21–30 of 380 posts
To that end, I considered Sahil - and people like him - to be my model of success: being able to bring your vision to life.
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Pinterest is a malignant tumor on the face of the Web that exists to trick people who are trying to search for images. Being rich off that would be worse that toiling in obscurity.
Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…
Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
To what do you attribute the challenges?
Were you building a product there wasn't a market for, what you were delivering wasn't what people wanted?
Or, a marketting failure, inability to get enough people to know about it, and to understand how it would fit their needs?
Or, what I think I get from your post, is maybe you think neither of these -- rather you just tried to grow _too quickly_, quicker than the market/product could bear, and then had to deal with that.
Do you think if from the start you had _not_ tried to create a "billion dollar company", stayed smaller, accepted less investment with clearer expectations, had fewer employees, etc. -- you would have still been able to get to where you are now, but quicker and with less pain? You still would have been able to get _enough_ investment, and with the investment you had still would have been able to build the product succesfully?
I think maybe that's what your essay is implying you are suggesting, but I'm not totally sure if that's what you mean to be suggesting; or maybe you don't mean to be "diagnosing" it at all and aren't interested in these questions of what-could-have-been at this point. :)
Hey, #1 on Hacker News! I don't think that's happened since...I launched Gumroad back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 Thanks HN for being a part of my journey!
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.
Really love this post. My favorite line is: > Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag. I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face. I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't…
Ouch, number 2 employee at Pinterest - a $10 billion company that’s about to go public this year. He probably would have been worth an easy 100-200 million.