusing too much on product

Yeah.” “It’s a deal then,” I say, angling my head to look up at him. “You’ll become the head of the number one tech start-up in all of China, and I’ll be a renowned, award-winning journalist or English professor. Together, we’ll—” “Be the nation’s greatest power couple?” he offers. “I was going to say conquer the world,” I admit. “But sure. I guess we can start small.

invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got

there's an entire sector of venture capital now devoted to funding start-ups as “talent farms” for Big Tech

As you go through various stages of your career, you’ll start to realize how much uncertainty there is in the world. It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself.

People ask me, "What’s it feel like, knowing your work will outlive you?" I say—imagine raising a kid. You feed it, teach it, protect it. Give it your best years. One day it grows up, builds a tech startup, and blocks your number.

People ask me, 'What’s it feel like, knowing your work will outlive you?' I say—imagine raising a kid. You feed it, teach it, protect it. Give it your best years. One day it grows up, builds a tech startup, and blocks your number.

Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.

Thorp had tried to build a wall between North and South Dakota for some reason. He contracted the job to his son, and the whole thing turned out to be a money laundering scheme to fund disbanded Nicaraguan Contras who were launching a tech start-up in Ireland.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

We are all vessels of profound possibilities. When we learn to accept we're not the creator, but simply a conduit of knowledge... Then we can create.

If you're not constantly testing, you're going to be tested constantly.

It's impossible to leave positive footprints behind when you're gone, if you always walked on worried tiptoes before you left.

Let’s talk about Minimum Viable Product, or as I like to call it: the art of building just enough to find out you’re wrong.

Today, the use of unsustainable or ethically dubious tricks to get a startup off the ground is widely accepted—even celebrated in some circles of tech—and has been widely credited to the growth hacks that Thiel and his peers developed at PayPal.

The thing about bozos is that bozos don’t know that they’re bozos. Bozos think they’re the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view. Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.

less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined.

There is an enormous difference between starting a company and running one. Thinking up great ideas, which requires mainly intelligence and knowledge, is much easier than building an organization, which also requires measures of tenacity, discipline, and understanding. Part of the reason that nineteen out of twenty high-tech start-ups end in failure must be the difficulty of making this critical transition from a bunch of guys in a rented office to a larger bunch of guys in a rented office with customers to serve. Customers? What are those?

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

The short version is that if a tech company is about technological innovation first, and company culture second, a startup society is the reverse. It’s about community culture first, and technological innovation second. And while innovating on technology means forecasting the future, innovating on culture means probing the past.

You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.

What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.

Industry leaders like IBM, Google, and Microsoft have been at the forefront, channeling significant portions of their extensive R&D budgets into quantum computing research and development. Alongside these tech giants, a dynamic landscape of startups has emerged, with companies such as Rigetti Computing, IonQ, and D-Wave collectively securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

But the questions not asked screamed out the loudest. Nobody brought up inflated tech valuations or risk management. Nobody seemed concerned about the tenuous economics of ridesharing. SoftBank’s $4.4 billion WeWork deal was the largest slug of capital ever committed to a start-up, but nobody asked what WeWork had to do with technology. Because nobody asks tough questions in a bull market.

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.

I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if you are a high-tech person in that company, then you're basically a glorified typist in some sense. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists.

Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.

Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.

This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight—never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission. Max Levchin, my co-founder

Thought Leadership “The new economics for industry, government, education” Book by W. Edwards Deming “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” William Edwards Deming, Statistician, Professor and Author #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

It was assumed we would never discuss the glaring inconsistencies between the public narratives spun around our startup customers and the stories that their data told: if we were to read breathless, frothy tech-blog coverage about companies we suspected were failing, we would only smile and close the tab. It was assumed that if we had a publicly traded company using our software—and, if so moved, could chart the overall health of that public company based on its data set, or build out predictive models of when its overall value might grow or recede—we would resist buying or selling its stock.

