Transcript
Glo Maldonado: I'm Glo Maldonado. I've been involved in five exits from being an engineer, now as a founder, too. I have made a lot of mistakes in my career. Fifteen years, you can imagine how many mistakes I've made. I've deleted production databases. I don't have the excuse of vibe coding. I just deleted it myself when I was trying to do a backup. I've done all those things. Now, in leadership, as a manager, as a founder, there are so many things I got wrong. I want to share some of them with you so you don't repeat my mistakes.
A Platform Your Team Loves - Could it Be a Business?
One thing. I think engineers, we're really special in a way that we love learning. We love learning quickly. We always do experiments. It's part of being scientists. In many ways even if you don't call yourself computer scientists, you're a scientist with a computer. That is so important because, at the end of the day, a lot of our skills translate. What I mean by that, the reality is you've probably already done this. You've probably already had something you've built that people are like, "This is amazing. I wish I had that on my previous job. This is so cool." You just want to ask yourself, could this be a business? Yes and no. That's another thing that I'll talk in a bit about product market fit. You need to know if people can buy this. Whatever you're building, whatever amazing tool that you did, maybe an internal metrics platform.
Maybe a way to send logs distributed. Maybe a way to execute frameworks. Like, could those be businesses? Datadog, Honeycomb, and Temporal, yes. The answer is yes. You need to understand some important details. Yes, your decisions are going to be what's going to take you there. Does anyone have any ideas, anything you built that you want to release into the wild, into the world, open source or business?
Here's where I need to start. I, unfortunately, need to start by scaring you all. It happens. You'll get over it quickly. One of the best advice I got in life is, don't sweat the small stuff. That's the goal of this talk. I want to scare you about the right things, not the wrong things. The truth, 90% of startups fail. That is a fact. Sometimes great products, great teams, they still fail. Slack is a good example. They were really failing before they pivoted. Most likely you will fail. Most likely your pivot will even fail. You will learn a lot. It will be fun. Living is fun. It's going to take you a while to exit. If you're lucky in five years someone acquires you, like we're talking about Superhuman, big fan. It took them five years to be acquired. This was a repeat founder, really smart, brilliant, and still took him that time.
A lot of people are like, but I heard this company that Turing got acquired. Those are unicorns. We're engineers here. Don't focus always on the p99. Design first for the p50 then worry about the p99. If you do it the other way around, you get in trouble. You need to prove yourself, because you're going to be making less money, whichever money you're making right now. Why? Because your company comes first. Your investors come first. Your product comes first. You cannot just be like, I'm going to have a three-week vacation. No. You're not going to have that for a while. Why would you do this? Because you want to prove yourself, or you love something so much that you're like, the world needs this. Believe me, there are so many things that people need to build. In order to do that, you need a translation layer. This is something that I also love about AI. I think AI has shown you that if you know C++, you can write Rust and you can write Python. You just have to be like, translate. It's a different thing.
The VALK - VC Abstraction Layer Knowledge
I want to give you this. This is what I call the VC Abstraction Layer Knowledge. With this knowledge, you can turn your platform skills or your engineering skills in general into things that will help you make better startup decisions. It's going to accelerate your learning. It's going to reduce uncertainty. It's really going to allow you to think better. Again, we're technologists here. I'm sure you all have tried to evaluate some tools. How many of you have tried Kubernetes or a new CI/CD tool or whatever hot new AI tool is happening? You test these things. You evaluate. You're trying to see, am I going to get the return on my investment on this? Like, I spent two weeks with Cursor. Is that going to be worth the time that I spent on this? Maybe, maybe not. You already do that, which is important. VCs do very similar things.
There's a return on investment. That's what VCs do. They measure opportunities. They have a platform. You have to do your due diligence. You do the same. You manage projects. You validate your decisions, timing. You decide on your metrics. Before I really try to convince you that VCs are the best people ever, some of them are. Probably not. Why should you think like a VC? Because they have seen things, they have seen so much of the things that are going to happen at your startup. The other reason I always say it's good to think like an investor, like a VC, is because you need to really understand this prioritization, this chain. What matters most is the market, sometimes even more than new customers. Because if you're in the right market, things are just going to happen. One of the things I was talking with Trish is that there are so many markets out there.
