Other founders
What operators, not investors, actually said about building companies: Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Brian Chesky, the Collisons, Jason Fried and DHH, Tobi Lütke, Stewart Butterfield, Sara Blakely and Jensen Huang, each with the source and where the idea applies in the idea-to-MVP playbook. The investor views are in Y Combinator, a16z and Peter Thiel; Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Jensen Huang have their own sheets (Huang gets a short summary here).
Who's here and why
| Founder | Company | Best known for (as advice) | Main source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jeff Bezos | Amazon | Day 1, customer obsession, reversible decisions, memos | annual shareholder letters (1997–2020) |
| Reid Hoffman | LinkedIn (co-founder), PayPal (executive) | launch while embarrassed; blitzscaling | LinkedIn essays, Blitzscaling (2018), Masters of Scale podcast |
| Brian Chesky | Airbnb | handcrafted experiences, the 11-star exercise | Masters of Scale (2017), Stanford CS183B (2014) |
| Patrick & John Collison | Stripe | aggressive manual onboarding; speed | Paul Graham's essays, patrickcollison.com |
| Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) | 37signals / Basecamp | build less, fund yourself, calm growth | Getting Real (2006), Rework (2010), It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018) |
| Tobi Lütke | Shopify | the trust battery | The Knowledge Project podcast (2018) |
| Stewart Butterfield | Slack | sell the outcome, not the tool | "We Don't Sell Saddles Here" (memo 2013, published 2014) |
| Sara Blakely | Spanx | failure as not trying | essay in Getting There (2015) |
| Jensen Huang | Nvidia | first principles; resilience through hardship | Stanford GSB (2024) |
Founders' advice has the opposite bias to investors': it comes from one company, told in hindsight. Treat each as a tool, not a law.
Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
Bezos's annual letters to shareholders are the richest primary source any founder has left. The 1997 letter was re-attached to every later letter.
| Principle | What it means | Source | Apply it by… |
|---|---|---|---|
| It's all about the long term | measure success by long-term shareholder value; invest for market leadership over short-term profits; "we'll take the cash flows" over GAAP appearances; make bold rather than timid bets | 1997 letter (opens in a new tab) (attached to later letters) | deciding up front what you'll optimize for |
| Obsess over customers | he says obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of "Day 1" vitality, because customers are "always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied" | 2016 letter (opens in a new tab) | customer discovery that never stops |
| Day 1 vs Day 2 | "Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death." His Day 1 defenses: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, eager adoption of external trends, high-velocity decisions | 2016 letter | a startup is Day 1 by default; the risk begins once process appears |
| Resist proxies | process becomes the thing ("we followed the process"); surveys become a proxy for customers | 2016 letter | watching real users rather than only survey averages |
| Type 1 / Type 2 decisions | one-way doors (irreversible) deserve slow, careful thought; two-way doors (reversible) should be made quickly by individuals or small groups; as organizations grow they tend to use the heavy process for most decisions, including Type 2 ones | 2015 letter (opens in a new tab) | decision rules: classify each decision's reversibility |
| Decide at ~70% | "most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had"; waiting for 90% is usually slow; being good at course-correcting makes being wrong cheap | 2016 letter | a deadline on each open decision |
| Disagree and commit | say "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it?" He does it too, and says escalate true misalignment early instead of deciding by exhaustion | 2016 letter | co-founder disputes on two-way doors |
| Failure and invention are twins | he calls Amazon "the best place in the world to fail"; "Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time." Unlike baseball, business outcomes are long-tailed | 2015 letter | running several cheap experiments in validation |
| High standards | teachable, not innate; domain-specific; you must recognize what good looks like; and set realistic scope (his handstand example: people expect two weeks; it takes six months) | 2017 letter (opens in a new tab) | estimating honestly how long "good" takes |
| Six-page narratives | no slide decks; narratively structured six-page memos, read silently at the start of meetings; great memos take a week or more of rewriting | 2017 letter | writing the one-page spec in prose |
| Wandering | efficiency when you know where you're going; guided "wandering" for non-linear discoveries | 2018 letter (opens in a new tab) | protecting some unplanned exploration |
Working backwards and the PR/FAQ