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth—they’re now millions of members strong without any superfluous “buzz.” They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with.

The need for approval from Twitter users was something that her younger self probably would have sneered at, but now she saw it as the cost of doing business. It was fine to get likes, but what she really wanted was either a retweet or, even better, a completely original tweet commending her for a job well done, preferably one from someone in the tech world whose work she respected and who, ideally, had hundreds of thousands of followers. If the only people who liked the tweet were “eggs”—people whose Twitter presence was so lame that they hadn’t even bothered uploading avatars, or spambots, or both—she sometimes deleted the tweet.

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want.

So, like, what are we to each other?” “We’re old friends who’ve known each other for, like, a hundred years,” I tell him. “It’s just that ninety-five of them happened in one week.” “I like that.” "Three years from now,” he says, “when you break up with your first college boyfriend, you’ll call me and I’ll stay up all night talking you through it.” “Possibly,” I admit. And then I say, “Seven years from now, when your first computer start-up company goes belly up, we’ll go out that night. I’ll make you laugh, and keep you from getting too drunk, and convince you to get to work on your second tech start-up.” “Possibly,” he admits. “And twelve years from now, you’ll call to tell me that you want me to be the godfather to your first kid.” “Possibly,” I concede. “And twenty years from now, we’ll all go on vacation together, and our spouses, or whatever, will get jealous that we’re spending too much time talking to each other, and they’ll run off together.” “Possibly,” he concludes. “And thirty years from now, when you’re running for reelection, and I’ve made my third fortune, I’ll take you dancing, and it’ll be all over the tabloids.” And then he adds, “Of course, they’ll be holographic by then.” I have to laugh. “Of course they will.” He smiles at me. “And then maybe we can ask again, what we are to each other?

On describes the earliest startup as like driving a race car. You’re close to the ground, and you feel every move you make. You have control, you can turn quickly, you feel like things are moving fast. Of course, you’re also at risk of crashing at any moment, but you only take yourself down if you do. As you grow, you graduate to a commercial flight. You’re farther from the ground, and more people’s lives depend on you, so you need to consider your movements more carefully, but you still feel in control and can turn the plane relatively quickly. Finally, you graduate to a spaceship, where you can’t make quick moves and the course is set long in advance, but you’re capable of going very far and taking tons of people along for the ride.

The parallels, however, between improvisational theater and the plunge into the abyss that is founding or working at a startup are numerous. To expose oneself on the stage, and to inhabit a character, require an embrace of serendipity and a level of psychological flexibility that are essential in building and navigating the growth of a company that seeks to serve a new market, and indeed participate in the creation of that market, rather than merely accommodate the needs and demands of existing ones. There is a breathless, improvisational quality to building technology. Jerry Seinfeld has said, “In comedy, you do anything that you think might work. Anything.” The same is true in tech. The construction of software and technology is an observational art and science, not a theoretical one. One needs to constantly abandon perceived notions of what ought to work in favor of what does work. It is that sensitivity to the audience, the public, and the customer that allows us to build.

TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

One question is in the mind of every fledgling entrepreneur in the high-tech startups of Beijing’s Zhongguancun neighborhood, the fabrication hubs of Wenzhou, the industrial region of Dalian, and dozens of other Chinese business centers: “Why not me?” Success is all around them…. Young Chinese businesspeople are driven by materialistic desires, eager to “catch up” with the rest of the world, and almost giddy with a sense of multiplying opportunity. They have read Internet chronicles of the triumphs of Yahoo, Silicon Graphics, and Google. They see themselves as the creators of the world’s future Intels, Apples, and Microsofts, and some of them probably will be.

In 2017, US companies are estimated to have allocated more than $650 million to fuel the AI talent race, with more than 10,000 available positions at top employers across the country. The top five tech companies have the capital to crowd out competitors: startups, universities, municipalities, established corporations in other industries, and less wealthy countries.31 In Britain, university administrators are already talking about a “missing generation” of data scientists.

Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.

Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as “the tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.

But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor.

The journalist Dan Lyons joined a tech start-up after being downsized from Newsweek in 2012, and the experience inspired him to write a book about how Bay Area norms have infected the American workplace, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. Nominally egalitarian but oppressive in practice, the start-up spirit insists that everyone be super psyched about their jobs all the time. No one is actually loyal to the organziation in the sense of intending to work there for longer than five years, but what employees lack in commitment, they must make up for in enthusiasm. This mandatory passion is made worse by the smartphone. No one is every off duty anymore. The BlackBerry’s original tagline was “Always On. Always Connected.” Bizarrely, this made people want to buy it.

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products. . . . [C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service. . . . In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. . . . Furthermore . . . [a]round what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? . . . You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 110

Tencent had two core competencies: capital and traffic volume. ‘There’s a lot of great entrepreneurs outside, and if you turn every single one of them into your enemy, it’s not a good thing. As a company you can’t actually hire these entrepreneurs, so what are you going to do? Investment is actually the best way to get a piece of their action.’ This became the breakthrough in Tencent’s new strategy: from then on, the company would embark on a new chapter by becoming an incubator for startups, instead of a killer. It would invest in them, often by taking minority stakes, and grow an ecosystem of companies.

TalkBox made its first mistake a few months into launching. In 2011, most people were still relying on 2G in mainland China. The most popular data package in China was 30 megabytes for about 80 cents. The novice founders, thinking 3G would soon dawn upon the country, decided to opt for voice quality instead of speed. They were wrong; the faster network didn’t roll out fully until 2013, missing their estimate by a year. WeChat chose the reverse and soon started picking up momentum. A TalkBox message for one minute used up more than a tenth of one megabyte every time. With only thirty megabytes in their data packages, many users were reluctant to send voice messages using TalkBox. WeChat, on the other hand, only required a fifteenth of TalkBox’s. Herein lies an important lesson that wizened startup founders the world over swear by. Timing is everything – come up with an idea too late and you miss the wave, yet roll out something too early and people will deem your product useless. The same happened with food-delivery and restaurant group discounts during the desktop era. They never took off.

Many AI startups fail not because of their business, tech, or market, but because they expect to make money too quickly.

The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees. When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley market, along with his skill level.

NSO was founded in 2010 by Israelis Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, school friends who had entered the tech start-up world in the 2000s and soon realized the potential of developing a tool that could access a mobile phone undetected. They were joined by former Mossad employee and military intelligence agent Niv Karmi. Hulio served in the Israeli military reserves and conducted IDF operations in the West Bank in the early 2000s. Conspiring with the dark side was thus assured from the beginning of NSO’s life.17 The first deal the company struck was with the assistance of convicted US felon Elliott Broidy, a long time director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. A big supporter of Donald Trump in his campaign for the presidency in 2016, Broidy was pardoned by President Trump in 2021 after Broidy pleaded guilty to violating foreign lobbying laws.

The norm is that if you launch a big initiative and it fails (in any department, not just tech), it would certainly limit your career. In more agile cultures, failure isn’t punished. Instead, it’s a learning opportunity. The mindset of embracing risk and tolerating failure is a huge part of the software ethos. It’s also one of the biggest things that old companies avoid—even those with leaders who claim, as many do, that they want to become more like a startup.

In science-related startups, the story is a little different. On average, 75 percent of founders in healthcare, life sciences, and biotech had directly relevant experience, while in enterprise tech only 40 percent and in consumer only 30 percent had directly relevant experience.

