I've been building startups for a few years now. Looking back, I wanted to summarize a few lessons I've learned. Hopefully they'll help others - especially first-time founders: 1. Entrepreneurship has very little to do with IQ or EQ most of the time. Building a company is incredibly mentally demanding. Unlike physical exhaustion, which you can recover from with a good night's sleep or a meal, mental energy is much harder to replenish. Entrepreneurship can completely drain you. One of the most important skills is learning not to get trapped in your own thoughts or obsess over every problem. Iteration matters. Good business direction can be analyzed. Technical solution has something to do with IQ but entrepreneurship most of the time has nothing to do with EQ and IQ. Pure persistence and fast iteration with careful planning. 2. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally an idealistic pursuit. Building something innovative is a Don Quixote story. Innovation is not driven by materialism—it is driven by idealism. The more idealistic people you have in your team and in your life, the stronger you become. Three idealists are enough to build a small team. Ten or twenty can take you a long way. A hundred can build a world-class company. If you're not an idealist, I honestly wouldn't recommend starting a technology company. Without a strong mission, even small temptations or setbacks can cause people to give up, and you'll struggle to lead a team. Starting a company just to make money is a mindset from the last century. Back then, business was often about copying what already existed. Today, it's about thinking differently and creating something new. 3. What you build matters less than who you build it with. People problems are always the biggest problems. 4. Choosing the right investors is one of the most important decisions you'll make. A great investor can change your trajectory even if they only invest one dollar. Their value isn't the money—it's how much they help you grow as a founder and how much they contribute to the company's success. The best investors grow alongside founders. They're almost like founders standing beside you. Fundraising isn't really about raising money. If you wouldn't casually choose a husband or wife, you shouldn't casually choose investors either—even if you're desperate for capital. I've met incredible investors, and I've also met terrible ones. During one of our fundraising rounds, an investor repeatedly told us they were investing and even encouraged us to tell others they were committed. I finished raising from everyone else, and then they disappeared completely, leaving me in an impossible position. Looking back, I'm actually grateful it happened. 5. The ideal time to start a company is when you're alone. I honestly can't imagine starting a company while also having a spouse or a family to support. It's very easy to drag the people closest to you into your struggles. You'll feel pressure both inside and outside of work, and everyone ends up exhausted. No matter what, keep your own pressure to yourself. Don't make the people around you carry it. You chose this path—don't ask others to bear the consequences. 6. Take equity seriously. Many first-time founders don't. Equity mistakes are incredibly difficult—and expensive—to fix later. If you wouldn't casually give someone part of your home, don't casually promise them equity. Be patient when granting ownership. It's far better to vest equity over time than to give everything away in the excitement of the moment. Giving someone equity is like inviting them to live in your house. You're agreeing to build a life together. Sometimes abstract concepts become much clearer when you compare them to everyday life. 7. Hire a great lawyer and accountant from day one. Building a startup isn't just about making a product people will buy. Building a company is a complex system, and that's much harder. Your finances and legal structure can't afford major mistakes. Great lawyers are expensive—but fixing legal problems later is even more expensive. 8. Your founding team shouldn't be driven primarily by money. It's not that money doesn't matter. But if making money is everyone's number one priority, there's a good chance the company either won't become great—or won't survive at all. 9. If something or someone feels like a compromise, it's probably the wrong decision. Don't settle. Missing one person or one project won't stop your company from flying. Hiring the wrong person or making the wrong compromise, however, might cause the entire plane to crash. Founders are always flying the plane while simultaneously repairing it. I used to think my most important job was serving the team and helping everyone do their work. Eventually I realized that's just repairing the plane. Your real job is flying it. Your judgment is your most valuable asset. If you lose that, you're failing the entire company. The whole team should do everything they can to protect the founder's ability to make good decisions. 10. Ultimately, every great business creates value for society. The most important thing isn't what you build—it's whether people's lives become better because of it. The more people you genuinely help, the bigger your business can become. Great founders can often explain exactly how their company will make money five years from now, but they often can't clearly explain how they'll make money over the next two years. Building a company requires long-term thinking. Which brings us back to the importance of both founders and investors. 11. Truly innovative companies rarely know how they'll make money at the beginning. Most groundbreaking ideas don't start with a proven business model. If something is obviously profitable from day one, it's usually not that innovative. Its ceiling is often easier to predict. Founders spend their lives balancing innovation with commercialization. Investors are trying to balance those same two forces. Neither side has an easy job. 12. There's a quote often attributed to Napoleon: A lion leading a flock of sheep is stronger than a sheep leading a flock of lions. Knowing yourself is just as important as leading others. If you're a lion, lead with strength while taking care of your people. If you're a sheep, be the best sheep you can beside a great lion. Everyone lives better that way. The real danger is not knowing who you are—when lions think they're sheep, or sheep think they're lions. Stay hopeful. Stay optimistic. But also learn to be content. 13. Your reputation is everything. Nothing is more valuable than your reputation. When you build a reputation for integrity, opportunities—and money—start finding you instead of the other way around.

I’m a fan boy of Shengkun and @MonidHQ team. I was going back to the office after dinner and he just finished a meeting. None of us is chilling on a Friday night haha.

