Founder Wisdom: the best lines from 600+ founders and CEOs (audio edition)

This is Founder Wisdom, the book highlights edition. I interviewed more than 3,000 founders and CEOs on my podcast. These are some of their best lines in their own words. This audio is read by an AI voice. The full book with photos and every guest's page is free online. Chapter 1, Where It Started. Joe Ciura, founder and CEO, GoBrewing. I was bringing my textbooks into work, reading 15 seconds in between building these cars, and I did that for 5 years. Co-founder, Xero Shoes. When he told me he wanted to start this business, I said, absolutely not. We need to buckle down and do one thing at a time. And he ignored me. When I went to bed, he built a website. CEO, Nine Zero. When I moved to the US, nobody cared. We'd sold MessageLabs for $700 million, and nobody had really heard about the company. I thought it would give me a lot of access. It was a rude awakening. I was back to zero. Lloyd Lobo, co-founder and author, Boast: AI and Traction. You could be on a crappy journey on the way to hell, but great companions make it memorable. Here I am on this refugee bus, and I'm like, this is my tribe. When we lived in the refugee camps, it was some of the best times of my life. Tristan Roberts, CEO, Dog Years. I was recruited by some biohackers who were developing a gene therapy for HIV. I Realized that even if it worked, nobody would believe me. So I did a live stream of the injection in order to get some amount of credibility in case it did work. Vic Dorfman, founder, member fix, and member host. Thailand nurtured me when I had nothing. I feel like it's my mother. It fed me from its breast. I really feel this way. Yele Okeremi, CEO, Precise Financial Systems. We started the company with less than sixty U.S. dollars. It was eight thousand naira at that time. Today, eight thousand naira would be worth about two or three dollars. Chapter two: The part they don't put on LinkedIn. Chris J. Snook, founder and managing partner, Atomic Capital Virtual Family Office. I found myself half a million dollars in debt, no income, no job, and no one would hire me because I didn't even know how to get a job. There was only one way out, which was through. Jim Donnelly, co-founder and CEO, Humanaut Health. I always say about the people who betrayed me, their punishment is they have to be them the rest of their life. And my reward is I get to be me the rest of my life. I don't let it hold me back. Lena Phoenix, co-founder, Xero Shoes. We'd invested a couple hundred thousand in molds and product on our credit cards. I got the first customer complaint, a very nice one, and I fell onto the floor and thought, This is it, we're bankrupt. Co-founder and author, Boast: AI and Traction. I thought money would make me super happy because I never had it. But when I left the company, I actually got depressed. I hit rock bottom because throughout my life I had community, this was my tribe, and I lost it. Founder and CEO, Social Native. There are a million things that I worked on that did not work. Electric scooters, but like 10 years before it should have been. Light-up dog collars. A wig subscription business. You're constantly testing the universe. Duncan Logan, CEO, Ninety. Anyone can sell a dollar for 50 cents, but you just can't do it for long. If you're selling dollars for 50 cents, it's gonna fly off the shelf. WeWork's business was a little bit like that. It was too good to be true. Ray First, 5x founder, investor, World Series of Poker champion, author, Full Tilt Poker former board member. I'd run good, as they say in poker. I'd hit a lot of green lights in life. On the surface, everything was fine, but I wasn't in touch with my humanity or my emotions. I was looking at people as strategic pieces on a chessboard. Chapter 3, Money. Joe Chura, founder and CEO, GoBrewing. When we sold, I don't even want to say I had $50 in my savings account, but it wasn't much at all. At Dealer Inspire, we didn't take a paycheck for years. Jay Samit, serial disruptor, author, keynote speaker, jaysamit.com. Microsoft went public for $400 million, and my eBay founder stock went from $15 to $615 a share in the first month. I sold all of it. Am I unhappy? No. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Dan Rasmussen, partner and founder, Verdad Advisors. There's a difference between planning and predicting. I'm not going to short the S&P because I think a recession is coming. I develop a plan for what I'll do when one comes. One of those is useful and the other is based on a fallacy about your forecasting ability. Margarita Womack, founder and CEO, Latin Goodness Foods, Maspanadas. If you sell an $8 bag of frozen empanadas online, you're probably paying $50 for packaging and shipping. It's prohibitive. Peter Lublink, CEO, Bethany Kids. There are times you have to say to a surgeon, slow down, we can't afford any more patients. That's a terrible place to live. Jay Dewani, founder and CEO, Lemurian Labs. GPUs tend to fail. The mean time to failure is about 4 to 8 hours, and every single time a GPU fails, it costs roughly $300,000 depending on your run. Maybe $200,000. Yat Siu, chairman, Animoca Brands. Back then, Hong Kong was Milton Friedman's wet dream. Zero capital gains tax, no dividend taxes, and no social safety net. You had 70-year-old seniors literally carrying up trash. Chapter four, raising. Ben Narison, founder and general partner, Tenacity Venture Capital. In 2023 and 2024, I saw 10,000 pitches. I funded six. I'm a one-and-done fund. I only put in money once. Whether you're going well or not, there is no more money. Mario Martinez Jr., CEO and founder, Vengreso. It was 190 meetings to get $650,000. On top of that, I