ALEXIS OHANIAN - Teaches Building your Startup

I'm Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit while I was a senior at UVA. Be honest, it's really not about me. It's about you guys on the other end of the monitor. Sold the company. Came back to Reddit in 2014 as exec chairman to help lead a turnaround. Left. Ohanian says more diversity is in the best interest of Reddit and the tech industry more broadly. Then began investing. I want to discover the next Alexis Ohanian. Hand them a check and have them create something even bigger and even better. The next Alexis Ohanian is actually your own child. Oh yes, right there. Business dad life. I don't know if this color works for me. In this class, I'm going to teach you everything I've learned as a CEO and an investor in multiple billion-dollar companies so that you can go from your own idea to actually executing your dreams. I'm the right person to teach this class because few have both founded and scaled world-changing companies and also been among the earliest investors in dozens of startups, 30 of which are now multi-billion dollar companies. In the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory to change the world. In the internet revolution, you only need to open a laptop. If there's an aspiring CEO out there watching this, I would want her to know that starting a company is one of the highest leverage ways to change the world. And one thing that I am sure of is wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, you are capable of building an incredible business. You are capable of being a very successful entrepreneur. And I'm convinced that there are great ideas everywhere. There are people capable of executing on those great ideas everywhere. And I hope you will take the lessons from this, my own experiences, my ups, my downs, my successes and my failures to do even better than I did. And frankly, I want you to do this because then when you are successful, I want you to tell me about it so that I can then brag about all of your success and claim all the credit for it. That is all I want out of this because I really deeply believe that my purpose for however decades I get to do this is to help another generation do even better than I did. As an investor, I'll clue you in on what I'm looking for. What gets me excited? I'll teach you the steps to get funding for your business. I want to teach you how to find the right idea and steer you away from the bad ones. What would immediately turn me off in a pitch meeting. I'll let you know when to accept failure, when to pivot, and when to hit the accelerator. I'll teach you how to deal with setbacks and haters and competition. Although, if there's one thing I can't teach you, but that you're really going to need, it's determination. Back in the really early days of Reddit, we took a big meeting with Yahoo. We sit down with this executive. He's got his whole team there. I get into the pitch and he pauses me and he says, 'Just wait a second. Hold on. How big is Reddit anyway?' So I told him, you know, it was tens of thousands of users at this point. It was still really small, but it was growing. And he says, 'You guys are a rounding error compared to Yahoo. Like what are you even doing here?' The meeting did not go well after that. But I felt a certain kind of motivation from it. I printed out a piece of paper that just had a few words on it. It said, 'You are a rounding error.' And I looked at that paper every single day when I showed up to work. And they gave me so much life. I know I would not be the entrepreneur that I am had he not done that. And so my advice to you is look, you're going to come across haters in all forms. Don't take it personally and use it as motivation for when times get tough. I'll also be talking about corporate responsibility. Founders today are so much more sophisticated than I was. I meet CEOs now who from day one, even when they're 22, realize that what they're building has massive repercussions and will have a big impact on future generations. And they take that responsibility seriously. The very best founders, the most successful CEOs are going to have to think about how will my company fit into the broader society that it's going to shape. I look at it through a very simple lens. When I am explaining this hard decision to my daughter when she's grown up, am I proud of the answer? That's the test. So, this class isn't just for business people. This class isn't even just for entrepreneurs. This class is for anyone who's looking for opportunities to take an idea and bring it to fruition. And that doesn't mean just for, you know, the next Reddit, right? This could be for an amazing nonprofit. This could be for an amazing movie. This could be for an amazing fill in the blank. Ideas without execution are worthless. But so many of the best practices of modern entrepreneurs are applicable to someone in just about any field. The playing field has been leveled. All links are created equal. Let's get started. I'm Alexis Ohanian and this is my master class. Wait, did we do the clap? I'm just saying I want to make sure everything's synced. So Tom Friedman has this book and this pretty well-known quote about the world is flat and he's talking about globalization. And I know for a fact, one, the world is a sphere. I know we got a flat-earther thing going on on the internet, but let me be clear, folks. World is a sphere. The worldwide web, however, is actually flat. Really does create a kind of level playing field for ideas that makes my career possible as an entrepreneur, as an investor. The only way I can show up in Boston with a laptop and an internet connection and go on to build something that now hundreds of millions of people all over the world use like Reddit is because that playing field was laid out for me. And I know it is still a fraction of the potential greatness that we missed out on for thousands of years of civilization when the best ideas didn't necessarily win because of all the structural problems, because of all the gatekeepers, because of all the things that we know can hold a great idea back. The playing field of course structurally in our society is not a level one. I know that I had advantages just by being able to walk into a room as a 6'5 white dude and get taken seriously always. The internet is not this magic wand that all of a sudden solves all of society's very real problems, but it does provide a gateway and it does provide a chance for you to take an idea and build something and reach an audience that you wouldn't have been able to reach before and learn things you wouldn't have been able to learn before and actually bring to fruition ideas that maybe would have been snuffed out in their earliest days if you had to go through and get someone's authority or permission or sign off in order to bring them to life. And that's great for entrepreneurs. It's great for artists. It's great for creators of all types. There is a cliche that floats around venture capital that I hate, which is that there's too much money chasing too few good ideas. And I hate it because I know for a fact that it is not true. And the only people who say that are people who do not have networks of great founders. By great founders, I mean someone who is incredibly compelling, someone who deeply understands the market and can empathize with customers and is capable of getting something created. Maybe not ultimately the one building it, but someone who can recruit them. If you maintain great networks of great founders, what you'll find is that there are amazing ideas birthed every single day, and I'm in the business of finding people and identifying people and their great ideas before anyone else realizes that they're a great idea, and then putting my reputation, my team's time, our money into helping that CEO bring that idea to fruition. We'll get done shooting this. I will look at my phone and see a dozen more great ideas in my inbox from founders who I'm excited to meet. Creating something online today is as low cost as it has ever been and it's only getting cheaper. So when we talk about the cost of you starting something today, it's really time. It's time. It's making the decision to say, 'You know what? I'm going to put off binge watching Netflix tonight. I'm going to sit down and really think through this business. I'm going to start mocking up wireframes. I'm going to go talk to customers. I'm going to do the work to better understand what I'm building and then get started on actually building it.' So time increasingly is the most valuable input to getting a startup started. The costs in everything else continue to fall thanks to technology and the resources that you have where you invest that time into learning like this master class continue to get better and better. What I thought was massive growth 15 years ago is a blip today. Companies or ideas when they find real traction now grow much much faster. When you really dig into where the internet is going with web 3 and crypto, you start to see it then on a whole another scale. You aim for massive growth by relentlessly focusing on building something that people want and ideally something that people love. If they want it badly enough, they'll likely want to share it. And that is a prerequisite for massive growth that frankly few founders ever even achieve. We invested in a company called Axi Infinity and they grew to a hundred million dollars in revenue in a single month. A hundred million dollars in revenue in a month. And the reason it's so eye-popping is because you now have this intersection of hundreds of millions of people all over the world online and then now the rails for money thanks to crypto. And you connect those two and we're going to start seeing growth on an even bigger scale. The kind of holy numbers we're going to be talking about today are actually again going to seem kind of boring in 15 more years. So hang on. Anyone watching this should think through their commitments, their responsibilities first. And if you can put yourself and your family in a place where this is a viable path and you can't stop thinking about this idea and you really need it to exist, then all right, go for it. But being an entrepreneur is a lot. That's not to say it's exceptionally hard work. My sister's a nurse. I would last maybe a week doing that job, right? There are harder jobs and harder careers for sure. That said, the mindset you have to get into to be an entrepreneur, the commitment you have to make, it's a bigger existential one because you cannot leave the job at the end of the day. You're going to have decisions where you decide to forego time with friends, time with family, time with your partner, time for yourself. The people who have to do it, we're all a little broken in some way. We just have to. If you know, I have to do this. If you really are laying awake at night thinking about this, it really is the first thing you wake up to in the morning, you probably are the kind of person who should be doing this. And I hope a big part of this course gives you not just the strategies and the tactics to be successful, but also helps you with the gut check of is this something I want to commit to? For those who just know it in their bones, this is what they have to do. That's a thing you got to listen to. I really should know what entrepreneur means in French. In my mind, it means has ideas and does them. As simple as that. Here is a very fancy sounding word that actually is describing a very simple and because of that simplicity, beautiful idea. And people who hear that word maybe think of it as something that is other. And I've really worked hard to knock that off of its pedestal so that people understand, yeah, entrepreneurship is as simple as having ideas and doing them and everyone is capable of it. So, let's say you're 38, you've got a four-year-old daughter, and you're wondering, 'Am I too old to start a startup?' The answer to that is no, you're not. And in fact, this would be a good time to pull up all the data that shows exactly how many multi-billion dollar companies have been founded by folks in their 30s as well as their 40s and their 50s. You want an example of a company that was started by a 30-something year old? You're looking at one. Master class. Part of the reason that we are obsessed with this myth or this fantasy, the 20-year-old founder is because it is rooted in some truth, which is a kid right out of the University of Virginia doesn't really have an understanding for how the world works when it comes to media because he's never done it before. He's just a college kid and he ran a forum while he was in school. This whole website, everything was just social experiment to see what would happen. A bunch of people free to voice their own opinions online. Had I had five or 10 years of experience building certainly consumer social apps, I think Reddit would have avoided a lot of mistakes that we made. I think we would have been far more effective and successful. And there are things that I know I did while growing Reddit that I look at today, I'm like, gosh, that was a terrible decision. Why did I make that? Experience is valuable. And the best case scenario is where you have experience, but you're not carrying the baggage of a sort of frozen mindset of how things should be. If you don't happen to live in Silicon Valley, it doesn't matter. And I know that because I didn't start Reddit in Silicon Valley. I started it in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our first real office was in Medford, Massachusetts. And today I run a pretty darn successful venture capital firm from South Florida. And while yeah, for decades Silicon Valley was the epicenter of tech, it is no more. And certainly post-COVID we have seen more and more people realize thanks to the internet that they can do their work from just about anywhere. They have an internet connection and more importantly for this course, they can start their business from just about anywhere. There are limitless cities all over not just the United States but all over the world that are going to found the next billion dollar startup. The one attribute that someone needs to be a successful entrepreneur is relentless resourcefulness. Not just resourcefulness, relentless resourcefulness. Now, I love that phrase because it is alliterative, but also because I think it perfectly describes what it takes to be successful as a startup founder. And my favorite analogy for this is actually football. And a great running back when they make contact for the first time continues to drive their legs. This seems like a subtle distinction, but it absolutely separates the greats from everyone else. Waking up in the morning trying to sell your product, trying to close a customer, trying to build your business, someone's going to try to tackle you. Someone's going to try to stop you. You're going to run into impediments all the time. A great CEO doesn't seize up. They continue to pump their legs harder to adapt and make solutions. Early on, you have to be willing to wear all the hats. You have to be willing to be a generalist. And even your early employees need to accept the fact that they're going to take on responsibilities that they are not great at. They might actually be quite mediocre or even quite bad at, but will absolutely just need to do their best, learn quickly, and adapt. That scrappiness needs to infect not just the founding team, but even those early employees because you're going to find yourself in a situation where something just needs to get done. There has to be a responsibility that you take on as a founder, which is you're always the one at the end of the day responsible. This sort of total ownership mindset. And then be willing to question all of these times you get punched in the face about something that disappoints you, something that goes wrong. Really understand why it happened. The best founders I've seen, they'll meet for office hours with us. We'll talk about things that they're challenges they're facing, questions they have. We'll come up with some ideas in that session and then a couple weeks later when we meet again, they'll have tried all of those things. They'll have come up with three more new things and they'll have moved forward as a result. Now, if you're working in a more corporate environment, the same skills that are going to make you effective at starting a business are likely the same skills that are going to make you effective within an organization. As a startup founder, just identifying a problem is not good enough. You have to have a solution mindset. You have to have this idea that okay, I see a problem and I have an idea for what could be a solution and I'm going to try it. That same model turns out is something managers in the corporate world love. It's going to get you up the corporate ladder faster. It's going to help you be more productive, frankly, and have better relationships with your colleagues, help you be more effective within the workplace, make you a more valuable employee, and give you more autonomy to really control your own destiny. This is a thing we hire for and develop at 776. This is a thing that I talk to CEOs about all the time. Hiring for and developing this kind of entrepreneurial mindset within members of your team is going to help get you closer to that ideal, to that goal. I need you to start thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur starting now. Go ahead, try it on for size. I'm definitely guilty of carrying around. Back in the day it was a notepad. Now it's just a notes section of my smartphone full of things that piss me off because chances are if you're upset by something, there is a good business opportunity there. So, right, if it's a product experience that frustrates you, if it's something that just isn't working as well as it should, there's probably a chance to build something better. And it doesn't always mean it's a great business, but it definitely gets you to start thinking about areas where you can improve and get you in a mindset where you're looking for things to solve. It's pretty common that your customers or potential customers don't even know the right solution for their problem. Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, they all have great quotes about, you know, people wanting was it faster horses and not an automobile. And it's true. There's nothing quite like a founder that has thought deeply about a problem, talked to and can really empathize with potential customers, and is able to really engineer something that is noticeably better. And every now and then, I still meet founders who say, 'Look, I just can't. I'm not an idea person.' It's not that I don't believe you. It's just that I don't think you're trying hard enough and I don't think you've really spent the time understanding what people need because there is no shortage of things that need to be improved. It's about realizing what you're going to work on, what you're going to commit a decade of your life to, and then how to actually get started. Most good ideas have lots of competitors. Or at least they have other versions that are less good already out in the market. You should be aware of it. You should listen to your customers. You should listen to their customers, but pay no attention to what they're doing. If you've spent the time in the market, if you've spent the time talking to customers, if you've done the diligence of, yeah, even a cursory Google search or Twitter search, you'll know other competitors. But it is rare that I get turned off in a pitch just because competitors exist. And so pay attention to your competitor's customers. Don't pay attention to your competitors. And remain focused on building the best product you can for the users you have today and then the ones you want to get tomorrow. So product market fit is one of these cliches you'll hear a lot in tech. It's an important one though. What it means is that you have a good fit between the product you've built and the market that wants it. That is people like what you're building. Clear signs of product market fit are, you know, high retention numbers. So that after 30 days, you know, 15, 20, 30, 40% of people are still using your app. The higher the better. In some cases, I've had startups where 30 days after creating an account, 95% of those users are still there using the app, which is extremely high. But there are more subtle examples of product market fit, too. Organic growth. So, organic growth is basically word of mouth. The idea that your business can grow without paying for it. Your business grows because people just love talking about it. Or maybe the business itself gets more valuable the more people share it. And so when you start seeing new signups, new users, new customers that are just coming via organic word of mouth, you don't even know where they come from. They're just clearly coming without a destination. They're going directly to your website. These are all really good signs that you're finding product market fit because customers care enough to share whatever it is you're doing. And believe me, that matters a lot. Like, consider today how many infinite distractions there are. You get an idea out there. Anyone who's willing to give you a little bit of their attention is a superhero. So, do the work to build that community early because they are going to be such great evangelists. And there's such a clear indication that you're finding product market fit when you have these random strangers on the internet who are excited about what you're building, who are committed to it, who are buying, who are telling their friends. Like that's special. Understanding community, especially your community, has always been more art than science. But only recently are we understanding the true value of a community and being able to really quantify the impact that it has on the bottom line on sales, on retention, on growth. These are all levers that can directly connect to community and it's a powerful thing. So I actually think in a world now where it's getting easier and easier to get a V1 of the product out there, building a community first, finding community market fit is going to be one of the hallmarks of an entrepreneur over this next phase because that is now actually the really hard part because building community is not easily scalable. It requires community building work. It requires empathy and time. It requires you to be kind of a party host or a community leader or however you want to frame it. And that's not something you can just automate away. The good news is it's never been easier because there are so many places to build community. There's so many people who are primed now to participate. It's so important to understand what they're saying, what their problems are, what their hopes are in order to then get a vision for what you're going to build and what you're going to do. So, I want you to go out there, keep your eyes open, grab a notebook, however you want to do it, and see how many ideas you can come up with online and offline based on what people are complaining about, hopeful for, curious about. Test your idea one way or another to see if there's demand or there's interest. You understand the community of people, I think, a lot better than you think. And if you can in many cases just even open up the conversation, I think you'll be surprised by what you hear back from folks. For almost two decades, I've been telling people that online communities are just as real as offline communities. So many of us are making relationships sometimes with total strangers online in communities where they're falling in love, sharing stock picks, building businesses together. That is the new normal. And what the internet has enabled is disparate people all over the world to come together in communities that cross all kinds of geographies and sort of traditional boundaries. And this is an exciting thing. If you're a creator, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're someone who has an idea, you are more likely than ever to find a community that actually already has this same problem or this same ambition or this same desire. And only in the modern era, thanks to the advent of online communities at scale, can we actually see the power of that and track that. So, I think eight years ago, I was one of the first checks into Patreon. And at the time, Kickstarter was a pretty good way to raise money for a project. But what creators wanted was recurring revenue. And what I loved about this idea was friends of mine who were creators who just wanted to know that their rent would get paid every month didn't have a recurring source of revenue. But like a good history major, I realized, okay, the Medici solved this problem during the Renaissance. They were just, you know, a ludicrously wealthy family that could make sure to pay Michelangelo's bills for a few years while he painted a ceiling. This can work on the internet. And you don't need one really wealthy family. You could have millions of regular folks all chipping in a dollar a month, a few dollars a month to this creator. And in many ways, Patreon kicked off this creator economy. And for almost the last decade now, it has thrived. And it means a new generation of entrepreneurs will be able to make a living on their terms creating. It's amazing that you could have someone in Oklahoma who does a cappella renditions of video game theme songs, who can make a living without ever having to go to LA, without ever having to get an agent, without ever having to sign a deal, just making content that they genuinely love for an audience that genuinely loves the content. And it's a perfect example of how entrepreneurship is not just I think what a lot of us thought 30 years ago which was oh that's starting a company. Today it's oh I want to be a creator. The starving artist cliche exists because usually when people heard that you were into the arts or created they just sort of feel bad for you and be like gosh I hope that works out you know. Now we're seeing a new path and it's one more example of just how broad the definition for entrepreneur has gotten and it's a great thing. I made some headlines for wearing a crypto punk to the Met Gala and it was a very particular one that I bought for my wife because I saw it and I was like, 'Oh, this looks just like my wife. I'm going to buy it for her.' She really liked this gift. The crypto punk was really one of the original use cases of art in this new medium called NFTs, non-fungible tokens, digital collectibles or digital creations that if you want to claim ownership of it, you need to own its digital record. A formidable opportunity for these artists to commercialize their work. They're able to attach smart contracts to their work which govern the ways in which the works are sold and resold. Now, some people are baffled by this. They recoil against the whole concept that there is a real art market online now. But that just begs the question, what is culture anyway? If I asked you what one of the most important paintings of the Western world was, you might say the Mona Lisa. Millions of people from all over the world go to the Louvre, wait in line, spend a ton of money and a ton of time to go look at a painting. I mean, no disrespect to Da Vinci. It's not his best work, but it's certainly his most famous. And yet, no one cared about the Mona Lisa until it became a meme. This is true. You can look this up. That painting was in the Louvre for hundreds of years, and no one cared until in the early 20th century, it got stolen. A bunch of Parisians were all sitting around their cafes going, 'Oh no, the Mona Lisa was stolen. Wait, what? What happened?' They didn't have Twitter. But it was a sensation around Paris. Yeah, the Mona Lisa got stolen. I've never heard of it. It's an amazing painting. It was stolen. They found it. Spoiler. They brought it back to the Louvre and a meme was created. All of a sudden, now everyone had to see this painting that was stolen. And yet here we are 100 years later and every one of us, including you, are convinced this has always been one of the most important paintings of Western civilization. But no one cared until it became a meme. And if we consider just for a moment that most of what we know as culture has for hundreds of years been dictated from institutions that have decided this is important because they put it in a museum or they put it in a textbook. Culture, it turns out, has never actually come from the top down. That's an artificial construct. It's always come from the bottom up. When it was a cave painting on a wall, it was bottom up. And so with the rise of NFTs right now today, we're seeing an advent of a new medium. The NFT is no different from oil on canvas. The technology itself is novel and special, but what makes it really unique is that it captures the attention of a community. It creates culture from the bottom up. This is something that excites an entire generation of creatives who now get to understand a value for their work that the digital world had previously ignored because if you created something in the digital age, it was instantly sharable all over the world. And so, how could you get value for it, right? It was a commodity. It was a JPEG that millions of people could see and you never got any attribution or any revenue. And what's wild is that that dynamic thanks to the blockchain has changed forever. And I'd say to the folks who are like, 'Well, I can just right-click and save as on your JPEG and now I own it. Haha.' I would say, 'Well, friend, think of how many times that Mona Lisa has been copied and reproduced on t-shirts, on wallpapers, on wherever. Has that made the Mona Lisa less valuable or more valuable?' And so this new technology now brings all of the best parts of the digital world, which are infinite scale, zero reproduction cost with all of the benefits that came from the physical world when you could actually prove this is the one original. And now all these millions of copies actually make this one original way more valuable. And we're in the earliest days of this. We are still in the weird and messy and bizarre stage of this new medium, but the dollars are real. The creators that are building and innovating on this are very real. And I mean, I just can't even wait to see what happens over the next 5 to 10 years because it epitomizes why community matters because you're able to get thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all in their digital Parisian cafes excited about and talking about some special piece of art that's captured their attention. And now everyone participating can actually monetize, can actually get the value out of that attention which has never been possible in the internet. So I dare you go rethink the boundaries around what you think is real. Expand your horizon and the number of opportunities will increase exponentially. How important is execution? Execution is really not that important. So, I'm just with you. Execution is everything. Ideas alone are worthless. What ultimately makes or breaks a successful business comes down to the nitty-gritty of execution. A relentless focus on getting things done, on prioritizing the most important work, and deprioritizing everything else in pursuit of building something really special. So the MVP is a weird acronym clearly created by people who are not into sports. It does not mean most valuable player. It means minimum viable product. And this is something I don't know who coined it but in startup land this is the idea of the most basic version of your product that solves a problem. That's what makes it viable. It's the jankiest earliest version of something that just works well enough. And it's something you can put in front of customers or users or potential clients or partners or what have you. And maybe they can click around with it. It does some basic functionality and it gets you some idea of whether or not you're on the right track. Now, the best case scenario is you have an MVP built. You get it in front of users and they're willing to pay you money for it. You know, in the case of Instacart, I was an early investor when this company was literally two drivers hired off of Craigslist and you could open the app, place an order, and then one of those two Craigslist drivers would get a notification on their phone, head over to the Safeway, fill out your order, and bring it to your destination. Hey, Chris. Hey. Yes. Here's your groceries. Perfect. Thank you so much. And that was Instacart. Not even 1.0, I know 0.1, but it was the minimum viable product that showed us, look, this isn't just someone who has an idea. Hey, grocery delivery should be a solved problem as easy as, you know, just using your smartphone. The thing worked and that was enough. And that was enough to say, great, here's some money. Let's go build this into a multi-billion dollar business one day. And it's special when you're actually putting something in a potential investor's hand that works. And even if it's janky, even if behind the scenes you're wizarding it, obviously don't lie to anyone, but that difference of that aha moment that a great MVP provides is everything. A founder today has more and more leverage than they did a decade ago because so many of the different components of even getting a business set up have been automated or semi-automated through software or simply just made more efficient, right? Even something like payments. When we started Reddit in 2005 and I made our first storefront where we sold merch, it was a very convoluted process just to get a PayPal button on the website so that people could make payments that way to buy a t-shirt. Today, within seconds, you can take a line of code and immediately start accepting payments online. That is a powerful change that has made it so much easier for entrepreneurs to get started and start collecting revenue. You know, you don't even actually have to write code to be able to do this. So, you just have to spend enough time learning how to use these no code tools to cobble together a prototype. Or maybe it's just simply being able to convince someone to co-found this company with you who can help build the actual software prototype. But let's say you're not building something with software. Let's say you just want to, you know, you're creating a direct to consumer widget business. The friction required now to start a direct to consumer business really comes down to opening a Shopify account and then collecting your widgets and marketing them appropriately, right? You'll continue to see more and more of the skills required to be an entrepreneur to really execute are going to be more and more freely available and learnable. It will matter absolutely what business you're doing, but you'll find more often than not so many of the best resources for execution are really very accessible and then it's up to you to actually take advantage of them. What's ultimately going to determine whether or not your execution is successful is not just doing the work, it's also making sure you're working on the right things and being really good at prioritizing what matters most. And so if you're talking about improving a product, there's a hundred things you could do at any given time. In software, we prioritize these. So P 0, don't ask, but we start counting with zero. That's the most important thing. P 0 things on the product plan are the most important things that need to get done on the fastest timeline. Two weeks out, we set goals for the team. Those are P 0 items. What about P1 items, P2 items, P3 items? Now you see a sense of prioritization of the product plan. Everything that doesn't make the cut there, basically you'd love to do it, but it's just not a priority. You want to remember it, but not work on it right now. We can use this actual master class as an example. The P 0 priority here is to actually finish and launch this master class. The P1 would be the marketing campaign that we do around the master class launch. A P2 would be something like planning an IG live on launch day. This is the kind of thing that would be a nice to have, but it's not an absolute priority. Right now, the most important thing I can be doing is the thing I'm doing right now, which is recording this audio that you are listening to. It is the absolute top priority. The best operationally run startups are ruthless about prioritizing. And so that P 0 item, P1 items as well are the things that your team needs to be singularly focused on, are the things that you when you're just thinking about what are you going to do today, everything needs to funnel back up to those P 0 items. And if not, you're going to be wasting time on the wrong things. Finally, I get to live my life as a TV commercial star. All right, so these are plant-based chicken nuggets called Nugs. So, the first version of Nugs that I tried early on could not have fooled anyone. Like, they were clearly coming from plants. They just wasn't there. Wasn't even close. And I actually passed on the investment back then. This was early. This is probably their first round of funding. Six, nine months later, I tried the next version and I was like, wait, okay, this is actually really good. And as an investor, one of the things you look for is not just the quality of the product, but how quickly the product improved as the founders got feedback, were in market, and really started testing the idea. And the best founders just execute so well on improving the product. And it's that delta. It's the change from six months ago to today to then looking ahead where it'll be in another six months that gets an investor very excited. Look, I'm going to say it again. Execution is everything. And that's not just doing the work. It's doing the right work for you as an entrepreneur. Figuring out what your edge is in terms of understanding how to continuously improve the product, whether it's a edible product or whether it's software, is the most important thing you could spend your time on in those first 6 months, that first year. I mean, do we have enough time for this one? I like I'm going. Let's go. Okay. Today, the ways to get fundraising are rapidly changing because everything from crowdfunding to, you know, crypto token offerings to even laws are evolving right now that allow more people to be able to invest. But there are some universal truths that are going to hold up no matter how you do it. My transition from CEO to investor has been eye-opening. Don't get me wrong, it is much easier to be the one on the other side of the table with the money deciding whether or not to invest in a founder because I know what it's like to be on the side asking for an investment and be told no time after time after time. That's a part of fundraising. There is not a single founder. There's not a single CEO out there who has not been told no more times than yes. And that's the nature of startup investing. It's the nature of fundraising and it's the nature of being an entrepreneur, which is getting really comfortable hearing no. But one of the things that I think about as an investor is how I can

