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One sentence about building things, taken apart

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Founders and teams

Sentences about the people doing the building, alone and together.

75 essays, 2010–2014

Four colleagues talk across a white table in a bright meeting room

Much of what founders tell each other is about temperament, and this section gathers those lines. Failure comes up more than anything else. Drew Houston says a founder only needs to be right once, Seth Godin notes that the road to success is seldom easy and never certain, and an old saying advises failing often so as to succeed sooner. Chris Dixon measures ambition in rejections, which holds only while the rejections teach something.

Other pages deal with how a founder carries themselves. Tony Hsieh warns against being cocky or flashy. Biz Stone says it can take ten years of trying to look like an overnight success, and a line credited to Henry Ford prefers a remedy to a complaint.

On teams, Jeff Atwood argues that few things build mastery like teaching peers, and Dennis Crowley suggests building the nearest workable version when the technology a founder wants does not exist yet.

Most read in Founders and teams

2014 1 essay

  1. Mark Zuckerberg's lines, and what they meant for building a companyNearly everything Zuckerberg has said about building comes back to one preference: a working thing beats a discussion about one.Mark Zuckerberg

2011 47 essays

  1. Build the rough version the technology allows todayDodgeball ran on text messages and early Foursquare trusted its users. Both approximations taught more than waiting would have.Dennis Crowley
  2. The objection that became the featureReframing a risk is honest only after the work of reducing it is done.Aaron Patzer
  3. Someone at the table is better than youThe line began as advice for a card room. Applied to a business, it is less about manners than about keeping the habit of learning from people who know more.Tony Hsieh
  4. Acting brilliant is the slow road to being seen as brilliantConfidence can borrow a reputation for a few months. The work has to repay the loan.Seth Godin
  5. Progress runs through the change people resistThe inventor who took the hand crank off the car knew resistance well. His own research organization also shows why resistance is sometimes the right response.Charles F. Kettering
  6. Bring a remedy along with the complaintBlame settles who was wrong. A remedy changes what happens next time.Henry Ford
  7. The team is the hardest part, and the market can still overrule itInvestors who back early companies spend much of their time judging people. The view has a well-known rival: that the market decides most outcomes.John Doerr
  8. Pick which one to give up: easy or certainA path that is easy is rarely sure, and a sure one is rarely easy. Knowing which trade is being made helps more than hoping to avoid it.Seth Godin
  9. Creativity as the moment an assumption stopsPolaroid's founder described invention as subtraction: an obvious-seeming belief suddenly lets go. His own company later showed how the belief can come back.Edwin Land
  10. Pick the table before you play the handSkill decides less than founders like to think when the field is crowded. Where to compete is often a bigger choice than how.Tony Hsieh
  11. Listening to complaints without being run by themMeetup lost almost all its activity when it started charging organizers, and came back stronger. Not every protest ends that way.Scott Heiferman
  12. When good enough gets in the way, and when it should notCollins turned an old proverb around. His warning suits comfortable companies. A new company usually has the opposite problem.Jim Collins
  13. Good hires are what let a founder sleepThe payoff of a strong hire is less visible than a new feature. It shows up as problems that get solved without the founder hearing about them.Bijan Sabet
  14. Why chasing competitors makes a product less competitiveMatching every competitor's feature produces a product like everyone else's. Sierra's alternative was to make the user better at something.Kathy Sierra
  15. Pandora's unpaid years and what kept the staffPandora went public this month. A decade ago its staff worked for months without pay, and the reasons they stayed are in this line.Tim Westergren
  16. Giving people jobs slightly too big for themPeople grow fastest when the job is a little beyond them. Too far beyond, and the same fear makes them hide problems.Mark Pincus
  17. A founding team, and the people it can attractInvestors who back teams argue that a strong team finds its market. Those who back markets argue the reverse. The truth depends on the stage.Jim Breyer
  18. Splitting the difference between two visions leaves neitherA product built halfway between two ideas often has the weaknesses of both. Someone has to own the decision, even among equals.Sean Rad
  19. The case for starting in a slumpLinkedIn went public ten days ago. It was started in the wreckage of the dot-com crash, which its founder regards as no accident.Reid Hoffman
  20. Fear as something trained down, not wished awayHuffington's comparison is closer to the psychology of fear than it sounds. Exposure, repeated and survivable, is how fear usually shrinks.Arianna Huffington