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, both long-time Amazon executives, describe Amazon's processes in Working Backwards (St. Martin's Press, 2021). The core ones, as they describe them:
| Mechanism | What it is | Apply it by… |
|---|---|---|
| PR/FAQ | before building, write the launch press release (short, customer-facing) plus FAQs for customers and internal stakeholders; if the press release isn't exciting, the product isn't worth building | writing a PR/FAQ for your MVP in product design |
| Narratives | six-page memos instead of slides (as in the 2017 letter) | decisions argued in prose |
| Bar Raiser | a trained interviewer from outside the team with veto power in hiring | an outside voice in early hires |
| Single-threaded leaders | one person whose only job is one initiative; the book describes this evolving from the earlier "two-pizza team" idea (small teams two pizzas can feed) | one owner per area |
| Input metrics | manage the controllable inputs (selection, price, speed) rather than output metrics like revenue | instrumentation of leading indicators |
Regret minimization
In a 2001 interview for the Academy of Achievement (opens in a new tab), Bezos described deciding to leave his Wall Street job in 1994 with what he called a "regret minimization framework": project yourself to age 80 and minimize the number of regrets. "I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this." He adds that most regrets are "acts of omission". Use it for the decision to go full-time.
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
Launch while embarrassed
Hoffman coined the line, by his own account more than a decade before his 2017 essay If There Aren't Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late! (opens in a new tab):
"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."
| His three themes | What he means |
|---|---|
| speed | aim to launch fast |
| your assumptions are wrong | you'll be embarrassed by how many wrong assumptions you made about customers |
| feedback loop | launching late delays learning |
His limits on it: "I didn't write 'If you're not indicted by the first version of your product…'". If a launch generates lawsuits, alienates users or burns resources for no gain, it was too soon. Eric Ries's corollary, which he quotes: however long you wait, you'll be embarrassed anyway. His example: LinkedIn launched in 2003 without "Contact Finder", a feature the team thought essential; 14 years later it still didn't exist. Apply it to what not to build.
Blitzscaling (2018)
Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Currency, 2018) is about the next stage: once you have product–market fit in a winner-take-most market, deliberately prioritize speed over efficiency, accepting waste and chaos to win first.
| Stage (book's names) | Rough employee count |
|---|---|
| Family | 1–9 |
| Tribe | tens |
| Village | hundreds |
| City | thousands |
| Nation | tens of thousands |
This is not MVP advice. Blitzscaling before PMF is just burning money faster; see PG's default alive.
Masters of Scale: "handcrafted"
Hoffman's podcast opened in 2017 with an episode on Chesky called "Handcrafted", arguing that to scale you first have to do things that don't scale (transcript via Tim Ferriss #326 (opens in a new tab)). His summary: dream big, act small, handcraft the core service, then work out which part of it can scale.
Brian Chesky (Airbnb)
| Idea | What Chesky said | Source | Apply it by… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live with your users | "when you bought an iPhone Steve Jobs didn't come sleep on your couch, but I did"; features like profiles and reviews came from staying with hosts | Masters of Scale, "Handcrafted" (2017) | customer discovery in person |
| The 11-star exercise | take one part of the product, describe the 5-star version, then 6, 7… up to an absurd 11 (a Beatles-style welcome, a trip to space); the sweet spot for design is somewhere between "they opened the door" and "I went to space" | same; Hoffman's write-up (2018) (opens in a new tab) | designing the core experience of the MVP |
| Two stages | "There's really two stages of a startup's product. The first is design a perfect experience and then you scale that experience." | "Handcrafted" (2017) | perfecting the experience for a few users before growth |
| Cereal boxes | broke and in debt in 2008, the founders made and sold election-themed cereal (Obama O's, Cap'n McCain's); he says they made $40,000 selling cereal that year and $5,000 from the website | How to Start a Startup, Stanford CS183B, lecture on culture (2014) (opens in a new tab) | relentless resourcefulness to buy runway |
| Founder mode | his 2024 YC talk on how the "hire good people and give them room" advice failed him prompted PG's essay | Founder Mode (opens in a new tab) (PG, 2024) | staying in the detail as you grow |
The 11-star exercise and "live with your users" are Chesky's versions of PG's Do Things That Don't Scale (opens in a new tab) (2013), which uses Airbnb's door-to-door work in New York as its lead example.