As quickly as possible, cut through all the noise and understand what a CEO wants me to see about a product or a market or a business opportunity. I've got some best practices that I'll go into with you about that. Simply getting in front of people has become so much easier thanks to social media. There is a non-trivial number of deals that get pitched via Twitter DM or email. Some founders have gotten very creative with the ways they have pitched folks. But what's more important, especially in an environment with lots of noise, is finding ways to create strong signal that attract investors to whatever it is you're building. So how do you do that? One tried-and-true method is, as we've talked about earlier, simply shipping something, getting something that is in the hands of customers. That gives people a chance to talk about it and is a surefire way to have your first step into that fundraising conversation. I've had companies that I found literally on my Twitter feed that I was so excited by, I reached out to the CEO to schedule a meeting. This happens more often than you think. Yes, you can cold email, you can cold DM, but know that you're going to be sending a message into an inbox that's full of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands. Undoubtedly, we're going to see more and more opportunities for founders to break in. We're seeing software platforms emerge, more and more conferences emerge that are geared towards pitching. You should never pay to pitch, by the way. The folks who will charge you money in order to pitch your startup to a room full of investors are charlatans. Do not pay anyone to pitch your startup. Instead, look for opportunities, demo days, just general startup events where you can have the chance to get five minutes on stage talking about your business, talking about your aspirations. The best way to break in is shipping, building something great, because that reputation is what opens doors. That's what unlocks your way into investors. It's proof of execution. It's actually showing what you've built, the happy customers you have, the growth you've gotten. As the cost of getting started gets cheaper and cheaper, as the opportunities and methods to receive funding get easier and easier, you're going to have more and more ways to kick things off.