It will be clear once I show the circle slide. I just want to say that there's things that people did not realize would be a market. No one thought that, AI prompting, who is going to become an AI prompter? There are people that now are prompt engineers and that's their whole job. That's an industry. Someone realized that, and that's how they create this opportunity. Then you need to think about your resources: time, money, constraints. Those things always run off. It's important that you keep tracking them sometimes. You have to do very hard decisions. I hope none of you have to lay off someone. It's awful, but sometimes you have to do it. Finally, yourself. Sometimes you decide that the best thing is, I need to step down. I need to take a break. I need to hire someone that will be better at this job than me.
That's part of this. Because again, it's important to understand this prioritization. Because, bad news, your customers don't care about any of this, which is also really ironic. They don't care how much money you have raised. They don't care about your investors. They simply care that your product works. It solves a problem that they really have. Yes, talk to VCs. Most of them are really approachable. You'll be surprised. A lot of them have seen hundreds of markets, thousands of relationships at scale. The bottom line, you're learning this VC thinking to be able to serve what really matters. Often, it's not yourself.
This is something that most people don't talk about, which I feel they should. This is the game. This is how this works. Basically, here in the top, these are the limited partners. These are the sovereign wealth of the world. These are the pension funds. These are billions of dollars. These large groups give money to the VC firms, the people that have probably their last names on the VC firms. They're like, I'm going to give you $100 million, $1 billion to manage. They're going to be like, ok, I'll do it for 2% management fee. Then 20% of whatever money we make, which is cool. A great deal for both. Then they give this money to the startups. Basically, each fund, each VC firm usually have one or two funds a year. There are exceptions. The bigger ones probably have more than that. Basically, they have two rounds in a year.
They try to get 20 to 40 companies to join their fund or program, whatever you're going to call it. The goal here is that three to five of them need to return at least 10x. Why is this? Because that's how this whole business works. Like, they're not going for something that is going to give you a small percentage, that's going to win you a little bit more of the billions they made. That'll be even clearer on the next slide. This is so important. I love what you said, Trish, that this is the reality, VCs are lazy. VCs, if they see you failing, they're going to let you fail. Because at the end of the day, they just want to focus on the unicorns. They just want to focus on the ones that have this hockey stick growth.
It didn't used to be like this. Something really radically changed. This is something that I wish more people were aware of. A lot of people think about startups like it used to be in the platform era or in the 2010s. Those are gone. Those times are really over. What was the difference? How many of you know about ZIRP and what it stands for? It's called the zero-interest rate policy. What it means is the famous interest rates that you hear in the news and the bad fighting with people. I'm not going to go into those details. What I'm going to do is give you an analogy. Before, it used to be like a free poker table. You set out the table. Yes, you're going to win money or lose money when you bet on the startups. It sounds like fun. People did it because the U.S.
bonds and other investments, they give you nothing. If you had $1 billion, $1 billion bonds return, 0.5% of a billion, like $500,000. It's nothing impressive. The VCs are like, yes, I need to do the startups. I need to do these wild bets. I need to find these unicorns because I want those returns. I want to make more than this 0.5%. Today, you can just buy bonds and get 5% guaranteed. A lot of VCs are like, yes, why would I even do this? A lot of those smaller VC firms actually close. That's another thing that people don't realize. The metaphor that I use here is that now it's an expensive table. Now they can charge you for sitting at that table. What they're charging you is a percentage rate. Not only that, it's a percentage rate for 4% to 5% of the win or the lose.
This is why now raising VC money is harder than ever. I recommend everyone to bootstrap, at least at the beginning, bootstrap, bootstrap, because they want to see traction. I will explain what traction is in a couple of slides. The point I'm trying to drive home is your startup needs to beat that 5%. It has to return more than 5% of the money they gave you.