Lou quietly invested his portion in some tech startups out of Silicon Valley, and now neither he nor Veronica have to work ever again. Instead the two of them spend most of the year traveling in Europe and South America, splitting their time at home between a Craftsman in Carmel and a tony apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

There are downsides to working at consultancies. The most common: Career development-wise, these companies usually don’t offer paths to above staff engineer-level, which is one step above senior engineer. The scope of work is limited to what the customer sets. Consultancies are generally hired for projects that a customer considers to be outside its core competency. Not much focus on good software engineering practices. Clients pay for short-term results, not for a developer to work on long-term things like reducing tech debt. It might be hard to switch to product-focused companies later. Companies that build products like Big Tech, startups, and scaleups tend to have very different cultures where maintainability is important, as is taking the initiative. Working at a consultancy for too long can make the switch to these places harder.

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

—V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage “Compulsive reading. A deliciously timely, whip-smart buoyant dissection of men and women on the rise and the dynamics at play.” —Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish “Beneath its high-octane, hi-tech surface, The Startup Wife is a funny, poignant, and supersmart story of ambition, independence, and love—a brilliant portrait of the times we live in.” —Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire “Brilliant… A modern novel about love, startups, technology, ambition, and the future, all wrapped up in one. It’s very clever, but also subtle and very funny too.” —Emma Gannon, author of Olive

Morgan’s latest project is a tech startup called Clect (clect.com), which is a community and one-stop marketplace where people can browse, sell, and buy collectibles of any type imaginable (Star Wars, Smurfs, comics, a Millennium Falcon made from motorcycle parts, etc.).

It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected.

When examined through the lens of Meerkat’s Law and the central framework of this book, it is obvious why the resulting networks generated by big launches are weak. You’d rather have a smaller set of atomic networks that are denser and more engaged than a large number of networks that aren’t there. When a networked product depends on having other people in order to be useful, it’s better to ignore the top-line aggregate numbers. Instead, the quality of the traction can only be seen when you zoom all the way into the perspective of an individual user within the network. Does a new person who joins the product see value based on how many other users are already on it? You might as well ignore the aggregate numbers, and in particular the spike of users that a new product might see in its first days. As Eric Ries describes in his book The Lean Startup, these are “vanity metrics.” The numbers might make you feel good, especially when they are going up, but it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred million users if they are churning out at a high rate, due to a lack of other users engaging. When networks are built bottom-up, they are more likely to be densely interconnected, and thus healthier and more engaged. There are multiple reasons for this: A new product is often incubated within a subcommunity, whether that’s a college campus, San Francisco techies, gamers, or freelancers—as recent tech successes have shown. It will grow within this group before spreading into other verticals, allowing time for its developers to tune features like inviting or sharing, while honing the core value proposition. Once a new networked product is spreading via word of mouth, then each user is likely to know at least one other user already on the network. By the time it reaches the broader consciousness, it will be seen as a phenomenon, and top-down efforts can always be added on to scale a network that’s already big and engaged. If Big Bang Launches work so poorly in general, why do they work for Apple? This type of launch works for Apple because their core offerings can stand alone as premium, high-utility products that generally don’t need to construct new networks to function. At most, they tap into existing networks like email and SMS. Famously, Apple has not succeeded with social offerings like the now-defunct Game Center and Ping. The closest new networked product they’ve launched is arguably the App Store, but even that was initially not in Steve Jobs’s vision for the phone.87 Most important, though, you aren’t Apple. So don’t try to copy them without having their kinds of products.

Nectome is one of the handful of start-ups chosen to be part of Y Combinator, the most important of California’s tech incubators. (They’re the people who first championed Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.) In fact, Y Combinator head Sam Altman has already plunked down his $10,000 for Nectome’s service,

Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.

In fact, the romanticized narrative of the young, mostly male, high-tech wizard accounts for the smallest constellation in the universe of entrepreneurs—only about five to seven percent. Their new businesses get almost all the high-profile investment by venture capital firms, most of the media coverage, and—here’s a surprise—experience the highest failure rate of business startups. About eight in ten disappear within five years.

This “I-told-you-so” rant from your inner con man makes it hard to remember that he never told you any such thing. And conning yourself about Google may well make you more eager to take the plunge the next time you have a chance to get in on the ground floor of a risky high-tech start-up. Of course, “the next Google” may turn out to be the next Enron instead.