If you're meeting with an investor, you're probably going to get more like 30 minutes to an hour. That meeting is probably going to involve a pitch deck, but you're still going to want to be able to clearly and concisely, right up front, explain the problem. What is the thing that you're ultimately going to solve? Then prove that the market is big enough. When it comes to sizing your market, investors want to see something that is easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity so that your business is going into a market that is big enough for the value of your company to one day be worth billions. We invested in a high protein, low-carb bagel business recently that was making the case for engineering a solution to refined carbs, bread products that we know have a huge market today. We love our refined carbs in the United States. You can bottom-up size that pretty cleanly. The pitch is a really clear one: if our product is superior, if people will demand an alternative that is both plant-based and also low in carbs and high in protein, we can win a material portion of this market. This market's already big. So if we win 1% of it, here's how much money we make and here's how big our business is. That's what you've got to get across in the first few minutes as a founder: a clear problem, a clear need, and a huge market opportunity if we get it right.

One thing you might be tempted to do is use jargon. That is a mistake. That is automatically a red flag for me as an investor because I want to hear something explained to me in as plain English as possible. I'll even catch myself on the other side of the table occasionally dropping jargon just because it's more efficient, using an acronym like MVP, minimum viable product. Jargon has a place in industry because it helps experts quickly describe complex ideas, but in a pitch meeting, you need to be able to clearly and concisely explain what you're doing in plain English that anyone can understand. When I meet a founder who thinks that using a bunch of jargon is a way to impress an investor about their expertise, it's a bad sign. It's something to be avoided because ultimately you're going to need to be able to explain this business every single day to every single person you meet, whether it's a potential hire, a potential customer, or a potential investor. They're not going to be industry experts, so you need to be compelling in as few words as possible while still making it understandable. When it comes to the presentation itself, I'm starting to see a trend. I actually love it when founders just come with a memo to read ahead of time because we ultimately end up creating a memo on our side to memorialize the deal, debate the deal, learn from the deal. The memo format works really well. If you can efficiently in like a page explain all the things we talked about earlier, I find it to be a really nice alternative to a PowerPoint presentation. That said, 95% of the pitches we get are those slides, and for the time being, that's probably going to be the dominant medium. It does help when identifying founders with taste. Finding design talent to make that beautiful pitch deck is a lot easier than it was even five or ten years ago. But I care more about the design of a deck when I'm being pitched something that is consumer-facing or where design is really important. Occasionally, we get to invest in rocketship companies like Stoke. If you're Stoke and you're building reusable rockets, I don't care as much about the aesthetics of your deck because ultimately what's going to make your business successful is not taste. Whereas if you're pitching me something that's a better brand, like the bagel company I talked about earlier, it's really important to be able to show instantly that you have good taste. A well-designed presentation is a great way to do that.

Your presentation style matters as a founder, but what we're looking for is that you're compelling. That's different from being outgoing or charismatic. It's compelling. It's a demonstration of a kind of confidence and self-assuredness about your market, about your product, about your customer. You can convince someone, not just us as investors, you could convince someone to come work for you, leave their comfortable job at Google earning oodles of money to come work on an early stage risky startup. I usually ask them to explain why they want to spend the next decade or more of their lives working on this business because it gives me a chance to hear them talk through their why and also start to get a sense of just how obsessed they are with the market, just how empathetic they are with the customer. It also resets the relationship because people like talking about themselves, especially founders and CEOs. This question is valuable for a lot of reasons, not the least of which it sort of resets the whole conversation, so when we do get into the pitch or the deck, it's a more relatable conversation.

As an investor, some obvious red flags for me—and I'm a little nervous saying them because now founders will be able to trick us, but that's okay. Some obvious red flags: when a founder is really combative and defensive about their idea. There's a fine line between confidence and self-assuredness and defensiveness. It's important because you want the former, you don't want the latter, as it's an indication of how the founder is going to be once we actually start working together. Our job as investors is not to be a manager or a boss in any way whatsoever. It's a bad indication if a founder is so insecure about their ideas that they get defensive and combative in a pitch meeting, and it could mean they're going to have the same tendencies with members of their team, subordinates, etc. Another thing I look for, especially when there are multiple founders, is who is the CEO? I ask this question often in meetings when maybe it's not 100% clear because I want to see how both people respond. I want to see how the CEO responds, but I also want to see how the non-CEOs respond because you can see a lot from that body language. In these very early stage companies, a lot of the roles are pretty messy. Founders might have the tendency to say, 'Look, we don't want to figure that out yet. We're going to figure it out at the next round.' That almost always fails. In nearly every circumstance, as a condition of us investing, we need to know who the CEO is. Every now and then, like one out of a thousand, a co-CEO situation can work, maybe one out of 10,000, but it's rare. When you're asking that question of who is the CEO, part of it is just to see if the other person is looking really resentful or if they're both answering the question like 'Yes, I'm the CEO.' We've seen that happen before. That's something you absolutely want to have sorted out before you get in front of an investor, and everyone on the founding team needs to be okay with it. Another obvious red flag as an investor is when you can tell a founder is bullshitting you. It's much better as a founder to just say 'I don't know' in that situation. But it's basically game over if the answer you're giving is just made up or if the way you arrived at that answer is clearly not well thought out. Earlier we talked about market sizing. I don't care what the business is. If you show up in a pitch and say you're going to have 90% of the market one day, you're full of it. You may not know it, it may not be intentional, you're just overzealous and excited. Those are good attributes to have as a CEO, but you haven't tempered them and done the diligence to say, 'Okay, is this even possible?' You haven't watched this master class and realized that seems overzealous. It's unfortunately an easy way to dismiss a founder because if you're not going to be that rigorous about something as fundamental as how big this business could be and do a basic market sizing, you're not really willing to do the work. It is more popular than ever to be an entrepreneur, which is a great thing, but there are lots of people who just want to play house, pretend like they're being an entrepreneur. One of the things we can quickly dismiss folks on is something as simple as that. If you haven't done the work to get these really fundamental things right, you're probably not that serious about actually being an entrepreneur. You just like the idea.

Now that I've laid all that out for you, take 10 minutes to think about how an investor would hear your pitch.

For a lot of folks who might be great product creators, great visionaries, great designers, great community builders, they may have no experience whatsoever in hiring or management or any of the other things. Hiring becomes a skill that a lot of first-time CEOs will need to learn. Unfortunately, I don't have a secret for you. Hiring well, hiring quickly, very hard to do. There's no hack. It's not just how to hire well, it's also how to source well, how to interview well, how to onboard well, and how to develop talent well. In an environment like today where the very best people have all the leverage, you really have to make a commitment to doing recruiting and hiring well. People can now work from everywhere. You're not just running off a playbook that we've used for a few hundred years in modern business when it was a physical office space that everyone showed up at. You're joining hundreds of thousands of other CEOs right now to create a new playbook for how to create culture and develop people in a remote-first world or in a flexible office world, which is very different. Oftentimes founders will start with their networks, people they've worked with before, they're high conviction about. Generally speaking though, you'll run out of amazing people pretty quickly. No offense to your network, I'm sure they're all great, but let's face it, Fred, not the ideal hire, good guy, not the top performer you want on the team. So what do you do? You will start to find ways to see where the talent is and frankly start aggressively reaching out. Things like Twitter have actually become a new kind of resume because it's a place for people in their work lives to talk about the things they care about, to show off the work they're doing, to build an audience, build a following that helps them with a reputation. You'll find countless people who found their job opportunities through a Twitter DM. Now you're ultimately going to be looking around and saying, 'Okay, but how do we start to build this process? How do we start to understand who we want?' One of the things I am convinced of is that the job postings of the future are content. No one realized it because in the past, a job posting was one of millions on Monster.com, just a note in the void full of millions of other notes that look just like it saying, 'Here's a job. Here's what we're about.' For a role this important, turn it into a paper airplane and throw it off a building in New York City and hope you find a great person. That's sort of the equivalent of just tweeting something into the ether today. Instead, you would take time to make the content, the text, be really intentional about what you're asking for. You definitely would not ask for a CV first and foremost because that's not really relevant. The signal it sends to talent is 'I am just like all the other paper airplanes floating around New York City that doesn't actually really care.' In an environment where everyone is doing something the same way, being demonstrably different gives people something to want to talk about. It makes them want to retweet that job posting, send it to a friend. That kind of intention resonates with people. It goes back to creating that relationship, creating that community from day one. If I could tell you, you could get 10 times better results from an application that you actually put an hour into to really make it pop, to tell a great story, to be really thoughtful, to be really transparent, you should take that deal every single time.

The first 10 employees you hire are going to define the culture for the company for the rest of time. It's actually that high stakes. This is why I don't want to know about your CV, and I don't think you should be asking either. An ideal hire needs to be willing to help build the plane while you're flying it. That's a different type of person. The idea of 'this is not my job' really can't exist at an early stage startup because everything is everyone's responsibility. Everyone is wearing too many hats. That's the nature of it. When you're making those important early hiring decisions, the right person can have a huge impact. So actually, when you finish this in post, you should animate this. Your company starts here. Time goes this way. Company's starting here, growing, doing well. Things are moving along. You make that important decision to help the business, and you have a lot more leverage early on than later. The reason is because you make that decision, and even just the smallest impact on the trajectory of the business actually has a really big outcome by the time you get over here. Because over time, you're on a much different trajectory. Whereas let's say you put that off until later. You're plodding along, plodding along, and then finally make that same decision. Because you've waited so much more time, you now with the same decision have not had nearly as big of a trajectory impact on the business. So make that decision as early as possible. Reward those early employees, compensate them well. In many cases, you won't have the cash to do it, but that's why equity exists. Find ways to properly incentivize them for the long term, and it will be totally worth it.