  21. Unique is a starting point; better is what keeps peoplePicking something nobody else is doing avoids a crowded fight. It does not protect a company from a later arrival that does the same thing better.Angelo Sotira
  22. When experience starts blocking the wayExperienced people know why things failed before. The difficulty is noticing when the reasons have changed.Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
  23. Describing the product you want is not the same as having itOracle was built on imagining a product before it existed. In 1990 the same habit, applied to sales figures, nearly sank the company.Larry Ellison
  24. An idea becomes an innovation only when someone ships itIdeas are cheap to have and hard to deliver. The value lies in the delivery, and in the gap between a prototype and something people use.Garry Tan
  25. Freedom works for the people who were hired for itThe formula is simple when a company has thirty people. Groupon is finding out what happens to it at several thousand.Andrew Mason
  26. Hiring for what someone knows, not what their papers sayA degree is a proxy for what someone knows. When the knowledge can be tested directly, the proxy adds little.Aza Raskin
  27. Looking naive is a smaller risk than hedging every ideaYoung people with large ideas get dismissed as naive, and many shrink their ideas to avoid it. Sometimes the dismissal is correct.Scott Belsky
  28. A market with one company in it is a lonely place to sellThe first company in a new market has to explain the whole idea by itself. A competitor shares that cost and proves the market is real.Marc Benioff
  29. Founder stories get told from the end, and the middle disappearsPress coverage compresses years of confusion into a clean arc. The corrective is the founders' own accounts, read with the same care.Jessica Livingston
  30. Michael Dell's retail detour and what it taught himA failure is a lesson only if someone studies it. Fear is sometimes information, and not every mistake is worth making.Michael Dell
  31. A rough start is normal, which is different from meaningfulKnowing that most companies start badly helps a founder stay steady. It is no evidence that a particular bad start will turn out well.Sam Altman
  32. Measuring success in fun, and who else gets countedThreadless began as a side project run for the pleasure of it. Its founder's measure of success follows from that, and has limits he could afford to ignore.Jake Nickell
  33. Customers can judge a product, not invent itSurveys ask people to describe the future in terms of the present. That is the narrow, defensible point inside a line that is usually quoted as a boast.Steve Jobs
  34. Asking a team to care as much as the founderA founder owns the outcome. An employee owns a slice of it at best, and a reasonable team cares in proportion.Scott Heiferman
  35. Investors back teams because one person runs outA venture investor's view of the founder question: skills, stamina and judgment run out in one person long before a company is built.Mark Suster
  36. Rejection as a count, not a verdictA salesman who expects one sale in twenty calls can treat each refusal as progress. The rule depends on that expectation being right.Mark Cuban
  37. The cheap yes and the expensive one that followsA yes costs nothing to say and a great deal to deliver. A no is uncomfortable for a minute and then costs nothing at all.Jason Fried
  38. The people around a founder, chosen on purposeFounders absorb the standards of the people they spend time with. That can raise the bar or quietly lower it.Shervin Pishevar
  39. Outcomes get remembered; methods get checked laterDetours are forgotten once a company arrives. Shortcuts are a different matter, because someone usually goes back to look.Jason Calacanis
  40. Different is cheap to copy, better is notAfter the iMac, translucent plastic appeared on staplers and irons. The look spread in months. What made the computer better did not.Jonathan Ive
  41. Creative work needs room to fail, and a reason to stopPolaroid's founder built a company on attempts that were allowed to fail. Late in his career, the same confidence kept a doomed product going.Edwin Land
  42. Keep the optimism and check it against the numbersStarting a company takes more belief than the evidence supports. Running one takes the discipline to notice when the evidence has turned.Joe Kraus
  43. How Yelp adapted to what users did insteadYelp's first product asked friends for tips by email. What its users actually wanted to do was write reviews, and the company noticed in time.Jeremy Stoppelman
  44. The long, uncertain middle of building somethingPandora spent years close to dying before it worked. Patience carried it through, and so did a decision to change what the company sold.Tim Westergren
  45. A little outside irritation keeps a company inventiveCompanies that hire only people who think alike become efficient and predictable. A small amount of friction from outside can be worth its cost.Fred Wilson
  46. Mistakes are the price of being awakeIKEA's founder treated mistakes as the cost of acting and the fear of them as the start of bureaucracy. His argument assumes the mistake can be corrected.Ingvar Kamprad
  47. Being called crazy is common, and it proves nothingSkepticism follows most new ideas, good and bad alike. It is something to endure, never something to count as evidence.Larry Ellison