Maximo Caggiano, the Vice President of Finance at Phoenix Sol Consulting, transforms financial challenges into opportunities. His expertise in accounting systems and corporate management is complemented by a love for reading TechCrunch and Wired. Maximo's journey is a blend of financial precision and technological innovation, paving the way for startups and turning visions into reality.

The problem I just described can happen at the product level, such as an all‐new product from a startup, or at the feature level. The feature example is depressingly common. Every day, new features get deployed that don't get used. And, this case is even easier to prevent.

One of the biggest possible wastes of time and effort, and the reason for countless failed startups, is when a team designs and builds a product, yet, when they finally release the product, they find that people won't buy it.

What, you might ask, has happened to Schumpeter's powerful forces of creative destruction? Barriers to entry-whether regulatory barriers, the cost of investment, or anticompetitive behavior by the corporations themselves-allow monopolistic firms to retain their power by preventing new firms from entering the industry. In big tech, large incumbents police the so-called kill zone in their marketplace by "hoovering up or squashing any potential competitors." Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have, between them, "collectively bought over 436 companies and startups in the past 10 years and regulators have not challenged any of them.

I believe the major risk facing most efforts is value risk. On a startup canvas, this shows up under solution risk—discovering a compelling solution to customers. A solution that your customers will choose to buy and use.

I am not anti-venture capital. I am anti-everyone-thinking-venture-capital-is-the-only-way-to-start-a-tech-company.” The dream of being picked from a sea of wannapreneurs, anointed as a “real” founder, and handed buckets of money is alive and well in Silicon Valley and other startup hubs around the world. Except there’s something wrong with seeking this narrative . . . It’s lazy. It implies that you need someone else’s permission to build your company. That you’re not a real entrepreneur until an investor tells you that you are. Or maybe you like having an excuse not to ship, and a never-ending quest for funding is a pretty good excuse. There’s a reason the most common piece of advice I give aspiring founders is: Build your business, not your slide deck. Instead of waiting for a basket of money to fall into your lap, go build your business. If you were an author, I would tell you to stop asking publishers for permission and go write your book. Andy Weir (author of The Martian) didn’t wait for approval; he wrote an international bestseller that’s been made into a film starring Matt Damon.

The successful CEOs I have seen are ones that never give up. Even when I am telling them 'you really need to consider giving up'.

Tech giants of today suffer from the worst kind of handicap of all, lack of human perspective. Till you treat this common coldness, all innovation is mere fancy gimmick.

Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most successful and sought-after startup accelerators in the tech world. Graham has invested in several blockbuster companies, including AirBNB and Dropbox, both of which are valued in the billions at the time of this writing. After investing in hundreds of companies and considering thousands more, Paul Graham has perfected the art of identifying promising startups. His methods may surprise you. In an interview, Graham highlighted two key strategies: Favoring people over product Favoring determination over intelligence What’s most essential for a successful startup? Graham: The founders. We’ve learned in the six years of doing Y Combinator to look at the founders—not the business ideas—because the earlier you invest, the more you’re investing in the people. When Bill Gates was starting Microsoft, the idea that he had then involved a small-time microcomputer called the Altair. That didn’t seem very promising, so you had to see that this 19-year-old kid was going places. What do you look for? Graham: Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.[74] Your intelligence doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. If you’re reading this book, you’re probably more than capable. Your ideas don’t matter much, either. What matters most—by far, is your perseverance. Stop worrying about your mental aptitude. Stop worrying about the viability of the project you’re considering. Stop worrying about all the other big decisions keeping you up at night. Instead, focus on relentlessly grinding away at your passion until something incredible happens. Your potential output is governed by your mindset, not your mind itself.