Patrick and John Collison (Stripe)
| Idea | What happened | Source | Apply it by… |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Collison installation | YC's term for the brothers' habit: when someone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set it up on the spot | PG, Do Things That Don't Scale (opens in a new tab) (2013) | onboarding each early user yourself, immediately |
| Be the software | Stripe's "instant" merchant accounts were set up manually by the founders behind the scenes | same | a concierge MVP |
| A tiny MVP | Seibel describes Stripe's first version (then called /dev/payments) as having almost no features, a small bank partner and nightly manual paperwork, aimed only at early YC startups | Seibel, How to Build an MVP (opens in a new tab) (2023) | aiming v1 at one narrow, desperate segment |
| Support at 3 a.m. | Patrick describes a bot that paged a founder if a chat-room question went unanswered for 30 seconds | Masters of Scale, "Handcrafted" (2017) | founder-run support early on |
| Fast | Patrick's page listing ambitious projects done quickly (e.g. the Empire State Building in 410 days, Apollo 8 decided and launched in 134 days, JavaScript's prototype in 10 days) | patrickcollison.com/fast (opens in a new tab) | questioning your own timelines |
PG also cites Stripe in Schlep Blindness (opens in a new tab) (2012) as the idea thousands of programmers didn't see because payments looked painful.
Jason Fried and DHH (37signals)
Getting Real (2006, free online (opens in a new tab)) is the anti-VC counterpoint: small, profitable, opinionated software. Chapter titles and lines below are from the online text.
| Principle | What it means | Chapter | Apply it by… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build less | "Do less than your competitors to beat them." Solve the simple problems; leave the hairy ones to others | Build Less (opens in a new tab) | scoping the MVP |
| Fix time and budget, flex scope | "Never throw more time or money at a problem, just scale back the scope." | Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope (opens in a new tab) | appetite |
| Fund yourself | outside money brings constraints of its own; limited resources force you to launch sooner | Fund Yourself (opens in a new tab) | asking what you can do with $20k instead of $100k |
| Pick the right customers | "The customer is not always right." Basecamp focused on design firms | Hire the Right Customers (opens in a new tab) | a narrow first segment |
| Scale later | Basecamp ran on a single server for its first year | Scale Later (opens in a new tab) | what not to build |
| Half, not half-assed | "build half a product that kicks ass"; Basecamp started with just messages | Half, Not Half-Assed (opens in a new tab) | cutting features, not quality |
| Start with no | every feature request gets "not now"; only requests that keep coming back get considered | Start With No (opens in a new tab) | a high bar for new features |
| Forget feature requests | read them and throw them away; the important ones will keep coming back | Forget Feature Requests (opens in a new tab) | feedback collection that tracks problems, not wishlists |
| Meetings are toxic | they break the day into incoherent pieces and convey little information per minute | Meetings Are Toxic (opens in a new tab) | the same point as PG's maker's schedule (opens in a new tab) |
Their later books extend the same stance: Rework (Crown Business, 2010) and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (Harper Business, 2018), which argues for a "calm company" with sane hours and slow, profitable growth.
Tobi Lütke (Shopify): the trust battery
On The Knowledge Project (Ep. 41, "The Trust Battery" (opens in a new tab), 2018), Lütke described trust between colleagues as a battery rather than an on/off switch. Paraphrasing: when two people are hired into a company they start around 50% charged, because both passed the hiring process; each interaction charges or drains it; and the metaphor lets you talk about the state of trust without making it personal.
Apply it to co-founder and early-team relationships: autonomy follows charge. It's also a practical answer to the founder mode question of when to delegate.
Stewart Butterfield (Slack): sell horseback riding
Butterfield sent We Don't Sell Saddles Here (opens in a new tab) to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it in February 2014.
