Startup Academy

Daily clips from the world’s leading founders, CEOs, and VCs.

(and every once in a while a PE guy)

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian explains why he's investing in women's sports:

"I am certain 5-10 years from now, we will still watch, no matter how good the AI generated highlights get, watching the AI version of that Knicks final would do nothing for the human soul. Even if it was pixel perfect, if it didn't actually happen, it is irrelevant and worthless.

So live sports has to be fundamentally human. No one is going to line up to see a bunch of robots play 18 holes of golf against each other where everyone hits a hole in one.

The end state of this technology is some version of this perfection that no one's going to want to watch because sport has to be human. So I've been saying this for 5-6 years now. I'm only more confident about it.

And I think what this technology does is it makes these assets more valuable. It makes them more engaging for fans. It improves training. It improves so many elements, but it does not replace by any means."

– @alexisohanian with @daniburgz on @BloombergTV

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Peter Thiel says a startup's name predicts whether it lives or dies:

"The names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.

PayPal was a very friendly name, it was the friend that helps you pay.

Napster was a bad name... you nap some music, you nap a kid, that sounds like sort of a bad thing to be doing and it's no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years."

@peterthiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Why the quarterly TV spot is dead in the AI era:

"Especially in an attention economy where AI is making it faster for everyone to produce content, the competition just for attention gets higher and higher.

If you think about the pattern of spending a lot of money on a TV spot, a high-quality, high-produced TV spot that runs once a quarter versus 100 videos a day posted by X amount of creators in X amount of markets...

I think that we're returning to not just brands and platforms being high-produced, but more its own media agency of coordinating all of this content, both from the company and from all of its superfans and all of its community."

— @nadyaokamoto, co-founder and CMO of Pie, with @Erica_Wenger on the Trailblazers podcast

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Alex Karp, the CEO of @PalantirTech, says he never learned how to drive. He was too poor to own a car back then, and later became too rich to need one.

His unconventional lifestyle shows how differently he handles daily life, from Nordic walking and tai chi to skipping the routines most people consider a given.

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Michael Tannenbaum on how to spot an executive who's actually in the weeds:

"I remember this so many times where you see a piece of feedback from the customer, you should know what they're talking about.

And if you see people in the company that are like, what do they mean by this? It's like, you're just totally out of it.

If there's feedback that we're giving, I'm going to have an idea of what they're talking about 90% of the time... that's a real tell."

— @MBTannenbaum, now CEO of @Figure, with @TurnerNovak on @ThePeelPod

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

@friedberg says Moderna's cancer breakthrough is really regulatory capture funded by your tax dollars:

"A private pharmaceutical company has seen their market cap go from $20 billion to $60 billion because they went through this regulatory process to create what, in my mind, is a form of regulatory capture...

...fundamentally there's an underlying technique that was funded by a lot of public research dollars that I think should be more open-sourced, more ubiquitous, and every hospital should be trained on how to do this process to treat cancer patients."

— @friedberg on @theallinpod

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Sam Altman on why changing human behavior is harder than tech people think:

"After Netflix came out and started shipping DVDs, even before they started streaming, it was amazing to me that people still went to Blockbuster.

I drew it by a Blockbuster on my way to and from school. And it was amazing to me that people still did it.

That is an example that has stuck in my head of force of habit and the way people do things and changing behavior. It's just much harder than the tech nerds realize."

— @sama, CEO of OpenAI, on @FoundersPodcast

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Sam Altman on why OpenAI got mocked for chasing AGI in 2015:

"When we started, people thought it was totally unlikely or almost impossible that AGI was possible.

I mean, we just got hammered by all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI.

And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again, saying this is completely ridiculous."

— @sama, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, with @davidsenra on @FoundersPodcast

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Palmer Luckey tells the story of how he founded Oculus with the help of John Carmack:

"He introduced me to Sony.

They tried to hire me to run their VR research and development lab.

I turned them down. They doubled the offer. I turned that down.

And then John was kind of the first guy who got any public attention for me, where everyone was like,

'Oh, John Carmack says this is important, then this must be important.'

And then, if you could believe it, two years later, after I started Oculus and started selling these, he actually left @idSoftware and became the CTO of @Oculus."

@PalmerLuckey @ID_AA_Carmack @joerogan

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Doug Leone on how he sat through a root canal without novacaine:

"I used the trick of thinking what it must be like to go to war and lose an arm or two legs, that's pain with consequences.

Mine was pain with no consequences and so I just said, it's just nerve endings from there to my spine to my brain, I'm not moving.

I love fear, it does wonders for me, it gives me the challenge to overcome that gives me then a sense of security."

