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Aman Sanger: Cursor shipped alongside GPT-4, then usage tanked. Two features later, growth took off.

They started on the idea around January 2023 and spent a few months experimenting. Cursor shipped alongside GPT-4 to some initial buzz, “but then you know it died down. Usage tanked.”

As heavy users of their own product they iterated fast and found a core set of features: instructed edits (Command K) and codebase indexing, so you can ask questions about your whole codebase. “After we integrated those two features and we launched them, growth kind of just took off.”

Credit: Peak XV @peakxvpartners with Aman Sanger @amanrsanger, Co-founder of Cursor · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F555ThW9WaA

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— notes from a founder

#amansanger #cursor #ai #productmarketfit #peakxv #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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32 minutes ago

Bill Carr: Amazon created the bar raiser in 1999, when new people were hiring new people hiring new people.

Amazon built the bar raiser process back in 1999. “We had new people hiring new people hiring new people.” The company was only three or four years old and growing like a weed.

On every interview loop, one person outside the hiring manager's chain is the bar raiser. They run the debrief and technically have veto power, “which by the way a good bar raiser never uses... I was a bar raiser in my 15 years at Amazon. I never used it, never saw it used.”

Credit: Lenny's Podcast @lennysan with Bill Carr @wbcarr3, former Amazon VP and co-author of Working Backwards · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV_TUiPk8iE

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— notes from a founder

#billcarr #amazon #hiring #barraiser #lennyspodcast #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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4 hours ago

Reid Hoffman: in LinkedIn's first eight weeks, about 2,000 people a week signed up. That's death.

“In the first, say, eight weeks, the number of people that were signing up for the service were about 2,000 people per week.” They could have gotten that many by having everyone in the company call people from a phone book. “That's not going to work. That's death.”

So they spent about a year solving growth. If that didn't work, “the whole thing goes to zero.” Subscriptions and ads got them to profitability around 2005; they'd started in late 2002 and incorporated in early 2003. “More or less that was two years where you'd say, of any particular week, right now company doesn't exist.”

Credit: Khan Academy @khanacademy with Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMKxksLLeFA

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— notes from a founder

#reidhoffman #linkedin #growth #greylock #startupstories #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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4 hours ago

Kyle Vogt: Twitch took about eight years to become successful, so before starting Cruise he wanted a problem worth committing at least 10 years to.

“Twitch took like eight years to become successful, and so whatever I do, I better be willing to commit at least 10 years to something.” That raises the bar on what you choose.

His three requirements: the technology itself determines the product's success, it has a direct positive impact on society, and it's a big business, because “for the positive impact to matter, it's got to be large scale.” Self-driving cars passed. “This is something I know I can commit 10 years to.”

Credit: Lex Fridman @lexfridman with Kyle Vogt @kvogt, Co-founder of Twitch and Cruise · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHsdeLuWLZk

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— notes from a founder

#kylevogt #cruise #twitch #selfdriving #lexfridman #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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5 hours ago

Adam D'Angelo: Quora's four founders asked about 500 friends to use the product. 90% didn't. The other 50 people became the first community.

“The same thing that's going to get you from a million users to 10 million users is also what gets you from 100 users to a thousand users.”

Four of them built Quora's V1 and asked friends to post questions and answer them, even though nobody was reading yet. “We asked about 500 people... and I would say about 90% of them didn't do any of that. But the other 10%, you know, which is about 50 people, they started using it,” and that turned into a very small initial community.

Credit: South Park Commons @southpkcommons with Adam D'Angelo @adamdangelo, Co-founder & CEO of Quora · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngWa9x4vkQ

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— notes from a founder

#adamdangelo #quora #growth #community #southparkcommons #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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6 hours ago

Steve Wozniak: five people ran Apple for its first three years and held almost all the stock. At the IPO, he gave much of his own away.

“There were five of us that really ran the company for the first 3 years, and we pretty much had almost all the stock.” When Apple went public, that didn't feel right to him.

He came from Hewlett-Packard, where profit sharing made employees feel like owners. “So I gave away a lot of my own stock to almost everybody in the company,” including huge amounts to a few high-schoolers who helped him write code in the early days. “They shouldn't be treated like they aren't worth anything.”

Credit: PHP Agency · Patrick Bet-David @patrickbetdavid with Steve Wozniak @stevewoz, Co-founder of Apple · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_BDHS3A6ko

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— notes from a founder

#stevewozniak #apple #equity #employees #startupstories #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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7 hours ago

Vinod Khosla: 90% of investors add no value, and 70% add negative value to a company.

“90% of investors add no value in my assessment. 70% of investors add negative value to a company.” That means they're advising founders when they haven't earned the right to. Getting an MBA and joining a venture firm doesn't qualify you.