- The hypothetical Acme Saddle Company can sell saddles on leather quality and price, or it can sell horseback riding, which grows the whole market and gives the saddles context.
- Slack's version: "What we are selling is not the software product"; it is a result such as "a reduction in the cost of communication", and ultimately "organizational transformation". "We're selling better organizations, better teams."
- The memo cites Andreessen's "only thing that matters" essay and says Slack was still before product/market fit, so the team must work "from both ends": improve the product and communicate its value better.
Apply it to launch copy and onboarding: describe the outcome, not the feature list.
Sara Blakely (Spanx): redefine failure
Blakely's account in Gillian Zoe Segal's Getting There: A Book of Mentors (Abrams, 2015), as excerpted in James Clear's 3-2-1 newsletter (opens in a new tab) (April 2024): her father would ask at dinner, "What did you guys fail at this week?", and was disappointed if there was nothing. She says it taught her to define failure as not trying, rather than as not getting the outcome.
Apply it to validation: a failed experiment that kills a bad idea cheaply is a win.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia)
Full sheet: Jensen Huang. In brief: go back to first principles and ask how you'd reinvent a thing with today's tools (Stanford GSB, 2024 (opens in a new tab)); chase "zero-billion-dollar markets"; run a flat company where decisions and feedback are shared in the open. His "ample doses of pain and suffering" line was said at the SIEPR Economic Summit at Stanford on 1 March 2024, not at the GSB.
Where they disagree
| Question | One side | Other side | A workable reconciliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| How polished should v1 be? | Hoffman: launch embarrassed; YC: launch now | Steve Jobs: insanely great; Chesky: design the perfect experience first | an embarrassing product is fine; an embarrassing experience isn't. Polish the core loop, cut everything else |
| Competition | Thiel: monopoly; competition is for losers | PG and Friedman: err toward markets with competitors | a proven market, entered through a niche you can own |
| How fast to grow | Hoffman: blitzscale once you have PMF | 37signals: calm, profitable, "scale later"; PG: stay default alive | blitzscale only with PMF and a winner-take-most market; otherwise grow on revenue |
| Money | YC and a16z: raise to go fast | Getting Real: fund yourself | depends on whether speed decides the market |
| Planning | Thiel: a bad plan beats no plan; Bezos: the long term | Andreessen: the plan won't survive; 37signals: planning is guessing | long-term direction fixed, short-term plan disposable |
| Delegation | PG and Chesky: founder mode | Horowitz's peacetime CEO; conventional "hire good people and give them room" | Lütke's trust battery: autonomy in proportion to earned trust |
| Customer requests | YC: talk to users constantly | 37signals: read feature requests and throw them away | listen for problems, not for feature specs (see the Mom Test rules) |
| Decision speed | Bezos: decide at 70% | Bezos too: one-way doors need slow care | classify reversibility first |
Where each piece applies
| Pipeline phase | Founder advice | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Ideation | regret minimization; schlep-heavy ideas (Stripe); sell the outcome (Slack) | ideation |
| Validation | fail cheaply (Blakely); many small bets (Bezos) | validation |
| Product design | PR/FAQ; 11-star exercise; half, not half-assed; fix time, flex scope | product design |
| Building | launch embarrassed; scale later; six-page spec | building the MVP |
| Launch & iterate | Collison installation; handcrafted onboarding; sell horseback riding | launch & iterate |
| Operating | Type 1/2 decisions; disagree and commit; trust battery | playbook |
Critiques and limits
- Hindsight and survivorship. Every story here is told by a winner, years later. Cereal boxes, door-to-door recruiting and 3 a.m. support were also done by founders whose companies died; we don't hear their stories.
- Scale mismatch. Bezos's letters describe a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. "Resist proxies" and "Type 1/Type 2" transfer well; "input metrics" and single-threaded leaders mostly matter later.
- Context-specific success. 37signals' calm, self-funded model works for a profitable niche SaaS; Hoffman's blitzscaling works for winner-take-most networks. Each founder generalizes from the market they happened to be in.
