Kulvir argues that mastery, startups, and careers all require long-term thinking. Becoming skilled takes far longer than expected, and aspiring founders should work at fast-growing companies first. Product-market fit is the only metric that matters; learning and networks compound over decades, as Facebook's valuation grew from $15 billion in 2012 to $630 billion.
Chapters
So in terms of thinking long term, you know, there's a few dimensions to this. On the one hand, something as simple as if you want to accomplish something, if you want to gain mastery, if you want to, you know, achieve something, it actually just takes longer than you think. It takes actually quite a bit of time to get really good at something. So I was definitely very impatient. And I remember even, you know, I, I went on this entrepreneurial path. I was one of these people that thought that, hey, the best way to become an entrepreneur or to learn how to be a CEO is to just become one. And now I think I've shifted my thinking a little bit. I actually think if you do want to do a startup, eventually it can actually be really beneficial to go work at a startup, a fast growing one, and observe from others and learn for a while before you take the plunge to yourself. I now believe that really what determines the success of your startup is essentially getting to product market fit and anything else that's not focused on getting to product market fit doesn't really matter. It can just take time for you to have insights or ideas that can lead you down that path. Now also related to this I think is the idea of not really chasing instant gratification. So as you graduate, maybe there are job opportunities that come with a lot of prestige or maybe they come with a lot of money. And then there might be other opportunities that maybe index a little bit higher on what you're going to learn or the network that you're going to build. And I actually think you know what you learn and like the network you build that compounds again so much over time that again, I wouldn't sort of go for the sort of short term, sort of perceived, I don't know, external success. And you know, when I talk about compounding, I don't really think our brains are super well set up to just really understand the full magnitude of how things compound over time. And especially now with the Internet and technology, I think it's, it's kind of even crazier. So coming back to, you know, the Facebook story I referred to earlier wanted to share something. At that time when they were negotiating with us, Facebook was valued at $15 billion. That was their market cap. They had just done a deal with Microsoft. I think they were selling some ad inventory that Microsoft wanted to buy for Bing. But I remember at that time thinking $15 billion as a valuation for Facebook was just absolutely insane. We were coming out, this is still sort of coming out of the dot com crash. But the guys at Facebook, when they were negotiating with us, they were like, well, hey, Kulvir, you know, absolute worst case for us. We're going to end up a company say the size of Yahoo. And Yahoo at that time was valued at about $30 billion. So they're like, there's still a sort of 2x upside to joining our company. And they're like, you know, on the upside, on the best case scenario, maybe we'll end up something like Google. And at that time, Google was around, I think, 100 to $125 billion market cap. They had IPO'd in 2004 at about $25 billion market cap. So they'd sort of 4x'd over four years. But I remember like, you know, Google was a sort of once in a generation company, pretty much invented the best business model of all time. And so that's how they were sort of pitching, pitching the opportunity to us. Before I came down, I looked up Facebook's market capitalization. It's now $630 billion. So it was actually 40x what it was back then. And even for the people that were there in it, you know, it's kind of, it was kind of unfathomable to sort of think about it. I actually first sort of heard this advice actually from Mark Zuckerberg speaking at startup school here at Stanford. And he sort of just said, when you're thinking on a longer time horizon, I feel like you just, you end up playing a different game to your peers, whether you think about the competitive dynamic as a startup or even just the choices you're making in your life. I also did some research on Jeff Bezos when I was studying Amazon, and I'm pretty sure he went into starting Amazon with a 20 year horizon. And I almost sort of think like, if you're thinking about starting a startup, ask yourself, would you want to work on this for a. For about 20 years? I also have a theory that Obama pretty much had a 20 year plan to become president. Apparently in one of his legal internships he said this. You might sound crazy if you walk around telling people you want to be president so early in your life, but I actually think there are people that sort of work to that timeline.