Act I: Building the VALK
I'm going to start, again, going to this VALK. One of the big mistakes I've made in my career is the Kevin Costner quote, build it and they'll come. That is a lie. That is terrible advice. Maybe it was true in the '90s when computers were the hot new thing. Even now with AI, that's not true. You can build an amazing AI product and people are still not going to care. The reality is the markets don't care. You really need to be finding something that is interesting, solves a real problem, and will people pay for that? What you need to start thinking about, you need to start thinking about failure modes. You're going to be on call. Being a founder is being on call, if you ask me, a lot of times. You need to be aware of like, how many people are actually staying here?
What is the rotation rate? Before you were worried about uptime and stuff like that, now you need to be caring about the burn rates. If you're spending $5 to make $1, this is not going to work, period. When you're building an internal platform, your users are easy to find. Your teammates, probably your boss said, you must use this, that's it. The outside, the customers owe you nothing. I had situations where a potential customer ghosted me for 90 days, and then came back and like, no, I don't want to use your product. Ninety days, it's really more than they need. I'm going to give you the first component of the VALK. What we call due diligence, when we're evaluating technologies or building something new, now this needs to become your customer validation. Because if you ask people around like, would you use this? Usually they're going to say, yes, I will totally.
Then if you actually ask them like, has this issue happened to you? Most of the people are going to say no. Some of them are going to say like, yes, and it's the worst. Like, yes, I really need this problem fixed. You need to get really specific. Like the real thing you want to get from those conversations is someone like, yes, when can we start? These things, letter of intent, pre-order, pilots, they show skin in the game. They show that you are ready and that the people that you're serving are ready for your product.
What do we need to validate? I have a series of checklists. At the end, I'm sharing a QR code with a bunch of resources. You can throw them in your favorite Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, and they'll give you more details. Here are the ClipNote versions. You need to determine what the market size is. If you're thinking about your platform, it's like, what's your user base? Is it going to be just your team or is it going to be the whole org? That is important to think about. Then, what is your competitive advantage? What is your moat? How can you say like, no one else is going to come into this? Like using Pointz. Talking about Pointz, the defensibility is that, yes, Google Maps, they don't care about bike riders. It's something that for them, it's expensive, actually. Even for Google, it is expensive to serve that market because they are like, no, we need to focus on the big enterprise, on the SaaS thing.
That's your advantage. That is the moat that you have. That's the competitive advantage. Usually, people get really scared like, why should I keep it secret? No, you don't need to keep it secret. It needs to be real. Access, and all for platform projects. Our keynote was talking about like, you need to find champions. You need to find people that will adopt your product, your internal platform that will actually show that this is worth spending time in. The same thing you need to do with all your customers. You need to really find people that, would you pay for this? Can you talk to your friends about it? Can you refer them? Like, I love that. That idea of like, what happens if your product disappears tomorrow? That's the most important question. We even call it that Net Promoter Score. It's really the most important thing in your business.
Last but not least, make sure you're building painkillers and aspirins. Because people need your product. If it's something that's like, nice to have, yes, I should go to the gym. Like, how many of you have lost your gym? I'm embarrassed, but I'm one of those people. I use my Peloton every day because it's right there. My muscles are aching, I'm going to hop on the bike. It's more of a painkiller.
This is the other really important slide. This is the market slide. This is what really explains the three metrics that you need to know. These are things that most engineers haven't had to face, but this is actually what makes or break the company you're employed with right now. You want something that is big. We call this the total market. Again, I'm going to keep using the metaphor of incidents. Imagine all the possible incidents in your platform, all the possible bugs, all the things that could break. That is your total market. In reality, we know we cannot fix all the bugs. Even if we try, we can't. You need to really focus on, ok, once we can service the SAM. TAM is Total Addressable Market. SAM is Serviceable Addressable Market, and that is the people you can actually reach. This world, that's the thing that your team owns.
You should be focusing on the thing that your team owns, not others. Sometimes you do need to reach out to other teams, but in reality, for the most part, you're going to stay on this lane. Finally, the Service Obtainable Market. TAMs and SAM, that is the most important things. Because, yes, that is people that you can actually reach. You can reach tomorrow. Tomorrow you can show like, yes, this is my cool product. Try it. This is what really matters because a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of like, I need a $1 billion market. Yes, we all want the $1 billion markets. Reality, you need to focus on the first two first. You need to be and prove that. Just using the example of Datadog. It's a billion-dollar industry. Even then, they are not making billions and trillions necessarily right now. They have a more specific addressable market.