The test is whether you've built a company and lived through how hard and uncertain it is. At Sun, they worried about making payroll or going bankrupt more than twice. For a month or two, the earliest he went home was 3am and the latest he was back was 7am. “Unless you felt that gut-wrenching decision, you can't advise an entrepreneur.”

Credit: Y Combinator @ycombinator with Vinod Khosla @vkhosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p_qfiHA5ZU

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— notes from a founder

#vinodkhosla #khoslaventures #venturecapital #boards #ycombinator #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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7 hours ago

Paul Buchheit: about a third of early Google queries were misspelled. His interview question about it found Noam Shazeer.

Looking at Google's query logs, “like a third of the queries were misspelled,” so a spell corrector was the easiest quality win ever. He started using it as an interview question: “80% of engineers had no idea, and the other 20% gave sort of mediocre answers.”

Then one candidate was already ahead of him. “We have to hire him.” Buchheit went away for a couple of weeks at Christmas, and when he came back, the new hire had built what became Google's “Did you mean” feature, in his first two weeks, and it could even correct proper nouns. Later in the conversation Buchheit names him: Noam Shazeer, one of the key people on the “Attention Is All You Need” paper.

Credit: Y Combinator @ycombinator with Paul Buchheit @paultoo, creator of Gmail · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE

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— notes from a founder

#paulbuchheit #google #noamshazeer #hiring #ycombinator #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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8 hours ago

Brian Armstrong built the Coinbase prototype on nights and weekends while working at Airbnb, about 20 hours a week for a year to a year and a half.

He'd work until about 7pm, come home, eat dinner, then work from 8pm to midnight, three or four weeknights, plus seven or eight hours on Sunday afternoons. “I was probably doing like 20 hours a week or something like that on what would eventually become Coinbase in my personal time.”

In his late 20s: “I really want to try to build something important in the world.” He did that for about a year to a year and a half, then applied to Y Combinator. They accepted him and wrote the initial seed check, “that's what gave me the confidence to quit my job.”

Credit: The Diary Of A CEO @StevenBartlett with Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong, Co-founder & CEO of Coinbase · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL-TmAw1H_U

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— notes from a founder

#brianarmstrong #coinbase #sidehustle #diaryofaceo #buildinpublic #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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9 hours ago

Reed Hastings founded Pure Software in 1990. It went public in '95 and was acquired in '97. Looking back, the big mistake was declining talent density.

“I founded Pure Software in 1990.” It grew like a typical great software company, doubling. “I wasn't careful about it, and I would say talent density declined.” It went public in '95 and was acquired in '97.

With declining talent density you need rules to protect against mistakes, “and that only further drives out the high caliber people.” His conclusion: he'd tried to run software like a manufacturing plant, and should instead manage it “with inspiration rather than management.”

Credit: Invest Like The Best @patrick_oshag with Reed Hastings @reedhastings, Co-founder of Netflix · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eo_HgKKG3Q

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— notes from a founder

#reedhastings #netflix #talentdensity #culture #investlikethebest #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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10 hours ago

Max Levchin: PayPal's most sacred asset was roughly 100 million rows of card and bank data. Then his security upgrade took the site down for five and a half hours.

The most sacred thing at PayPal was the database of credit card and bank credentials, “roughly 100 million rows.” To get rid of a single master key, he implemented Shamir's secret sharing “over undoubtedly 2 or 3 days of no sleep” and split the key into shards.

They took the site down, decrypted with the master key, re-encrypted with the sharded key, brought it back up, and people typed in their shards. “It didn't decrypt correctly.” For the next five and a half hours they were beating their heads against the wall. “There was not a backup.” At 5am Peter called asking why the site was still down, with CNN reporting PayPal went down last night.

Credit: Khosla Ventures @khoslaventures with Max Levchin @mlevchin, Co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Affirm · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVEA9U1KuRQ

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— notes from a founder

#maxlevchin #paypal #affirm #security #startupstories #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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10 hours ago

Apoorva Mehta went through about 20 startup ideas before Instacart. His filter: write down the top 10 reasons the idea will not work.

Why Instacart worked in 2012: smartphone penetration was high, most people had credit or debit cards, and shopping online was a social norm. Webvan tried groceries online in the early 2000s, “and it just didn't work because those three things were not true.”

His lesson from iterating through ideas: “Iteration speed is everything. The faster you go through the ideas, the more shots on goal.” First, try to kill the idea: “Write down the top 10 reasons why that idea will not work, and if you can't overcome those challenges, there's no point investing any time into it.”

Credit: South Park Commons @southpkcommons with Apoorva Mehta @apoorva_mehta, Founder of Instacart · clip via Startup Archive @StartupArchive_
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjJdyoWBZLM

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— notes from a founder

#apoorvamehta #instacart #startupideas #iteration #southparkcommons #founders #startups by @notesfromafounder

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11 hours ago