I am stopping being toxic today. But kindly letting you know that it’s 10 PM on Friday in San Francisco. I’m f**king busy. Happy Friday.

Looking for someone to work together. Ping me if you think you can do cold outbound good enough. I want you to cold reach out to me, impress me and we can work on something together. I want you to challenge me, deny me or figure out a way to impress or grill me and get me interested or questioned. You have one shot. I don't care if you use slop or whatever. I want you to impress people, get their interested, and convert then close the f**king deal. Now go.

People underestimate the power of die trying and overestimate intelligence. When I moved to London alone by myself, I had no family and friends, I spoke no English, and I literally learned English from a homeless guy on the street. You don't need intelligence to learn a language... Drunk people in the bar and homeless guys on the street were my English teachers at that time... One day, I saw a homeless guy sitting in front of a supermarket in winter. I thought he must be freezing, so I bought him some sandwiches from the supermarket. I gave them to him. He said, “I don’t eat this shit.” I was curious about what he wanted instead. He said he only drank Stella (a Belgian beer). So I went back in, bought a dozen, and sat down on the street drinking with him. He couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Day by day. Sitting on the street from time to time. This is how I learned to speak English, from a homeless guy. I call him Mr. Colins, and I still visit him whenever I’m in London. Sometimes I just wish everyone on Earth could go to space and see this little blue dot. All the drama we go through every day happens on this little dot. How stupid we sometimes are, to ourselves and to each other, when we all live on this little blue dot.

I want to know who bookmarked my post of this... My secret admirers but feel shy to say hi?

This genuinely made me laugh. No dating before Series B sounds silly. Dating might save your company’s life. I’m 6’ if someone’s interested in helping me run the company and take it public. The law asks me to give 50% of my assets, but I’m down to give more.

Unfortunately if you work in B2B, social media won’t bring you any clients except for you wait and plan for a really long period of time. Social media is for consumer and developers - 2C and 2D.

Was nerdsniped by why Blackpink is so viral, even though I hadn’t heard any of their songs before. I listened to Blackpink for the first time today. I’m thrilled to see that Van Halen from the ’70s is still viral, with 13M listeners, while Blackpink has almost 20M - and both of their No. 1 songs are called “Jump.”

I was a little surprised how much I have learnt by working hard over time while I was talking to Maya in this pod: If you are running an early-stage business, you need to seriously ask yourself: - Is your business helping others making money? All good business do. If you do, how many people you are helping then? - Do you have a good TAM? I made this mistake by choosing an industry doesn't have good TAM. It was a mistake but wasn't a mistake. Choosing a right industry is very very very important. - Best product at early-stage shouldn't make money and ideally no way for them to make too much money but they are directionally correct - this is my personal opinion because I always like the product that is a bit Van Gogh-ish but not too ahead of the age and market like Van Gogh. This is innovation. If you are innovative, at the start there isn't a market for you because you are ahead of your time! But you don't want to be too ahead of your time then you are not building a business - you are building a research lab Enjoy:

1st year building a startup 2nd year building a startup 3rd year building a startup

Wrapped up my day of work and leaving the office. Told my ai agents to keep doing the work and behave well. All great things in life shouldn’t be easily earned - love, great character, and innovation. By default they should be hard. I’m grateful.

Grok is behind. Everyone using GrokBot can tell…

Just finished reading before going to bed. I love this from Elon. Lose and fail 50 times. Then you will know nothing can hurt you anymore. You become a superhuman.

I love people use acceptable amount of dirty words in a meeting. That means passion to me. Just had two calls. All used some healthy dose of dirty words to me. I love it.

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Salespeople in SF or South America, we are hiring and I want to talk to you. - If you feel you are smart, ambitious and will do everything to close a deal - If you feel like your ambition is bigger than your environment - You work hard. You know you can sell. But you’ve never had the chance to work with a company that matches your drive - Your face is thicker than your sole and you don't mind doing other things at a fast growing startup with PMF and enjoy the upside Let's fucking go! Let's grind! I’m looking for a hungry, driven salesperson to join us, in person in San Francisco or remotely from South America, with native-level English fluency. Someone who goes after opportunities, takes ownership, and wants to help build something. If you’ve been thinking, “Give me the right opportunity and I’ll show you what I can do” DM me. Tell me what you’ve sold and why you’re ready for more

Founders often say: we are building a tool then we grow bigger we will build a marketplace. This usually can’t be the case. You either build a tool or build a platform. Hard to do both imo. Here’s why: Building a tool requires many fine-tuning and long tail feature development and the feature stack is totally different from the feature stack needed from the platform. If you can’t create a 10x better UX for your end user for your users you don’t have a moat. Platform is a game for liquidity and depth of liquidity. You don’t have this liquidity then no one will use your platform. Tool is a game of performance. One vertical and one horizontal. Historically speaking I don’t believe I’ve seen a product manufacturer can also be a good market seller. They always work with distributors. This is the manufacturing business. In software I don’t think it’s exceptional. I will have a hard time to see Figma builds a successful design template marketplace. It will have to be Gumroad who can do it for Figma.