Then the obtainable market, that keeps growing. That's why they're a great company. That's why they're a unicorn, because they keep growing, and thinking over the SAM. The TAM, we'll see eventually. That's why they keep adding more products and more features to the platform, because that is how you keep growing until you get the whole TAM. Very few people get the whole TAM, become monopolies.
This is another thing I really want to drive home. You really need to prove that the market exists. You can do this in 12 weeks. Here is my very aggressive timeline. You can do it in whatever time you want to pick for this. You need to do this because if you don't get this equation right, you're gone. Basically, on the first week, you need to talk with 50 people. You need to review them. What are your real problems? Is this something that people will actually pay? After that, then you build the MVP. A lot of people, and especially now with AI we want to just jump into the MVP. Please don't. Second, you need to start seeing these pilots. You can charge them for free, or, say, pay me later. Or, can we just sign a paper that shows that this works? Great. Then, by the last weeks, you actually, hopefully, have a business. Hopefully, you're making money by week 9 and 12. If you're not, I will say repeat back to step one and do this a couple times until you find something that works, because you need to prove that people will buy whatever you're building. That was a lot of the first component. One of the most important.
I'll go a little faster on this component 2. Here, I'm going to give you a specific and very tactical advice on how to impress investors. This is really important, not just for investors, but this is metrics. This is the dashboard, how you have in your platform, the daily dashboard or uptime. These are the reports that you should have on your startup. Here is where we start making the link again, this VALK, it's a translation layer. Usually, when you do a technical decision doc, you are focused on the user persona, the success metrics, the rollout plan. They're one-to-one with what investors are looking for. What is your ideal customer profile? What are the unit economics? Remember, if it takes you $5 to make $1, that is a terrible unit economic, if it takes you about that. Then, the rollout plan, that's the go-to-market strategy. That's basically, how can I reach everyone on my target market and actually make it interesting for them?
This is a good example with Honeycomb. I love Honeycomb. I think it's the coolest thing ever. I love it because it's a distributed tool with columnar storage, automatic instrumentation, and ML-powered anomaly detection. No one cares about that. Why people love it is because, like, I can now do the debugging. The debugging that used to take me hours. I know because I love observability, and it's one of my favorite things. Yes, with this tool, it actually takes you minutes to find the bug versus it took you a long time before. Yes, again, I think I went once with a VC meeting to say, like, I got this cool idea for instrumentation, and blah, blah, blah. I don't care about your technology. I care about the market. I care about people who would buy this. I'm a big fan of Honeycomb. The number one mistake you have on your pitches is, don't just come up with a solution, focus on the problem.
Because VCs, again, they found the pain relief, not technology. I'm very opinionated on this. Definitely one of the things not everyone will agree on. This is how your deck should look like. It should be just 10 slides. If you have more than that, no one's going to take you seriously. If you can make it a memo, even better. I'm going to have templates for both on the last slide on the QR code. Yes, 1 through 6, you have to put them. The most important is 7. Seven is actually what they care about, especially on this post-zero-interest rate economy. They want to see, like, there's revenue. Even if it's ramen profitable, even if it's a little, they want to see that. They just want to prove that you can actually get some money out of this. Then you want to see the growth, retention, paying customers. This is really important. I already gave you the roadmap. You can copy-paste it. It's pretty much there. I'll show another one. To learn more, people need to reach out. Really focus on the traction. I know we engineers, we don't like making business plans and having to think about those things. AI is great at that. Use it.
Finally, the last component, which, again, I think I'm using an example, I should have one of my teammates here saying that, because that's what I should do. That's what I should be, like, you cannot scale yourself. If you're just trying to build everything yourself. The metaphor is the Lego Tower. There's a great article about that. It's on the references. If you're doing that, you're going to be a bottleneck. You're not going to be able to scale. That's one of the number one issues that startups have that, for every single question, I need to ask this, and then, and then, and then. It just gets so slow. In reality, and this I believe very strongly, if you're not giving away your job every three to six months, you're doing something wrong. You need to be really aggressive that what we're doing today, I need to think in a way, how can I give it away to others? Because there's always going to be another tower. The next tower is going to be more important. You want to be sure that you're focusing on that one. The previous ones, they need to stay up. Of course, they need to stay up. You need to know how to find more.
