Peter De Loof

VP of Possibilities @Readz Digital Design | Web Publishing #nocode Platform | Love to | #Gent #LA transplant | #MusicManiac | #ALLIN

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Sam Altman's 9 things that the best founders do to build a great company

#1 Get to know your users really well

“The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.”

#2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth

“The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get that in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.”

#3 Make a long-term commitment

“Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.”

#4 Stay lean until everything is working really well

“In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.”

#5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people

“Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of time recruiting and retaining good talent.”

#6 Relentless execution

“You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with their company.”

#7 Startups are about not giving up

“One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.”

#8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself

“This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.”

#9 Clear mission

“You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”

Video source: @StanfordOnline (2017)

[Pat Grady @gradypb]

Saturday was my 15 year anniversary @sequoia... one of the things I love about Sequoia is getting to learn new things from amazing people, so here are 15 lessons from 15 people over 15 years... hope you enjoy!

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

Great #contentmarketing insights with realistic benchmarks to gauge performance and engagement like (internal) link building, writing longer articles often means better SEO optimized, social vs email The Animalz Benchmark Report 2021 @AnimalzCo https://t.co/Lo1wo6d6Np

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

@Delta I need help with modifying a booking can you help please? What info do you need to proceed?

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

Inspiring post: How to Get Your To-Do List Done When You’re Always in Meetings recognize the #GTD principles and pointers https://t.co/P23R12HrIt

[dave trott @davetrott]

"If you wait long enough you will see the bodies of your enemies float by" - Sun Tzu

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

The Search Singularity: How to Win in the Era of Infinite Content https://t.co/pPK8fzNeiW
Interesting piece from @thinking_slow, where he sketches the possibilities in AI already at hand and provides answer to raising concerns around the impact of AI on jobs in #contentmarketing

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

@Delta I understand that waiting times might be longer than normal but still waiting after 3 hours. It’s recommended as Medallion to use messaging in the app instead. Guess what after 6 hours and a robot asking me 3 times if I still need assistance still nothing nada! #FAIL

[Christoph Janz 🕊 @chrija]

ICYMI:
How public SaaS companies report churn, and what you can learn from them
https://t.co/F7D8DG4nkj

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

@myrstad hey, how are things! Good to see you here! Exploring Twitter spaces?

[Cabel Sasser @cabel]

Who's to say if this app — which measures your heart rate by putting your finger on the camera — is a scam?

That being said, my Reese's Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers has a heart rate of ~64 bpm

[mymind @mymind]

Into your mind.

(The weather project by Olafur Eliasson — Tate Modern, London 2003)

[Mike Elgan @MikeElgan]

Imagine going back in time one year and showing people this picture of a stadium full of cardboard fans and a sky of orange.

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

Excited to see this new digital #lifestyle magazine go live https://t.co/8IpqUZjfkw #bounceback #Vitality

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

Amazing photos! These actually almost look like illustrations

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The idea of capturing light in slow motion is not new - in fact, the Femto-Photography project succeded in doing this with physical cameras, and this is how they did that [source: https://t.co/Smuy1TbcPD]

[Isabel Albers @italbers]

Een wereldgezondheidscrisis, de ergste economische crisis sinds WOII die wordt verwacht, en een nog grotere klimaatcrisis. En dan dit. Dat katje toont hoe sommigen zijn doorgeslagen.

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

@ChaseSupport
•The easiest way to meet with a banker is to use https://t.co/SSYohCW00X to schedule a phone appointment. With all respect but this is complete BS. I scheduled 3 appointments, not once did a banker follow up on or called the phone number I provided #FAIL

[Peter De Loof @pdeloof]

@Chase @ChaseSupport you keep recommending to schedule a meeting with a banker via the site or phone app. NOT ONCE did a banker follow up on the claim that I have started 3 weeks ago https://t.co/BKS22dYJNX #FAIL

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Complained to a founder that a feature in his software was hard to find and didn't work. He replied that it was because it didn't work that they made it hard to find. Candid at least.