If you hire the wrong person, that's okay. You're going to hire the wrong person all the time. Maybe it's the wrong role, maybe it was the wrong expectations set. It doesn't necessarily mean the person was a bad person, just the wrong hire. What's so important though, out of respect for all the folks on your team, out of respect for the person, make that decision swiftly, help them move on, do it in a great way, and keep moving forward and learn from it. But you don't do your team any good when you have someone who doesn't want to be there, someone who can start to promote a kind of toxicity and negativity that holds everyone back. Then your team starts resenting you as a leader for your inability to execute on the thing that they all know needs to happen, that you know needs to happen. The good news is if you were struggling with that decision, you're not a psychopath. Congratulations, you're not a psychopath. High correlation between CEOs and psychopaths, though, but you're not one of them. What it does mean is you need to put the time in to coach yourself up on how to have those hard conversations, how to sort people through performance review work and performance improvement plans, and ultimately potentially letting someone go. Do that out of respect for everyone involved as soon as you can because it's going to be the right choice. You're never going to regret it. In six months, in a year when you reflect back on it, the only thing you're going to think is, 'Gosh, I wish I had done it sooner.'

When we started our venture capital firm 776, we knew we wanted to do everything differently. That all started with hiring. We did something that's actually atypical in venture, which is open applications. Doesn't seem very special until you realize that VC is a very insular industry and the vast majority of people all come from within the same networks. In fact, one study showed that 40% of all VCs graduated from Stanford or Harvard. As someone who wasn't in that group, but certainly feels a responsibility to get the very best working at our firm, we tried a different approach. We announced it on Twitter and we developed applications that were holistic. Didn't ask people for their CV because let's face it, we don't ask founders for their resumes. Why should we ask members of our own team? We asked for essays. We asked for explanations of not just experiences but also potential. We were able to get over 1,200 applicants, which for a brand new firm isn't too bad. We got some pretty interesting results. You see this kind of creativity doesn't just show up on a resume because you're asking questions that don't stop with the bare minimum but actually push applicants to go a little further, to talk about the why in their own lives and their own stories. Hi there. My name is Christina Yerulakis and I'm going to share a little bit about my story. Ever since I was a kid, I love building things. My dad always tinkered with technology. He pivoted in his career and founded his own computer networking company. The picture was blurry, but my direction was clear. Back then it was Legos or model cars and now it's technology products as a product manager. I grew up also banging on the piano and luckily I have family members who hone that talent and now excited to share my knowledge with all of our portfolio companies at 776. This is exactly what we could have hoped for, but nothing we could have predicted. Of those 1,200 applicants, over 82% considered themselves underrepresented in tech. I think this really speaks to the power of hiring for a broader purpose and being willing to break from the common examples of expertise or credentialism and actually getting to talent that is going to have an approach that's unorthodox, unconventional, but exactly what you need in a business like this.

There's this model of the Stanford grad, perfect grades, 4.0 their whole lives, starts a startup and ostensibly has all the pedigree that it might take. But as soon as they get punched in the face, which is a daily occurrence as a CEO, it's almost like there's a short circuit that happens. They've spent their entire career in education understanding how systems work and then doing whatever is necessary to check all the boxes. The problem is entrepreneurship, starting anything, has no syllabus. There's no professor. There's only the cold harsh reality of the market saying more often than not, 'I don't actually want this.' It's not my quote, but one of the greatest minds of this century once said, 'Sucking is the first step to being sort of good at something.' This is actually from a cartoon called Adventure Time, but I find it to be a really nice quote that sums up the mindset needed to be a successful entrepreneur. Anytime anyone is doing any new thing, they're going to be bad at it. Even if they have every possible inherent advantage, they might be slightly less bad, but everyone is still bad when learning and doing a new skill. There is no blueprint. That kind of resilience and ability to adapt is what really separates successful founders from ones who aren't.

Failing fast is a crucial requirement of starting a startup because you don't have time to fail slowly. Failing slowly means your company is going to fail. You don't have the luxury of time. If something's not working, you have to recognize that quickly and try something else. Everything you do has to be about failing quickly to find that product market fit that I spoke of earlier and find the thing that an investor wants to invest in. Running these little experiments and failing fast is so important and it really starts to define great founders. You see it happen in the first few months. That's why I think for some founders who have had a whole career of academic success, like I talked about earlier, they actually struggle because when I say fail and fail fast, that's anathema to everything they've done their entire lives. Failure was never an option in school. Failure is a way of life as an entrepreneur. You might be there watching and thinking, 'Well, I don't want to do that. Failing is not fun. That is a demoralizing thing to do.' And you, Alexis, you know, you've come a long way. Failure is probably easy for you to deal with because of all the success you've had. But the reality is there is a much greater risk to my failing on a new idea today for exactly the reason you said. There's that proverb about the tree falling in the woods. If no one's around to hear it, does it really make a sound? If a company or a product launch fails and no one's there to see it, does it really fail? The advice I give to you and what I wish someone had told me when I was starting Reddit was that it's the biggest advantage in the world to be starting out because you can fail a hundred times and no one's going to care because no one's going to know, because by definition you are still starting out. Once you can get over that psychological hurdle, it's actually really liberating because the novice, the neophyte, someone starting out has infinite room to fail.

So pivoting is some jargon. I don't know who came up with this one, but basically it means changing your plans, changing your approach, adapting your business in a pretty material way. It could be as drastic as having an idea that would let people order food from their cell phone so they wouldn't have to wait in line and then turning that into the front page of the internet. That's a pretty drastic pivot that we went through early on in Reddit. That original company was called My Mobile Menu, or M for short. Very proud of that name. After a year of talking to customers, doing all the things that I thought I needed to do, we had a lead investor tell us, 'I'll invest in anything but that idea.' It was a pretty direct pivot. The market does not usually tell you that clearly, 'Go work on something else.' But in this case, it did because we were just starting out and we had an investor that we really respected who we really wanted to work with. We said fine, let's try something new. There is no easy answer to when is the right time to pivot, but there is a difference between just losing faith in your existing idea and leaping to a new better idea. A strong pivot is an example of the latter. Generally speaking, if you're going to pitch investors, you don't want to pitch them in the midst of a pivot. You still want to have some clear story for what you're doing and why. There is no shortage of pitches that come through to an investor's inbox or ultimately get to sit down in front of them and tell them their idea. You have this narrow window to teach an investor something new, leave them feeling like they learned something new. One of the advantages to having pivoted at some point in your startup's career is you naturally get a chance to say, 'Look, I was an expert at X and by building this business, I actually was surprised by why.' That motivated us to adapt our business to go do this other thing. We invested in a company that had a good core idea, but realized they had an even better one called Papa. What it does is take college age students who are looking for extra work, looking to make some money, who are interested in maybe one day becoming healthcare workers or just empathetic, caring people who can then per hour spend time with isolated seniors. In the past, this might have been volunteer work, but it turns out loneliness is a real epidemic. There's 11,000 people retiring every day in the United States. What Papa realized early was there were a lot of people who wanted to be able to call up a Papa Pal because maybe they lived out of state and just have someone who was trusted be able to come in and check up on their relative. But what Andrew, the CEO, realized pretty early into the business, it was an even bigger opportunity for health plans. These health plans desperately wanted ways to get their members to have healthier outcomes. Selling to health plans was a much bigger opportunity. But if he had started out trying to close health plans that have a much larger sales cycle that could take months or even years to close, he may not have shown enough product market fit early on. It may have just gotten stalled out in bureaucracy. But he opted for the most pragmatic path as soon as he could launch. Get out in the market. That let us launch them on the Today Show, bring them to the world, and start to generate real demand and real interest to prove the model out. So that when all those meetings with the health plans happened and they eventually really shifted the focus of the business there, there was a proof of concept.

I met these two founders a number of years ago, Wakas and Cidra. They're a husband and wife, both immigrants from Pakistan. They came to America because they wanted to build this business. It's called Adams. They wanted to make the most comfortable footwear on the planet. They did with a really dope box, too. They have an amazing story, an amazing community. They seem to have everything going right. Then COVID happened and all of a sudden no one was buying shoes because they were all going to be quarantined in their homes for an indefinite period of time. What they realized was, okay, we've got some of the best production teams in the world making our shoes. Let's repurpose fabric. Let's take our team and say, okay, we have a few weeks. Let's make the most comfortable, highest quality, breathable mask we can. Another startup might have thought, let's just cut costs and try to bunker down until the pandemic is over. But the kind of founders that I get most excited to invest in are like Wakas and Cidra who say, 'Okay, what are the resources we have available? We already use this fabric to produce the lining for our shoes. Is there a way that we can repurpose it into a beautiful, elegant, comfortable, breathable mask that people will want, too? Then let's go to our community and say, look, we're not trying to sell these as a way to take advantage of the pandemic. We're actually trying to sell them to help a bunch of the most vulnerable New Yorkers.' I gave them the first, I think, 10 grand. I said, 'Look, I'm going to make sure 10 grand worth of these masks go to my friend Collins' nonprofit. Just tell me when to wire the money and you've got your first order.' It takes a special type of founder to be confronted by a global pandemic that threatens the fundamentals of the entire business, stare it in the eyes and say, 'Okay, our turn to figure out a way to adapt to this. Our turn to figure out how we keep giving something of value to our community.' That's exactly what you want to get behind as a founder. What they did in a matter of weeks was engineer some really impressive masks that sold in record numbers. It is a testament to their resourcefulness in the face of global catastrophe.