- Quotes drift. Famous lines get polished in retelling. Hoffman's aphorism is well documented by him; Huang's "pain and suffering" line circulates in several versions; Blakely's dinner-table question appears with small wording differences. Use the source, not the meme.
- Founder mode vs trust. "Stay in the details" (Chesky via PG) and "delegate to trusted people" (Lütke, Horowitz) pull in different directions; neither has systematic evidence behind it yet.
- Personal risk. Regret minimization and "fail at something every week" are easier with a safety net. Weigh them against your runway, dependants and the probability of outcomes.
Takeaways checklist
DECIDING
[ ] Is this a one-way or a two-way door?
[ ] Two-way: decide now at ~70% information
[ ] Disagreement: disagree and commit, or escalate
[ ] Big personal call: which choice will I regret at 80?
DESIGNING
[ ] PR/FAQ written before building
[ ] 11-star exercise on the core moment; pick the
buildable star level
[ ] Scope cut to "half, not half-assed"
[ ] Time and budget fixed; scope flexes
LAUNCHING
[ ] v1 ships while still a bit embarrassing (not harmful)
[ ] Onboarding each early user personally
[ ] Copy sells the outcome (horseback riding), not
the features (saddles)
[ ] Founders answer support
OPERATING
[ ] Six-page memo, not slides, for big decisions
[ ] Trust battery: autonomy matches earned trust
[ ] Meetings minimized; maker time protected
[ ] Failed experiments counted as progressReferences
- Jeff Bezos, 2015 letter to shareholders (opens in a new tab): Type 1/Type 2 decisions; failure and invention; long-tailed payoffs
- Jeff Bezos, 2016 letter to shareholders (opens in a new tab): Day 1 vs Day 2; proxies; 70% information; disagree and commit
- Jeff Bezos, 2017 letter to shareholders (opens in a new tab): high standards; six-page narratives; includes the 1997 letter
- Jeff Bezos, 2018 letter to shareholders (opens in a new tab): wandering vs efficiency
- Academy of Achievement, interview with Jeff Bezos (2001) (opens in a new tab): the regret minimization framework
- Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (St. Martin's Press, 2021): PR/FAQ, narratives, Bar Raiser, single-threaded leaders
- Reid Hoffman, If There Aren't Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late! (2017) (opens in a new tab): his own explanation of the "embarrassed" aphorism
- Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling (Currency, 2018): speed over efficiency after PMF
- Reid Hoffman, How to scale a magical experience: 4 lessons from Airbnb's Brian Chesky (2018) (opens in a new tab): the 11-star exercise in Chesky's words
- Masters of Scale, "Handcrafted" with Brian Chesky (2017), transcript via The Tim Ferriss Show (opens in a new tab): Chesky and Patrick Collison on handcrafting early experiences
- Y Combinator, How to Start a Startup: Building company culture, Part I (Stanford CS183B, 2014) (opens in a new tab): Chesky's cereal story; transcript on the page
- Paul Graham, Do Things That Don't Scale (2013) (opens in a new tab): the Collison installation; Airbnb in New York
- Paul Graham, Founder Mode (2024) (opens in a new tab): prompted by Chesky's talk
- Michael Seibel, How to Build an MVP (2023) (opens in a new tab): Stripe's and Airbnb's first versions
- Patrick Collison, Fast (opens in a new tab): examples of ambitious projects done quickly
- 37signals, Getting Real (2006) (opens in a new tab): the full book, free online
- Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework (Crown Business, 2010) and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (Harper Business, 2018)
- The Knowledge Project Ep. 41, Tobi Lütke: The Trust Battery (2018) (opens in a new tab): the trust battery in his words
- Stewart Butterfield, We Don't Sell Saddles Here (2014) (opens in a new tab): the July 2013 Slack memo
- Gillian Zoe Segal, Getting There: A Book of Mentors (Abrams, 2015): Sara Blakely's essay on failure
- James Clear, 3-2-1 newsletter, 4 April 2024 (opens in a new tab): excerpt of Blakely's passage
- Stanford GSB, Jensen Huang on How to Use First-Principles Thinking to Drive Decisions (2024) (opens in a new tab): View From The Top interview