Act II: The Hard Truths
I'm going to give other hard truths. Number one is, one of the reasons I love computers is I get so quick feedback. If I make a typo, a syntax error, I get that feedback immediately. On startups, it's going to take a while. Sometimes the market changes. It's very weird. If you're lucky and if you're good, it's going to take you 18 months to 2 years to be able to prove, really, if the market is real and is sustainable. That's a long time. Again, like I said, 5 years to exit, 11 years to IPO. It's painful. It's like when you are in a large company and you need to move from a monolith into microservices, it's going to suck. It's going to be slow. It has to be incremental, because if you try to do everything overnight, that does not work at all. You need to focus on the right metrics.
I already mentioned a couple. Here, I'll just repeat them because this is important. Focus on retention and traction. Focus on making sure that people are adopting your product and that you're making revenue off it. Because, yes, we're so used to a platform being like, just keep the lights on and everything is fine. Reality, no. Retention, revenue, and growth, that is the right focus. Another thing I wish more people knew. This is really how VC funding works. I would even argue that post-Series B, you're no longer a startup. You're a scale-up or a startup company. Post-Series B, you're good. You've already shown that you can scale, that there's a real market and stuff like that. I'm going to start backwards. Like, from Series A, you just need to show that you can scale. You said yes, I already have these successes. I have these cool logos on my website.
There are a couple enterprises. Now, I need to just show that I can go from a handful of people to billions of people. That's the easy part in a way. On the seed stage, which is actually here to where most startups die, you need to prove that you can sell. You need to actually be showing that this thing that I built, yes, people will pay for it. They'll pay good money for it. Think of economics, like supply and demand. How can we make this work? You need to think about that. Pre-seed, this is the easy part, in a way. Most of you already know how to build. In reality, they're not going to let you build if you cannot show that it's going to be this whole thing, that you're going to go from this pre-seed idea all the way to IPO or nice acquisition.
Talking about my experience, I was part of a16z Speedrun. Why was it valuable? As usual, the money was the least important part, it was the network and the credibility. They allow you to go fast track. The network is the most important thing because the network is what allows you to be like, I have this question. Am I doing something right or wrong? Just talk to people. They say like, I don't know how to scale my columnar database. They're like, I can put you with the DataStax people, with the CTO. Literally, they open those doors. You need to use them wisely, but they're amazing doors. Don't just raise money for the fun of raising money. That's another big mistake. Many overvalued companies die just because they're overvalued and they trade scale before they have all the other fundamentals. My recommendation is once you can answer these few questions each round, what we learned on this current round, what we'll learn in the next one, and what are the metrics to prove it, it's so much better.
We always say that warm intro is much better because people trust you more. You want to achieve the same with each of your fundraisers. Basically, you want to say like, on the previous round, this is what we did. We killed it. Let's go to the next one. Another reality check, your best friend is going to be your co-founder or your employee or anyone else. It's probably going to be your lawyer, because the lawyers are like your DBA. When you have a large database that is struggling, you're going to have slow indexes. You're going to have bad queries. You're going to be awake at 3 a.m. That's technical debt. Same thing with your lawyers. The legal debt is just as expensive because just look at the hourly rates. My point here is like, think about this. Try to be proactive. Think like, I'm going to hire this person.
Let's make sure that they have a good contract in place before getting them hired, because you save yourself a lot of headaches. Than, later, like, how about this situation? Oh-oh. Then you have to call a lawyer. Undoing things is much harder than setting up correctly in the first place. This is my very opinionated, if you guys are going to be founders, you should do it like this, and as soon as possible, incorporate. I'm not a lawyer. Please find a lawyer. Talk to your lawyer. Delaware C-Corp should be great for most of you, especially in California. Don't ask me why, talk to a lawyer. Day one, you should have agreements on the best thing, especially if you have co-founders, stuff like that. It's really important that you have that very clear on, because that could be a nightmare way down the line. There are so many companies.