Where your business ends up in 10 years is not necessarily going to be where you think. You should, as a visionary leader, have some north star for where you believe the business will go. That's going to rely a lot on your instincts and a lot on the time that you spend thinking about it. Take a minute to think about a time in your personal life or your professional life when you've had to pivot, when you've had to change your game plan and adapt. Because I think if you take a moment, what you'll realize is that you've done it before and you can do it again.

Competition is an inevitable byproduct of starting a business and the sooner you accept that the better. I personally took all of my competition way too personally for years when starting Reddit because it felt like an attack on my kid. Now that I have a kid, I realize starting a startup is definitely not the same as having a kid. But those feelings are totally reasonable. The danger with focusing too much on your competition is that you're not actually spending time innovating and solving problems. One of the best skills you can develop is understanding you should just ignore your competition. You should maybe pay attention to what they're doing and more importantly pay attention to what their customers say about what they're doing, but don't obsess over them because if you do, you're not going to be creating anything new. You're going to be too busy copying the things that they're doing and really limiting the upside for your own business. In the early days of Reddit, we had a competitor called Digg. Our approaches seemed pretty similar. You submit a link, other people vote on it, they comment on it. What was the differentiator? One of the things we kept asking ourselves was why are people going to keep coming back to Reddit every day, especially when they could go to Digg or so many other places. There were times when, candidly, I was just thinking way too much about what they were doing because they were the market leader. They had VC funding. They were based in Silicon Valley. We were this tiny startup, didn't have any funding, based in Boston then. I spent more time than I would have liked thinking about their business and how they were acting and how we should be reacting. It was a year in that I realized no, we need to be building our product the way that's best for our customers and really understand what their users weren't happy about in order to make better decisions about what we were building. That's it. I realized as long as Digg was one homepage, one front page of the internet, so to speak, it could only apply to a certain number of people. There was always going to be a ceiling because what is a good front page for me isn't necessarily a good front page for you and isn't necessarily a good front page for someone else. So we knew we had to build a platform that was built on communities. In that, we created a way for the site to naturally scale beyond that idea of just one front page. Today, tens of thousands of communities exist on Reddit. Each one has its own front page that each community believes is the front page for them. We knew deep down that this was an important enough distinction. What our communities actually wanted was a chance to have autonomy over that because these weren't just sections of a newspaper. These were real communities. Each one had its own culture, its own language, its own in-jokes, its own sort of hierarchy. That ended up making all the difference.

My dad's been a travel agent his entire working life. Around the time I was in high school, he decided to start his own travel agency. I got to see entrepreneurship firsthand. I helped him build his website. I was his IT guy. Helped him get this little agency up and running in Towson, Maryland. He had one employee. They worked really hard. They had a great business. Then the dot-com boom happened. Online travel agencies started emerging and started drinking all of the milkshake of small travel agencies like my dad's. I watched this every day coming home from work. He would get more and more upset at the evening news reporting on the dot-com boom and talking about how these websites were stealing market share from what he was doing. A byproduct of that were the airlines, which used to pay a commission to travel agents, started reducing their fees consistently until basically zero. I still remember my dad telling me the day that one of the airlines had reduced his commissions to zero, which was the way that travel agents made a lot of their money. He sent a fax to them. I don't think he knows how often I like telling this story. He sent a fax back to them that just simply said, 'Fuck you.' I like imagining someone receiving a fax that simply had a handwritten 'Fuck you' signed by my dad. To his credit though, he adapted his business. He still runs it. I'm trying to get him to retire. I think he's finally going to retire this year. But he weathered the storm. Dad was not in a place to start learning how to code and building his own online travel agency. But instead, he realized where he provided value. It was particularly for business travelers who didn't have time but wanted a concierge type experience, and then leisure travelers who really wanted their hand held for a really special type of getaway. That's where he found his niche. That's where he persevered. Ultimately, it's not a business I'm going to be taking over, but it's a business that provided for his family. In the face of all kinds of disruption, he found a way to deliver. In an industry where there were not a lot of people that were able to adapt, there aren't many travel agencies left out there, and I'm proud that his is one of the few. I hope this is a lesson for you. It's not just about focusing on your customers and ignoring competition. It's also about the inevitability of it. All those feelings, whether they are of rage or just frustration that competition exists or is drastically shaping your industry, it's a part of the process. The more that you can take that energy and funnel it into your own improvement and your own success, the better. I really hope that you fax makes it into the final cut. Great.

As an entrepreneur, the people in your circle are vital. The people you spend the most time with are naturally going to have an impact on everything you do, professionally and personally. One of the greatest assets I got was having a pair of parents who both showed me a way to do entrepreneurship. My dad weathered some pretty tumultuous times as a small business owner, especially of a travel agency. From my mom, I got an unflappable conviction. I still remember the day I told her that I was not going to law school and instead I was going to start a startup. I needed an idea. I needed a co-founder. All I knew was that I was starting a business. Her immediate reaction was, 'That sounds great. What do you have in mind?' That gave me the conviction and the self-assuredness to know that even if it was a total failure, they would still love me, they would still support me, and things would be fine. I feel so grateful for the fact that I had folks in my life like my mom and my dad who gave that bit of foundation that I see has played out and is responsible for everything I've accomplished. I realize how lucky I am to have that foundation. I realize a lot of people, maybe you watching this, don't. I'm grateful for the fact that the conversations around everything from mental health to career development to just physical wellness are becoming more and more common in business because the more people are able to talk about it, the sooner they're able to do the work. Every one of us has work to do, myself included. If you have access to those resources, take full advantage of them. If you don't, it's one more challenge for you to overcome, one more thing that you can absolutely get through. But know that the work that you're doing on your business, the work that you're doing to build these networks and make an effort to surround yourself with people who are additive to your life, will have a huge impact on your outcomes both professionally and personally.

I get asked a lot to be a mentor. What I tell founders is I am not the right mentor for you. The reason is I don't believe the person you need right now is someone who's 5 years or 10 years ahead of you. That's helpful for sure. It's someone who's like one or two years ahead of you. This isn't just CEOs. This could be a head of marketing who wants to develop her skills and be ready for a role that they aspire to by connecting them with a CMO who's a few years ahead in their career. That pairing is actually where I see tremendous value because the advice that I could give you if I'm 5, 10, 15 years ahead of where you are is only so relevant. There are things, believe me, don't go turning off this master class. There are plenty of things I can tell you that are relevant and valuable, but if you're getting down to the nitty-gritty and the tactics and you're a CEO at a stage in your business where you're just breaking into heavy growth, you're experiencing real-time problems.

That only someone who is basically at the same stage can truly empathize with and truly give you best practices for, because they've just gone through it themselves in this current market, in this current environment where things change so rapidly. And so having a team around you to keep you honest in that regard is so valuable. And yes, it can come from investors. It can come from advisers who are further in their career than you are. But we really love seeing folks and we'll go out of our way to pair up folks with peers and folks just a step ahead. And just generally speaking, I advise folks, whether they're founders or my sisters, to surround themselves with people who challenge them to be better.

Founding a company with someone really is at that level of intimacy and responsibility, and it's not a decision to make lightly. When you make that decision, you've got to treat it basically like a marriage. I know there's lots of founders who come together because they were friends in college and they think, 'Okay, we get on pretty well. We've known each other for a little while. We should start a company together.' And that alone is okay, that's necessary. You should get along well, but that's not sufficient. And one of the questions I'll ask as an investor is about specifically what types of work or projects have you done together? What have you done that demonstrates your ability not just to hang out in a fraternity together, but actually build something together? What are some examples where you've had conflict and were able to reach a conclusion, and were you both okay with that conclusion? And if you can't get to a good answer with that and have everyone be excited by it, you're going to have a bad time. So when choosing a business partner, certainly look for people who fill in gaps that you have. Someone who complements your skill set is a great asset to look for in a business partner. Also as important is someone who shares your values. And I've seen founders in situations where the skill set is perfectly complementary. One sophisticated, savvy sort of business leader, one sophisticated tech leader. And ostensibly it's great. This is peas and carrots, right? They complement each other well. But if their values don't align, it will eventually come apart, because one year in, five years in, 10 years in, 20 years in, you're making decisions about the business that are much more holistic. It's about a kind of vision for what the opportunities are, what the risks are. And if there isn't alignment on the values, founders are going to make different decisions. And eventually you're going to see that divergence. And so the sooner founders can sync up about what their values are, what their personal views are, and what they feel are their responsibilities as business leaders, the better. Because having that kind of alignment is what makes long-term partnerships successful.

If you don't have a co-founder, it's still very worth having comrades, so to speak. We talked earlier about having peers and folks who are sort of at your level or where you want to be in another couple years in your group. Same concept. Solo founders can get the benefit of the emotional support of a co-founder without actually having a co-founder. So do the work. Draft up what looks like a personal board of advisors and choose people, three, four, five of them, who you know will always be there as a source of unvarnished truth, who are looking out for your best interests, and who make you want to be a better person.

I always used to tell founders to not care about press because that itself was not a goal, and it's still true. But what has changed is that as media becomes more broad and a more accurate reflection of just internet sentiment or sort of community sentiment, it actually gets more valuable. I want to be careful. Again, it's still more important to build a great business, but the value of having the zeitgeist aware of and excited by what you're doing is increasing.

