Beliefs
Things I have said often enough, and defended in enough rooms, that I am prepared to have them written down where anyone can hold me to them.
Forty investments instead of an MBA
I invested in 40 startups instead of doing an MBA.
I have no prestigious degree and I stopped being embarrassed about that a long time ago. Putting my own money into companies and then watching closely what happened to them taught me more about how businesses actually work than a classroom would have, partly because the lessons cost something.
If it does not act, it is a dashboard
In the AI era, if a software doesn’t take action, it’s not software, it’s a dashboard.
Showing someone their missed calls is not the same as answering them. A great deal of what is sold as AI is a nicer way of looking at a problem you still have to solve yourself, and the difference between that and something that actually does the job is the whole business.
Long games with long people
Play long-term games with long-term people.
The line is Naval Ravikant’s and it has shaped who I work with more than any hiring framework has. Almost everything good that has happened to me came from a relationship that was years old by the time it paid off, which is a poor argument for optimising the next quarter.
Nobody buys software
Owners don’t buy software; they buy back the hour it just saved them.
When an owner pays for Allo he is not buying a phone system, he is buying the evening he no longer spends returning calls. That is why the trial has to work in minutes rather than weeks: the hour has to come back before he will believe anyone about anything.
Product gets you in, distribution decides
Win by product, dominate by distribution.
A better product gets you into the game and almost never wins it on its own, because the company most people have heard of collects most of the customers. We make our own content rather than renting an agency to do it, which is slower to start and much harder to copy.
Running a company is mostly selling
Being a CEO is primarily a sales job.
In one week I made 193 calls, and that is not a story about heroics, it is what the job is. You are selling to customers, to candidates, to investors and to the people already on the team, and the moment you stop doing it personally you start hearing about your own company secondhand.
Small businesses do not need more software
SMBs don’t need more software. They need less work.
Every tool sold to a small business arrives promising to help, and most of them add another login, another dashboard to check and another thing to keep up to date. The plumber did not become a plumber to maintain software. If what we build does not remove work from his week, we have added to the pile rather than taken from it.
Technology for the ones it left behind
The people we build for were left behind by software, not by ambition.
Enterprise software was built for enterprises and startup software was built for people like the founders who wrote it. The florist doing invoices on a Sunday night was never anybody's target user, and treating that as a failure of hers rather than of the tools is how the industry has managed to ignore fifty million businesses.
Where you sell decides how big you get
Sell only in France if you want a small company.
France is a fine place to start something and a hard place to make it enormous, because the market is smaller, the sales cycles are longer and the ambition around you is calibrated accordingly. I moved to Miami because the customers I want to reach are here in numbers France cannot match, and because being surrounded by people building at that scale changes what you think is normal.
You do not need Y Combinator
If you need to give up 7% to motivate yourself, there’s a problem.
Accelerators are useful to plenty of founders and I have nothing against them, but handing over a chunk of your company in exchange for the discipline to work hard is a strange trade. If the deadline is what makes you build, the deadline is not really the problem.