The tech startup scene, for all its pretensions of transparency, principled innovation, and a counterculture renouncement of pressed shirts and staid social convention, is actually a surprisingly reactionary crowd. Its members preen and puff and protect their public image, like a Victorian lady powdering her nose, and refuse to acknowledge anything contrary to their well-marketed exteriors. Sure,

Thought Leadership “The Keys To Success” Book by Jim Rohn “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” - Jim Rohn (Entrepreneur) #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Thought Leadership “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” Book by Ashlee Vance “Take risks now and do something bold. You won’t regret it.” - Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX and Tesla) #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Reading: “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul” Book by Howard Schultz “When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.” Howard Schultz, Executive Chairman of Starbucks #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Nighttime Twitter was different from daytime Twitter only in that the content shifted from people in her timeline making dumb jokes about tech news to people making dumb jokes about TV. Katya

What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.

Bunch of people go out to the Valley, create something new. Us out here in the world go hmm, that's interesting, and start using it. Meanwhile the Valley guys are convinced they're the second coming of Christ and start overhyping and doing all sorts of things that aren't even useful anymore. The tech press clap and clap until it's time to write the obituary.

Thought Leadership “The Downing Street Years” Book by Margaret Thatcher “I have a habit of comparing the phraseology of communiques . . . noting a certain similarity of words, a certain similarity of optimism . . . and a certain similarity in the lack of practical results during the ensuring years.” Margaret Thatcher Author Former British Prime Minister #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

Two friends, Matt Gray and Tom Scott, set up a website in 2014 where people could communicate only via emojis—even usernames were strings of emojis. It was a joke, but nonetheless, sixty thousand people signed up; Gray and Scott began taking confused calls from investors who thought their site was an ambitious new tech startup. Meanwhile, a data engineer called Fred Benenson pushed things to nosebleed heights by attempting to translate Moby-Dick into emojis. True to the platform age, Benenson did not do the translation work himself, but crowd-sourced it on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where he had thousands of volunteers each translate a little bit of the text. The finished work—Emoji Dick—can be purchased for $200 in hardcover or $5 as a PDF. Meanwhile, Benenson hopes to build an emoji translation engine that will allow all literature to be turned into digi-glyphs.

Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.

The lawsuit was also a major distraction to Evan, Bobby, and Snapchat, during a time when they needed to focus more than ever. Finally, they reached a settlement. Reggie would receive $ 157.5 million and sign a gag order to never speak about Snapchat, the founding, or the lawsuit. Snapchat would acknowledge Reggie’s contributions to the company. Like Facebook’s multiple lawsuits with the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, it’s difficult to neatly arrange the characters into winner and loser columns. Reggie Brown likely could not have built Snapchat into the multibillion-dollar company it is today. But he did not simply toss an idea out there for anyone to take—he recruited Evan, the best person he knew for the task, to join him and start the company. So what is fair for each side to receive? Snapchat’s valuation soared so high and so quickly during the lawsuit that it was hard for each side to wrap their heads around it, let alone arbitrate what each side deserved. This question isn’t going away. The Social Network, featuring courtroom scene after courtroom scene of friends hurling accusations at each other through expensive lawyers, spurred scores of young college students to pursue startups. Evan’s massive success with Snapchat has only increased the startup fervor on Stanford’s campus. And Reggie’s lawyers’ firm, Lee Tran & Liang, has become the hot law firm for ousted startup cofounders to sue young tech companies.

In all the focus on political instability in the region, less examined is that many countries have adopted restrictive internet access and privacy laws. This includes business-friendly Dubai and lean-forward tech center Jordan. Often described as necessary steps in areas like press-and-publications law in order to protect libel concerns, these restrictions are usually vaguely worded and subject to wide and opportunistic interpretation. On the ground, entrepreneurs and investors alike view these as moves that risk chilling business development in their promising ecosystems. Jordan’s

In the tech industry, timing is everything. Start-ups who are very early and far ahead of the curve risk being at the bleeding edge and end up losing whereas companies who win big are typically at the leading edge or cutting edge.

Tech StartUp is Innovation War(Awesome one) and Innovation is Everything and Everything is Software!