Now, I'm not telling you to spend all of your time on social media, but I'm kind of telling you that one of the skills that will serve you well is understanding these trends and patterns, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times online, especially in your industry, because that's going to help you anticipate the kind of messaging you're going to do for your product. It's going to help you understand how to communicate to potential hires. It's going to help you identify opportunities to post a really funny meme that will go viral that millions of people will see, that'll get them excited about whatever you're doing. This new generation of CEOs, the ones who are just getting started now, they have to live in this. And so a decade ago, I was telling founders, hey, be aware of a story in the media and use that as a peg that you can tie your story to. Right? If there's a ton of people talking about return to work and the future of the office because of COVID, if your startup fits into that narrative in some way, shape, or form, that's a story peg you can use to get someone more interested in whatever you're doing because they'll see the relevance and the connection. The same thing happens on the internet every day in a cycle that moves so much faster. And so this could literally be a meme that is tweeted and then goes viral and is forgotten four hours later. But if you can identify it, use that as the peg. See that as a way to tell your own story in addition to it or maybe remixing it. That's how you ride that wave.

Back in 2009, I was asked to give a TED talk about the power of the internet and in particular social media. And so I used this story about Greenpeace. They were really concerned about the humpback whales and wanted to do something to raise awareness for the whaling expeditions that were happening in Japan. So they created an online poll. Now, some of these names were really erudite and thoughtful. And then there was Mr. Splashy Pants. Now, they put that name up just as a joke. They weren't expecting anyone to vote on it. But this is the internet. And as soon as Reddit found out about that whale, they got excited. We even changed the logo. I doodled a version of Splashy, to his friends. Mr. Pants to you. And then really got people fired up because Greenpeace saw the initial poll numbers and they thought there was a problem. They actually threw them out because they weren't happy with the results. 73% for Mr. Splashy Pants. This can't be. So they reset the poll, and sure enough, Mr. Splashy Pants won again. It was a great victory for that whale. Now what happened next was surprising because Greenpeace had tried to undo this first attempt. It only galvanized the online community even more to rally behind Splashy. And as a result, hundreds of thousands and soon millions of people were learning about this whale and the naming event, and ultimately the plight of these humpback whales, and it actually forced the Japanese government to halt their whaling expeditions. And all because Greenpeace tried to stop this silly whale and its name from flourishing. And what they learned from that, and what I hoped everyone in the crowd would realize, was that we've only had perceived control over the narrative. The reality is, on social media, no one has control. The gatekeepers are not in control. It's up to us to decide, to vote, to share the things that we care most about. And the sooner you can lean into that, the better.

Incumbent press, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, business television, still is important, but with very specific goals. I always tell founders to work backwards from their goal when doing press or any kind of outreach. If your goal is to drive more customers, that determines where you're going to go and where you're going to spend your time. If your goal is to help open up the door to new hires, it's going to affect where you choose to go. And these legacy institutions still have a great brand value, but as there are more and more alternatives and more and more competition for the incumbents, their authority and their influence is going to wane. If for no other reason than a company launching this year, and especially next year and the year after that, can so perfectly curate all the people it wants to talk to. If they're launching a plant-based chicken nugget company of the future, they know their audience very well, knows exactly who reaches that audience, knows exactly the people who reach that audience who are also into plant-based foods, who are also into fitness. You could carve and dice out a media list to a tremendous degree of specificity, and then go outreach to exactly who you want to talk to, exactly the way that you want to talk to each one of them, and build out a very specific campaign.

You're inevitably going to get bad press. You're going to take it personally, especially if you're like me, and you're going to need to forget about it as quickly as possible. I coach plenty of founders through this. When the first time it happens, it stings so much because your company is so personal to you that you take it as an affront, almost like it's a kid. And it's always the same process where we acknowledge it happened. I remind the founder, look, it's not you. It's about the company. You are not the company. And at the end of the day, maybe there is some good feedback in that negative press. Let's take it for what it's worth and forget about it. That news cycle is going to move on within 12 hours, I mean 24 hours tops. And that is the new normal, and that's not slowing down. It's only going to increase as there are more and more sources, as we get more and more fragmented, and as the news cycles continue to speed up faster and faster. And so the overarching theme that's still very true is build genuine personal relationships with folks, do good work, and talk about it openly. There's a chance to create a new story or a new relationship or new content every minute of every day.

We know the business adage, word of mouth is the best form of marketing. We've all heard it. We didn't have to go to business school to learn it. We take it for granted because it's so obvious. And only in the modern era, thanks to the advent of online communities at scale, can we actually see the power of that and track that, because this was always the case. If I had a nice blacksmith in town who I really liked, I would tell a buddy of mine, 'Hey, you need to go get your sword repaired. You should go to Fred's blacksmith shop.' Right? Word of mouth was a really compelling form of advertising. And that blacksmith wasn't going to be able to buy an ad in the newspaper because they didn't exist yet, because we didn't have the printing press. But today, every one of us has our own little printing press in our pocket where we can authentically and genuinely spread the word about our local blacksmith or our favorite startup, and other people will see it and can easily amplify it. And now that we're starting to understand and really measure that, we are going to see an entirely new way that every CEO is going to think about community. The internet has drastically changed the relationship to the customer. Social media was the first wave of this change. And the realization every company has now had to go through is that your customers are everywhere. Your customers are talking about you everywhere. And your choice is simple: either ignore them, bury your head in the sand, and hope that it just takes care of itself, or engage with them, learn from them, empathize with them. And if you're going to keep trying to do the former, you're probably going to have a really bad time. You have an imperative now more than ever to engage with every single one of your customers, good, bad, ugly, where they are, and in a way that shows that you actually give a damn.

Do you like how I tied the blacksmith thing together? I wasn't sure where I was going with it, but I feel like I brought it in.

I don't necessarily think every company needs a great logo or a mascot in particular, but they do need some kind of personality or depth. And that's absolutely the case for anything that's consumer-facing, but increasingly the case for any business, even a B2B type business that's servicing other businesses, because we are storytellers as humans. We want to find points of connection and be able to relate to everything in our world, including increasingly even companies and brands that we use and care about. And now that social media is ubiquitous and everyone is fighting for every last bit of attention, the more work you put into humanizing your brand, into humanizing your business, making it more relatable, whether it's you as a founder personally or through some avatar you create, it goes a long way towards creating yet another mode of brand equity.

I used to draw a unique design on the Reddit logo every day, and there's a story behind that. It provided just a tiny bit more connection with my own mom. My mother got sick while I was starting Reddit. She was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and that in many ways guided my entire life, but especially that period of my life leading Reddit and ultimately selling it. And one of the little joys I gave her and myself really was by doodling these little stories in the logo of Reddit up in the corner so that every morning she would have something to go look at that was just fun and sometimes a little silly, sometimes a little weird, and we'd have something to talk about that wasn't just the chemo or the treatments. And she came to really look forward to this and would give me ideas for different storylines that we could do. And it was awesome to have this little artistic collaboration with my mom during those final years that also, it turns out, entertained millions of people.

The concept of surprise and delight is something that I've just always been obsessed with because on the internet in particular, people's expectations are just so low. And that's actually a huge advantage because when expectations are low and you come in and really delight people, oh man, that happy zone in between of that low expectations meeting with really great experience creates a lifelong customer. For instance, when you emailed [email protected] with a customer support question, for the first four years of the company, you got a response from me. As a founder and CEO, one of the highest leveraged things you can do is send a thoughtful and supportive reply to someone with that signature that says founder CEO. Once I got in the mood to be like, 'Okay, I'm going to go do some feedback emails,' I would immediately start with the most recently sent few emails so that those people, those lucky folks, would get essentially an instant reply. And over time, you build up a lot of confidence with your users, a lot of confidence with your customers, and then when things do go wrong, and they will, you'll make mistakes, you will have earned trust. You'll have earned respect. You'll have earned the benefit of the doubt. Take some time to actually think through what are some ways that you can surprise and delight your own customers. What are some ways that you can rethink what actually delivers value to the people who you serve?

I really hope we end this work-life balance myth because it has become very clear that there really is no boundary. The reality is these things are one and the same, and it's more about finding a balance between taking care of oneself and then taking care of everything else. Your biggest asset is you. If you want to be a great entrepreneur, you have to take care of yourself every bit as much as you take care of your business. That's the balance that I'm most interested in trying to create. It's the balance that we're interested in supporting for our founders. I've certainly spoken out on things like hustle porn, which was a term I coined mostly to lampoon this content. You'll find it on social media that really lionizes, exaggerates, celebrates absurd work. And what I mean by that is, posting about how successful you are by celebrating how hard you are grinding is not something I have ever seen a really successful entrepreneur actually do. And in fact, the most successful entrepreneurs I've ever known are the ones who work the hardest at trying to find that balance. Again, not between work and life, but between self and the needs of others, however broadly defined. And that is, I think, the challenge for you, because you will not be your best self for others unless you are taking care of yourself and vice versa.

I'm convinced that there is going to be a smarter generation of entrepreneurs, hopefully you watching this, who understand that those boundaries need to exist and who need to do the work to create systems, to create process, to create good habits that allow for both to flourish. But you're going to spend your entire career trying to find that. And it's going to ebb and flow. It does for me. And the most effective tools I've found are probably some of the most basic. Even being able to do an inventory of my calendar week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter helps me understand literally how much time I'm spending with my family, for myself, versus with my team. Just even doing an audit of your calendar. Now granted, we've built our own software into 776 to make this very easy, but before that, I was still just using my own calendar just to look Sunday mornings to get a sense of like what the hell did I do this last week? Have I been spending enough time with my daughter? Have I been spending enough time for myself? Have I been spending enough time on the things that mattered most during the work week? I challenge every entrepreneur, as early in the process as possible, to start to do this kind of inventory because even at its most basic level, knowing where you're spending time in your workday is going to make you better as an entrepreneur. It's going to make you better as a person because that's the only way you find out that you've been spending most of your time this past week on the wrong things or stuck in meetings that are not actually pushing forward your real goals or objectives. And so doing a regular audit of one's time is really one of the best things you can do, not just as an entrepreneur, but just as a person who cares about where they're spending their time.