Most startups die because of co-founder drama. Just think about that. Then, yes, before coding, you need to think about your intellectual property. I'm not kidding. Sometimes it's like I'm going to hire my buddy and he's not even going to charge me, or she's amazing and I just want her feedback. Later it's like, you just shared your IP. You just shared your secrets with them. That has consequences. Think about those things. Fundraising. Again, my opinion, I'm not a lawyer, but definitely talk to your lawyer. SAFE is a really nice investment vehicle. YC even has a template. Check it out. Talk to a lawyer.
The last reality check. This is something that I could definitely fight for hours with engineers, style guides. I could talk about that for millennia. It is really important on a startup because you really need to agree on the fundamentals, the mission, vision, and values. I know they sound like MBA mumbo-jumbo, and it doesn't sound important. It's really important because they're the same principles. You're going to have to make so many decisions in a startup that is ridiculous. I was even going to wear a mock neck to make fun of Steve Jobs that he wore a mock neck because he was like, "I don't want to think about this. I have so many decisions to make in the day that I don't want to even think about what I'm going to wear today." I think that's a little overdone if you ask me. Reality, what matters is that you can have people that understand why we're doing this.
Why do we exist? Why is it going to be our success in five years? That's an extremely important question. How do we decide? How do we decide, like, this option versus the other? I can share this. At Mocksi, we have magic, authenticity, and dignity as our values. That is basically whenever we're like, we need to relaunch our blog. It's not having things. It's like, how can we make sure that it has all those three elements? That it feels magical. We're talking about things that are really interesting. It feels authentic. Yes, this is something that is filled from us, not from someone else. Then dignity. Like, yes, it's something that we care about. We feel very strongly, and myself even more. We build AI for people, not for robots. MVVs, it actually helps you because it prevents architecture debates later or arguments.
Reality check number six. Again, co-founders are extremely important. You can do it solo. With AI, it actually helps you on going solo on some things. Sales can be scary, but now there's amazing AI tools for sales, stuff like that. At the end of the day, it's really hard. You're going to have to be handling all the responsibility, all the stress by yourself. You better have no serious weaknesses because otherwise they're going to haunt you. It's really important. The flip side, with a co-founder, you need to make sure that they have complementary skills. Because, again, you don't want to be fighting on, like, we should do it on Java and not on Scala or Ruby, on old school things. Like, no, we went with just TypeScript. Those conversations are going to kill you. You're wasting time, you're at a startup. Someone needs to be able to quickly make the decision and move on.
You need to know you can work under pressure with them. This is one of the reasons a lot of people go to their best friend or college roommates. Basically, because on those situations, you've been stuck. One of the things I recommend friends on the dating world, but I also would recommend on the startup world is, take a long trip together. Because on a long trip, yes, you're going to be worried about the car not running out of gas. You're going to be worried about where to stay, maybe the weather hits, and notice how they respond on those moments. That is really important. Yes, take a long trip. Last but not least, you need to make sure that you're compatible, that your style, the way you work, your battles that you have, they're a match, because things can go wrong. At the end of the day, it's better to do it alone than having a bad co-founder.
How do you make sure even more about this besides going on a road trip? Ask these questions. How do you handle disagreements? How are we going to split the equity? What's going to be success in five years? Do you love or hate working? Even better, and probably the most important, can you get some references? Can you ask people, like, you work with this person the best. I love the interview question, "Tell me about a disagreement you had in your team or in your real life." That answer tells you so much. We were talking about contractors earlier. I strongly believe on trials. If you can do a three-month trial, you can say, let's try working together for three months, see what happens, and then we do the paperwork. That's amazing. Definitely leverage that.
Act III: Your Rollout Plan
I'm just going to go now even more tactical. This is a 30-60-90 framework for your startup. It takes off for other people with validation. The first days, you're just trying to have a conversation, talk with people, and get enough data to actually build a good MVP. An MVP that people are like, that is cool. Can I use it tomorrow? Great. Definitely focus on that. Again, legal. Legal is your best friend. You're validating. The second stage is, how do you actually measure? You need to start measuring things. You need to be saying like, I have paying customers, can I double that number next month or at least increase it next month, and over and over again? You need to be tracking that more than anything else. You need to agree on what is your service level objectives. I'm using that very generously. You need to understand like, can we maintain this company if you have three customers?