2010 27 essays

  1. What a good partner multiplies, and what a bad one dividesThe figure is an exaggeration, but the direction is right. The gain comes from covering different ground, and it reverses quickly when partners pull apart.Arianna Huffington
  2. Every job looks easy from the outsideThe word “easy” usually means the speaker has not seen the details. Sometimes it means the specialist has stopped looking for a simpler way.Jason Fried
  3. Small is a size, doing more with less is a skillAny company can be small by accident. Getting more out of each person and dollar is a habit that has to be built on purpose.Greg McAdoo
  4. A company defined by its rival borrows the rival's shapePositioning a startup as a better version of someone else ties its identity to a company it does not control. There are markets where that is exactly right.Omar Hamoui
  5. Owners who answer to no one still benefit from answering to someoneNobody can fire a sole owner. That is exactly why a regular appointment with someone who asks hard questions is worth arranging.Tim O'Reilly
  6. How a rival can make the sale easierA buyer asked to choose between two products is already halfway to buying. A buyer asked whether to buy something new at all often says no.Seth Godin
  7. Confidence in the voice, accuracy in the factsPeople who back a young company read the founder's manner as evidence. That makes composure useful and makes overstated claims dangerous.Larry Ellison
  8. Explaining something to a peer shows what you do not knowA peer audience asks follow-up questions and corrects mistakes. That feedback is what turns explaining into learning.Jeff Atwood
  9. A mentor from the right field beats a famous one from the wrong fieldGeneral wisdom is easy to find. What is scarce is someone who has made the specific mistakes waiting in a particular trade.Kyle Bragger
  10. Building the team from the first dayA team is not only a payroll. It starts as a set of relationships a founder begins collecting long before there is money to pay anyone.Ron Conway
  11. Each new hire adds conversations as well as handsHeadcount grows in a straight line. The number of conversations it takes to keep people aligned grows much faster, which is why small teams feel fast.David Karp
  12. People judge trust by looks, online as much as in personA polished design earns a first look from cautious users. It earns nothing on its own, and fraudsters know it works as well as honest founders do.Aaron Patzer
  13. An optimistic founder needs someone on the team imagining disasterOptimism belongs in strategy and in how a founder treats people. Paranoia belongs in the systems that fail when nobody is looking.Evan Williams
  14. The thousand days before Airbnb looked suddenAirbnb closed a large funding round this month. It began with three air mattresses on a San Francisco floor a little over three years ago.Brian Chesky
  15. What a resume leaves out, and what fit can hideSchultz is right that a resume says little about how someone behaves at work. Gut feeling is a weak replacement for it, though.Howard Schultz
  16. The golden rule as a way to run a team, and its blind spotTreating others the way one would like to be treated rules out most cruelty. It does less to tell a manager what a particular person needs.Nolan Ryan
  17. Where the best deals are, conflicts of interest come alongAn investor with no conflicts is often an investor with no network. The useful question is how the conflicts are handled.John Doerr
  18. Surviving a hard year does not guarantee a stronger companySome crises teach discipline. Others leave debt, fatigue and a cap table that never recovers. The saying only counts the survivors.Friedrich Nietzsche
  19. Leadership as example, and where example runs outKamprad put his idea of leadership into a staff document in 1976. It works best when the leader's habits are visible and the rule being taught is simple.Ingvar Kamprad
  20. Let the bestsellers pay for the long shotsSuccess pulls a business toward repeating itself. A budget for risk pulls the other way.Jen Bekman
  21. Give people a job slightly bigger than the one they expectedBranson built a group of companies by handing people roles they had not quite earned yet. The idea holds, with one condition that his line leaves out.Richard Branson
  22. Daily rejection as a sign the goals are big enoughWhen one yes is all it takes, a day without a no is a day nobody was asked.Chris Dixon
  23. The ten years behind an overnight successTwitter looked sudden from outside. Its co-founder had spent close to a decade on the same problem, and the part of the line he put first is the one nobody controls.Biz Stone
  24. Plan for a quarter of your projects to failA failure rate can be a target, as long as the failures are cheap and the lessons are kept.Adam Smith
  25. When launching early is risky, learn early insteadDropbox could not afford a sloppy launch, so it found other ways to hear from users first.Drew Houston
  26. Being right once only counts if the misses were smallThe arithmetic of startups rewards a single large win. It only works for founders who are still standing when that win comes.Drew Houston
  27. Cheap failures, early and oftenThe maxim is about speed, and it only works when each failure is small enough to learn from and walk away.Tom Kelley