So I was 34 years old. Really? Was I 34 years old when I became a dad? Is that right? Can someone fact check that? 2017. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I was 34 years old when I became a dad. It still feels weird just saying that. And for the first 34 years of my life, I could be very selfish. I really was only looking out for myself at the end of the day. And even having a partner, getting married, like just finding and creating a life with an equal partnership was work and it was growth. But then becoming a dad just is such a humbling experience because you realize all those things you thought were important just really aren't that important. And it's the first time I was really confronted with the reality that my existence only matters in the context of supporting this other person's existence. So not just in a sort of gut check of the decisions I was going to make, but also my time. Where's your belly? I have eaten it. I am even more ruthless about where I want to spend my time. Like, right now, I don't even think you're taking this conversation seriously.

There are only a handful of countries without a national paid leave policy. Suriname, Papua New Guinea, a few small islands in the Pacific, and the United States. It's pretty embarrassing. One of the first things that we did in the reset at Reddit was brought to me by our VP of people and culture, Caitlyn Holloway. She was the first to say, 'Look, we need to create this paid family leave policy.' That was at the time something that I just thought we needed to have in order to be competitive. And she assured me that yes, this is table stakes now within tech. You have to have a plan. You have to have a generous policy. That's what people want. That's what the best people want. But I didn't think much of it candidly until I took advantage of it. And I said, 'Look, I'm going to have a kid. I really want to go through all of this just like I'm another employee here.' And then when I took advantage of it and saw it, I changed forever because I realized for all the advantages that I had, how vital it was to know that I never had to make a choice between being with my family and my career at a time when the childbirth was really hard on my wife. And having that peace of mind was invaluable. And I've met so many fathers since who didn't have any kind of paid family leave and literally were at the hospital trying to decide whether or not to stay in the ICU or the NICU and go back to work. And that's, in my opinion, an unconscionable decision that we shouldn't expect any parent to make. We're talking about healthier outcomes for kids and moms. We're talking about an increased loyalty of employees to the firms that offer these services, increased retention. And if we continue to see, which we will, more and more competitiveness for talent, it's going to be even more important for every company to be able to make that case and have that opportunity. And this is one of the reasons why I've been such a staunch supporter of a federally offered paid family leave. This week, the entrepreneur did what entrepreneurs do. He went to Capitol Hill with a group of dad advocates to try and fix it. What do you want to see happen? I would like to see federally mandated paid family leave, six months worth for every American, because I want every small business owner, not just big startups with billion dollar valuations. I want every small business owner to be able to have this as something for their employees that doesn't come out of their pocket, comes out of mine as a taxpayer and all of yours, because the long-term impact in terms of economic gains, in terms of reduced health care costs, in terms of just basic decency about supporting the American family is so worth it. I'm confident it's not a question of if we get paid family leave for everyone. It's a question of when. And when that happens, even someone just getting started now has something that they know will be making their workforce even stronger, even more secure, and even more effective.

So, if you take the advice that I've given you to its logical conclusion, you want to continue to spend as much of your time as possible, surrounded by people who make you want to be the best version of yourself. When I see the success that my partner has, that Serena has at whatever she does, it is a win for us as a family unit. And selfishly also just makes me really proud because this is the woman that I'm spending the rest of my life with. Marriage is not for everyone. But if you want to go down that path, it then makes sense to marry someone who you can learn from. To marry someone who pushes you to be your best self. You can't marry my wife. So hands off. But one of the things that I really admired that I saw early in our relationship even before the marriage was when Serena's off the clock. She is off the clock. That is work is over, and the focus is on the dinner we're having or now obviously Olympia. And that is a muscle that I am still developing. I still get the tingle where I'm just like, God, I really want to check my phone right now. But I catch myself because I realize, no, I'm here with Olympia right now. This is my priority. This is what I'm here to do. I'm going to do this the best I can so that when I am back working, I'm locked in. On the count of three. One, two, three. She's gone.

So bottom line is, if you really want to be a successful entrepreneur, you want people around you at the office and at home who can still keep it 100 with you. Finding that balance between the people you know you need in your life professionally and the people you know you need in your life personally is so important.

It is definitely possible to build a wildly successful business that is aligned with making the world suck less. And we're seeing more and more industries now. Climate in particular is one that continues to be a place where I'm looking to make big investments where I know I'm not only going to generate great returns for my investors but also help unfuck our planet, as my buddy Chris Sacca describes it. And we're seeing more and more opportunities now in part because the technology has arrived but also because of the impending doom that has motivated so many of our best and brightest to say, 'Look, this is a problem I need to spend the rest of my life trying to solve.' And that's an exciting thing. More and more founders are looking not just at the ultimate business outcome of the companies they're starting, but also the societal outcome. And I actually think this is in a way generational. We have for the first time ever a generation, Gen Z, that has grown up on the connected web. They've grown up in the shadows of the platforms that my generation created. They've seen the good and they've seen the bad, and they have a fundamentally different outlook. You shouldn't have to compromise your values in order to be successful. And actually understanding your values as early as possible isn't just good for future co-founder issues. It's also good because it aligns your company early on. It makes that recruiting process I talked about earlier even more effective because the people who are thinking about joining, and certainly the ones who do join, are now not just subscribing to the job, they're also subscribing to the values and the mission of what an organization is doing. And I know it's so easy to roll your eyes at this because I would have when I was like 21 starting out as a CEO, but it matters. It really does. And now more than ever, because all of the leverage has gone to talent. Individuals have all of the power when they come to the negotiation table, when deciding whether to take one job or another. And so understanding your values, understanding your why as an organization, and having a north star, which is as bright as 'we will help unfuck the planet,' is a really great reason to get someone to come and work and give some of their best years to helping support this mission and this cause.

So many of the best practices for entrepreneurship when it comes to startups and for-profit companies are also applicable more than ever to nonprofits. And we're seeing this, we're seeing more and more of a startup or entrepreneurial mindset being applied to some of the best nonprofits that are getting formed in the last decade. So one of the things we're doing with 776 is actually applying our model for investing in startups toward investing in nonprofits. The same attributes we look for in a great founder of a for-profit startup are the same attributes that we look for in a great nonprofit founder. Same ones. And in many cases, the technologies that they're both using are becoming more and more similar. And the advice that we give actually starts looking kind of familiar. You think about an inefficient company that you want to disrupt as a startup founder. You're probably thinking about a lot of bloat. You're thinking about a lot of ineffectiveness. You're thinking about probably not a lot of technology. An up-and-coming nonprofit is looking at an incumbent nonprofit in much the same way. And what that means is they're understanding how technology can make every dollar more effective. They're understanding that they have to bring real accountability to their donor base. The internet is cutting out middlemen, cutting out overhead, and able to create a direct relationship between the cause that you care about or maybe the person who needs the money, the support, whatever you want to call it, and the donor. That level of intimacy and transparency is going to be applied to everything.

One company that's trying to make the world suck a little less is called DroneSeed. We chose to invest in them because the entrepreneurial techniques they are using are the same ones I advocate for. When DroneSeed pitched 776, they had a very clear problem they were working to solve. Our forests are burning. These forests provide a really important resource. They don't just look pretty. They also convert a whole ton of CO2 into oxygen. We need oxygen to live. There is a real problem as more and more wildfires are happening and they are getting worse and worse because they're destroying one of the best chances we have to keep this planet livable. It's a good attention-grabbing problem, right? Currently, the very best ways to reforest a site are remarkably manual. You're talking about people shoving a stick into the ground, doing backbreaking work to plant seeds, oftentimes at really high altitudes or with really steep terrain. It's a horribly inefficient and dangerous way to do really, really important and ultimately valuable work. And so that's the problem set DroneSeed looked at. How can they do a much more efficient, scalable job for this really important task? And they had a clear goal. The key result was straightforward. They could derive the real value of their business by generating carbon capture credits. With 8 million acres planted globally each year and 7 million acres in the US alone lost to wildfire, that is not sustainable. So here you have a clear and present problem with a significant and clearly outlined market opportunity and a clear reason to build a very viable business. Grant showed up with quite a bit of expertise not just in engineering proprietary drones but also the software to run those routes and finally their own innovative way to do the seed delivery. It lets them do things that humans alone could never do and in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. And so while it's never a good feeling when forests burn, every time it happens now, this is an opportunity for their business. And when compared to the traditional means of doing it, it's infinitely better.

One of the advantages to being an entrepreneur is you get to have a vision that few other people have, and you will spend years helping other people see that vision. That's getting investors, that's recruiting people, that's scaling the business, growing customers, all those things. And along the way, you're going to see and maybe not see adjustments to that trajectory. And you're going to have moments where you know something is right. You know something needs to happen. You can feel it in your bones. But maybe you don't advocate for it as well as you can. Maybe everyone else in the boardroom feels a very different way. Whenever you're confronted with those decisions, you're going to have to do the hard work on yourself to figure out where are you willing to compromise and where are you willing to just sort of relent and where you're not. And this is why one of the things I work on from day one with founders is understanding those values, understanding their why. So that when they are in that boardroom and they are the only voice arguing to do something that they know is the right thing, but everyone else in the room is opposed, they have the conviction, they have the courage, they have the words to know that at some point you will come back to reflect on your career and the things that you've done. And there is no greater gift to yourself than to know that when confronted with those hard decisions, you did what was right for you. You did what was right for your values. You did what was right for you to be able to tell your kid or someone you care about that you did the absolute best you could. The sooner you can get comfortable with speaking up and advocating for those things that you believe in that are to your vision, the better off the business is going to be.