Totally agreed. It seems he made some interesting choices about how to setup a startup for success before bringing on a technical co-founder, and as a technical co-founder I would be interested to hear 1) what he did and 2) what he thinks would be useful in convincing someone like me to come join him
I'd love to know this as well. Also, was their any specific criteria besides technical and that you got along with him when evaluating him as a co-founder? Are you located near each other (i.e. same city) or working remotely? Very cool story, thanks for sharing!
Good points. It seems he certainly has an interest in startups in the tech industry. It would be great to see him work with or invest in companies he has a lasting interest in.
I agree, however since he has seen and dealt with so many startups he gets to notice a lot of patterns about what makes startups more likely to be successful than the average person. There was definitely some valuable info in the lecture.
I’d take a look at the material and his writings before making that kind of judgement. Besides being smart, he seems to have a lot more humility than most of the people who give advice about startups, and he’s seen an unusually high number of startups throughout the process so he is in a great position to observe what works and what doesn’t. I’d much rather hear what he has to say than someone with one successful exit, mostly because I’ve come to trust his mind observational skill and his humble demeanor over the years.
Most of these videos had counterintuitive information that I was happy to have heard before getting started — especially since I came from a completely different industry. They won’t tell you near everything you need to know to get started, but nothing will so as far as these things go I found them to be very helpful.
I follow Suhail, and he was the founder of a competitor of mine, the stuff he's working on now is really interesting and a lot of the technical challenges the team are working on are fun and interesting.
He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
He knows startups extremely well. He's a very curious person and genuinely interested in startups and has gotten to know many startup founders. He started a successful (but not wildly successful) startup back when Y Combinator was new. I installed Loopt back then. It was pretty impressive for a while. A lot of startup people like him. Paul Graham does in particular but he rose to the top of Y Combinator over a period of time and I don't think it would have happened if he hadn't proven himself to most of the others at Y Combinator.
He's also quite up front about having no successful startup, at least in two interviews I've listened to (he brings it up without being asked directly).
I have no doubt the author is a good developer. He does seem to undervalue all the hustling Billy is doing. Sounds like he has customers lined up. I would kill for a startup founding partner like that
I feel as though the process he went through was how all good startups are born. Found a problem, iterated, talked to (or tried at least) to talk to his stakeholders and then found a scalable solution.
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