Mike Kang

CEO @launchupio • On a mission to build the best junior software engineers for startups through a rigorous, long-term, work-integrated learning experience.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

@petergyang We’re gonna have a problem here.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

A person who coordinates land, labor, and capital is the economic definition of entrepreneurship.

In the knowledge economy, the labor part became very important more than ever before.

Are you rallying the right talent at an amazing price point? Or is talent around you slipping away?

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Average Googler tenure is 1.3 years. I’m curious what the average tenure is for Googlers who leave to go to startups.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

@Yohguys Where’s the base case though

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Your startup isn’t a yacht where you hire fancy titled technicians who spend time drinking tea, listening to a little Mozart in the background.

It’s a small boat, where everyone is an expert at essentially one thing only - rowing fiercely despite seeing no end in sight.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

@SahilBloom I would imagine these types of sentiments are cyclic. You pay the price per generation or two and then lose all learnings across generation with overcompensating behavior.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Agreed. They could also be charging much more, but then they’d be prioritizing short term gains over long term data advantage.

It’s like having an airplane roll forward to make short term progress in distance coverage vs feeding it fuel so it can fly.

Being able to make profit but choosing not to for long term advantage…among the best situations a company and product and be in!!

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

As for customers, the startup community likes to say things like “you can’t convince your customers to do anything.” That is flat out wrong.

Many customers need your product, want your solution, but simply aren’t convinced yet.

Employees, investors, customers.. the good ones need to be identified and there is always some amount of convincing that will need to happen.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Would you have made Apple, if you had met Woz at the right time?

Everything you touch should become gold. Or at the very least, you should be able to identify gold when you see it.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Your ability to convince people to give you money (funding) is one thing. Your ability to convince and fully unlock the talent that you have at your disposal is another.

What is the best talent that you should have locked into your team but didn’t. It’s worth thinking about it.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Imagine a world with 100 instances of your startup happening right now.

Obviously not all of them learn an equal amount.

The one that learns the most is the one that most deserves more revenue and funding.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

So with your pre-seed or seed round, how much are you learning? Per dollar and per time.

Those who have faster learning velocity will tend to get more learning done, more customers, and more investments.

Slow burn is not the metric of achievement.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

If your burn rate is low and your startup has no traction, you are dying.

Dying slowly sounds better than dying fast, but not really.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Investors know that they could have invested into a steadier 10 percent ROI. An actual good investor doesn’t look at how slow your startup died.

They look at total learning velocity.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

@elonmusk = 1/ure

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Reliable narration is one of the more unusually important traits of founders who you can trust over the course of a decade.

Smart reliable narrators are more rare than you might expect.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

@garrytan Aristotle said what makes a story whole is when it had a beginning, middle, and end. Each one necessitating the next.

Without narration, there is no empathy being built from customers, employees, and investors.

Without narration, no one cares.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Content and styling are tightly coupled to each other. Otherwise, why would everything already have a browser defined default styling.

Design shipping becomes bad when the content person and design person are two separate entities that aren’t working together as one.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

We need media to stop talking about AI “replacing” engineers. It is about as intellectually shallow as saying that cars replaced walking.

Yes they did, but not in the hysterical sense.

[Mike Kang @themikekang]

Between maximizing on learning, revenue, growth, and perfection in your product, winning startups prioritize learning over everything else.