Sometimes you can. Spoiler, most VCs don't care about being profitable, they care about making it big. That's another reason I often recommend like, start with bootstrapping. Start feeling like, is this going to be worth it? Am I getting this traction? Because you can stay as a small business. That is valid. It's great. Last but not least, you need to have a good metrics framework. I already showed how it looks like. Again, the resource is going to be at the end. Then, yes, here it's now starting to scale. Like, can I get more customers? Can I prove that I can add more features and they will love them even more? Then, here's when you actually think like, should I raise more money or should I just go back to the drawing board? It's ok if you go back to the drawing board. Again, we're talking about, don't drop out of college. Don't leave your job. Most of this, talk to a lawyer. You can do it while being employed. Moonlighting is ok, especially in California. Start talking to 20 people next week on Monday.
Closing: The Synthesis
Now I'm going to close. You're ready. You're engineers. You can do this. This is a unique system. You know it. You just need to make the translation. You need to think like, the evaluations that I did for my product, now it's just, how do I get product market fit? The investment memo or the technical decision that you did, turn it into a pitch. You all have worked at this stage. You're in this conference with leadership that asks you, like, write me a doc before we talk. You should be doing that. Last, you need to think like a VC. What is your portfolio? What are the people that help you? What are the customers that you're going to get? How do you scale that? Seriously, you have the skills. Translation is completely possible. The things that are different. Years, not sprints. Your network matters a lot.
It matters for getting VC money, but also for getting customers. It matters in all the verticals. Finally, yes, you need a DBA. Another thing, and this is something that I keep telling my wife like, I get furious when engineers don't document. It's just as important as a startup because you need to be able to know why you made a decision later. You need to be able to say like, this is why we split the money this way. Here's who is going to decide this and that. Here's how we're going to solve this conflict. You need to do those documents because that way you can go back and have a conversation. That way you can be like, we used to decide that no code reviews. Now we want to do code reviews. Great. Have that conversation. Having a document that says we don't do code reviews for this, this, and that, it's a great way to actually have a conversation of now we should have code reviews.
Please have code reviews. On Monday, just start thinking about what's going to be the equity and the authority. There are so many frameworks. There's our ACL framework for choosing who is responsible, the responsibility matrix. That's great. You can use that. For our document equity, there are great resources by UPenn, also linked at the end, and YC also gives you really good resources for that first round.
Resources
Now I'll leave you with a cheat sheet of the material that I always recommend to everyone. The first one is, "The Mom Test." Read the book. It's very different than the usual advice. I would rename that because it's a very different thing. The "Cold Start Problem" is great. That's networks, networks, networks. Then, "After the Idea," that book is literally a crash course of going to startup school. I really recommend it. Lizzie recommended it. It's good. Subscribe, Lenny's Newsletter. "How I AI," that one's great too. First Round Review, all those are great subscriptions. I already said that a million times, get a lawyer. They don't charge as much as you think. You don't have to hire ones that are in San Francisco, just that are California licensed. Just look around. You can get someone remote, that is much cheaper. All the resources will be at this address, sanscourier.ai/qconsf-2025. I will be offering all these 12 templates. The mapping matrix, the due diligence, the metrics dashboard, the workshop for visions, co-founder, all this. The complete library, it's all there.
Please connect with me. I'm an Arc. I love durable execution, like DBOS, Temporal, stuff like that. Just reach out. I love talking about that. AI infra, MLOps, I've been doing that for four years. I love mentoring future and current founders. Yes, just reach out to me and happy to share more of my frameworks. As usual, the best time was probably yesterday. Next Monday is a great time to get started. You got the frameworks, now you know the mistakes and the things that could go wrong. Go and build something that people cannot live without. Try this week even before Monday, just try 3 potential customers. Say to someone like, "I know you're streaming. I've been thinking a lot about products for streamers." Like, "I know you have a stream. Can I talk with you for five minutes? Can I buy you a coffee?" You'll learn so much more from that conversation than you building 20 MVPs.
See more presentations with transcripts