@dougleone , chairman of Sequoia Capital, on the @davidsenra @FoundersPodcast

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

@johnternus, Apple CEO

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Apple’s John Ternus on the real tradeoff in product design:

If you imagine a product that never fails...and on the other end, a product that maybe isn't very reliable, but is super easy to repair...it's objectively better for the customer to have that reliability and it's ultimately better for the planet because the failure rate...has just dropped."

— John Ternus with @MKBHD

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Fmr. Intel CEO explains how they lost to TSMC:

"The thing with TSMC was they started with a vision of foundry. They were going to become the factory for the industry...

We never worked to make our process and our factories available for third parties. We do enough CPUs ourself. You know, we reuse it for chipsets and some of the other things that we're doing, but it was never standardized in a way that it could be made available for a broad ecosystem.

TSMC basically cut that in half and says, I don't care whose chip it is. I don't care what you're designing. I'll be your manufacturing partner.

And at the time, that was a trivial piece of the business. Intel didn't even care.

And then over steady progress over a long period of time and Apple as a customer, driving them to become really meaningful.

And when I came back to Intel in 2001, TSMC was producing 5x the wafers of Intel, not 10% more — 5x."

— @PGelsinger, Former Intel CEO, with @Jason on @theallinpod at the @RaiseSummit

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Founders, watch this!

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

29yo Billionaire's advice: "Start out sh***y at everything"

"Nobody is good at starting a company when they start a company.

For all entrepreneurs, you start out pretty sh**ty at everything.

And the whole game is how do you develop yourself to continuously improve to get better and learn quickly?"

@alexandr_wang, Chief AI Officer at Meta, with @garrytan, CEO of @ycombinator

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

How Jeffrey Katzenberg ended up running Disney Animation:

"He says, do you see that building over there? I went, yeah. And he says, well, do you know what they do there? I went, no, I have no idea what do they do there. He says, well, that's where they make the animated movies. I went, oh, that's good. He said, yeah, and it's your problem.

So that was my introduction to animation, I'd never made an animated movie before, I'd probably seen one or two of them as a kid, but I didn't know nothing whatsoever."

— Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner of WndrCo, on @BigShotPodcast

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

Uber founder @travisk on why most executives fail:

"Executives talk a f***ing awesome game.

You want them to be able to organize at scale, lead at scale. You also want them to be epic problem solvers, the most strategic badass problem solvers alive.

This is like being left-handed or right-handed. And there's very few people that are ambidextrous, but you need that.

I have come to the conclusion over my years doing the stuff is the problem solving is the most important thing. If you get somebody who organizes and manages well but cannot solve a problem, they're going to be doing ridiculous stuff in a super organized way."

— @travisk, Uber Founder & CEO of Atoms, on @tbpn with @johncoogan & @jordihays

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

"@solana isn't a niche chain. It isn't an app.

It is truly a platform for anybody... it's the chain for entrepreneurs.

It's a place where the best founders in crypto come to build their companies."

– Vibhu Norby, Chief Product Officer at the Solana Foundation

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

The biggest cheese banks in Italy store 300,000+ wheels of Parmesan.

Dairy farmers use cheese as collateral and get loans up to 80% of market value. At ~$1,000 per wheel, that’s $200m+ in loans (banks seize and sell cheese if farmer can’t pay back).

Best part: banks use automated machines that brush and turn the cheese wheels everyday to keep them fresh.

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

U-Haul has a reputation for building careers and holding onto employees, but how do they do it?

"I think the first thing is opening things up so it's not secretive. Too many small business people think it's a secret.

Not to worry, the person's not going to be competing with you or let them see what the business is and they may find part of it they're interested in."

— Joe Shoen, CEO of @uhaul, on @EntreLeadership

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

@alexabelonix 🙏

[Startup Academy @vc__backed]

According to Mark Cuban, you don't just go to college for the degree...

"Yes go to school. That's where you learn how to learn.

You may have a specific skill whether it's athletic whether it's technical whatever it may be, but if you don't know what you don't know, you're gonna have a hard time learning it.

If you don't know how to learn, the foundation of being successful is being curious and not just being curious but being able to be a sponge and assimilate as much as possible and college forces you to connect to people you otherwise would not to connect to.

If you're just in Silicon Valley and all you're doing is talking to tech people and you're walking around like a little tech zombie talking about your clawbot agents, and that's all that's the only context you have, then you're gonna lose out.

You're not gonna know how to grow a company, you're gonna make mistakes that will cost you your company, or somebody's gonna take advantage of you and aqua hire you and you know everything you dreamed of it won't happen.

- @mcuban with @Erica_Wenger on Trailblazers Podcast