spoke to another 120 founders for advice, and at least 50 or 60 of them said to me, "If you're not doing 300 meetings, you're not doing enough." Robert Harary, co-founder, early-stage VC investor, Razy Deco Evolution VC Partners. One of the best pieces of advice my mom gave me is a confused mind always says no. As a founder, you know too much about something no one else knows about yet, so you accidentally confuse investors. Jim Weldon, Chief Executive Officer, Prospect Desk. I think the capital has perverted the grit and entrepreneurial zeal that you should have in a startup, which is how do I get a lot done with a little, not how do I piss away $20 million on an A round. Josh Wagner, co-founder and partner, Revenue Capital. Typical VC is doing it wrong. They're basically in the moviemaking game. They're hoping that a 100x return covers the losses for the rest of the portfolio. And frankly, it's not a founder friendly model. John Frankel, founder and partner, Venture Capital. I can give you a checklist of, say, 12 items, and pretty much every company we invest in fails on 4 of them. When we first invest and other VCs say, huh, I don't quite get it, that to us is confirmatory. Jason Sherman, co-founder and managing partner, Top Shelf Ventures. We ran a study of 70 different celebrity-backed tequilas launched in a 3-year period. 65 of those either don't exist or barely exist. They all raised a lot of capital during a low-interest environment. Chapter 5, Selling. Jay Samit, serial disruptor, author, keynote speaker, jaysamit.com. Someone told me you have to be either the best in the world at what you do or the only one doing it, because if you're the only one, you're by definition the best in the world. Founder, Oberman and Partners. You're not competing with other marketing. TV commercials compete with the TV show, not with other commercials. On LinkedIn, you're competing with people posting, look what I did. That means you need to act that way. Founder, author, The Tilt. Content Entrepreneur Expo founded Content Marketing Institute. We hoped for 100 or 150 people to show up to the first event. We got 660 that year, 1,000 the next, 1,700 the next, and ultimately 4,000 people came to Cleveland, Ohio. That one event brought in about $6 to $6.5 million in revenue. CEO, Human Intelligence. I have failed miserably at sales. I'm a good visionary and I can do the big showcase first meeting, but that is very different from doing sales for the next 12 touchpoints. So I'm hiring a salesperson, giving them up to 10 to 15% of my company, and they'll become CEO if they succeed. Founder, LeadNextGen, SaaS Growth Summit. With almost 2,000 interviews, we have never paid for a speaker. Speakers pay us because they want to be in front of the ideal audience. Founder, ScaleChain.io. I try to get to the no as quickly as possible. I'm not even looking for a yes. I'm just looking for a no, because then I don't need to spend as much time. CTO and co-founder, Contour YCS 23. We sold the old product to the person that it was going to replace, and naturally they said, we don't want that. This time we learned, we target higher up in the chain. Chapter 6: Building. CEO, Human Intelligence. I told my company a year ago, you guys, this isn't working. Make it idiot-proof and addictive like crack cocaine. There's one product that got to a billion users in 2 months with no salespeople and no marketing, and that's ChatGPT. Mitchell Hora, founder and CEO, Continuum Ag. Across the US, the national average is that soils can infiltrate half an inch of rainfall per hour. On my family's farm, we can infiltrate 4 inches of rain in under 5 minutes. It doesn't flood away. It doesn't wash to the side carrying soil and pesticides and fertilizers. CEO, ImmuneBridge. Umbilical cord blood is young. It's healthy. These babies are not obese. They've never smoked a cigarette. It's liquid gold is what we refer to it as. CEO and co-founder, ImproveOn Health. There's not a feature in the platform that wasn't asked for by a customer. We don't build things that we think are cool. We just listen as deeply as we can, and they trust us. Vic Dorfman, founder, MemberFix, and member host. Membership site is not actually a niche; it's a positioning. A niche would be pregnant women over 40 who want to get fit. A membership site is a delivery vehicle for your value. Sahin Boydas, co-founder and CEO, Claros Farm. Everything in the supermarket has a nutrition fact, even junk food. But fruit has none. If they put it. It would be horrible in America. We only buy for the look. Inside, it's empty. Cameron Craig, Chief Executive Officer. A signature story: When the iPod came out, it got a lot of criticism. It only worked on a Mac. Steve said, "When hell freezes over, it will work on Windows," and in the press release, we said, "Hell froze over." Chapter seven: People. Founder and CEO, Ezra AI Labs. About 50% of applicants to engineering interviews are fraudulent. They're not real people. They're using fake identities or they're North Korean actors. Founder, BrowserUse, YCW25. Every day we have a daily war room at 9 AM. Everyone gets one goal for the day. If 3 people don't manage to achieve their goal, Then each of us has to do 60 push-ups. Jeffrey Caney, founder and CEO, Caney Aerospace. I asked everyone to take a temporary pay cut. I thought for sure everyone would quit. No one quit. In fact, one gentleman came to me and said, Jeff, are you sure you took enough? Sambor Pirok, co-founder and CEO, Space Rock Games. Letting people go is terrible every time. I had to speak with people I knew I would never let go unless I was forced to. I dropped tears. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to it. CEO, Bethany Kids. The salary we paid Martin to be a pediatric surgeon, we discovered he had been quietly giving away to everybody else. He was saying, this is money for the nurses on behalf of Bethany Kids. Founder and CEO, Demand Metric Commercial Excellence Consortium. It's not that people don't want to come to work. It's that the way they're managed destroys their motivation at the core. They've been systematically beaten down by these big enterprises, chained to their desks. Felix Velarde, founder, author of Scale at Speed 2Y3X. If I put half the people out of work, who are the people buying the products we're trying to market? This is the Henry Ford problem. He said, "I want to pay my workers enough that they can afford to buy a car from me." Chapter Eight: Head Game. Founder, Certus Insurance. I have total ADD. When it's really hard and everybody says you're never going to be successful, I'm like, yummy, let's go. Routine is the death of me. Founder, ex-SWAT sniper team leader, ShotIQ, MindIQ. I highly recommend that people get shot at at some time in their life. Don't get hit, that would suck, but it will change your perspective on life. Author, coach, CEO, Academy for Coaching Excellence. What is a terrible gift? We lose a loved one, we lose our health, terrible things. But whether it's a month, a year, or 10 years later, out of that experience, someone got a gift. Author and behavioral designer, Hooked, Indistractable. If you really want to know someone's values, you don't listen to what they say, because people say all kinds of stuff. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. Founder and Managing Partner, Adamant Capital Virtual Family Office. Just because you have a high pain tolerance does not mean it always serves you. When I look at what I'm capable of versus my actual rewards, my pain tolerance is also what has held me back. Partner and Founder, Verdad Advisors. Humans have many gifts, but prophecy is not among them. I call it future nihilism. If your DCF model were completely worthless and your out-year predictions meant absolutely nothing, how would that change your investing behavior? 5x founder, investor, World Series of Poker champion, author, Full Tilt Poker former board member. I used to view the world primarily through the lens of poker, And ultimately, it's a very limited and problematic worldview. It doesn't honor the relationships. The fundamental difference is that poker is a zero-sum game and business is not. We win more when we're winning together. Chapter 9, Life Outside. Tom Lenoble, author, coach, CEO, Academy for Coaching Excellence. I've been given 6 months to live 3 times. 2 life-threatening illnesses. The first one was terminal. And this year, I'll be in my 14th year living with metastatic cancer. Chairman and CEO, L-Nutra. I've done 12 or 13 years of schooling. I had 1 hour on nutrition. I had 0 hours on sleep, 0 on stress, 0 on social community, 0 on meditation. Executive coach, Columbia University professor, author, Columbia University. I was an obese kid. I weighed 60 pounds more than I do now when I was 16. I did not blame the food that I ate. I blamed myself for not holding myself accountable. Sharmin Ali, serial entrepreneur, author, angel investor, safe. I've suffered a cardiac arrest at the age of 33. My doctor was like, you just suffered a minor cardiac arrest. You could have died. And my response was, how minor? Founder and CSO, The Sales Rebellion. If you're lucky, you'll live 75 years. That means I can spend about 50 summers with my son. Then you get to a summer where it's too hot and you skip one, and now you've got 49. Professor of psychology, president of the Forgiveness Foundation, Luther College, Discover Forgiveness. When people estimate the angle of a climb, Those who have forgiven estimate it as less steep. Those who haven't forgiven see the challenge in front of them as physically greater. Founder, ghostwriter, and coach, The Human Atlas Institute. The first husband was Japanese, and I had to walk 5 steps behind him. That didn't last. With the Swiss one, there were holes in the marriage. It was the case of a great Swiss cheese meltdown. Chapter 10, AI. Justin Oberman, founder, Oberman and Partners. If you think about AI the McLuhan way, a technology is an extension of you. People say, I don't know how to write, so I'll have AI write for me. That's backwards. You're taking the worst part of yourself and amplifying it. CEO, Refined Labs. You win on expertise, not commodity information. What does AI do? It serves you up the most commodity information that there is. AI strategy consultant, co-founder, BIG. I tell executives, and they look at me like I'm crazy, that in your career you will hire someone whose best friend is not human. I totally believe that. CEO, Ringier. More Americans are now subscribing to LLM providers than to media. That is a really damning thing. It only appeared 2 years ago and it already overtook the subscriptions. CEO and co-founder, Fresco YC F24. With AI, you can spin up mockups and prototypes very easily. I watched someone code a clone of Airbnb in 3 hours. The real moat is trust with your customers and the human relationships you build. Founder and CIO, Tetranoodle Technologies. What I consider AI today from OpenAI or Gemini is crude AI. Just like you will never put crude oil in your car, you should never put crude AI in your mind. You should purify it before you consume it. Vihar Nandigala, co-founder, OrangeSlice.ai. If you just have the AI agent try to figure it out itself, it always recurses to the mean. It does what everyone else is doing because that's how it's trained, and that's not how you get 10x results. Chapter 11: Exits. I said I'd sell the business in 2 years and we'd move to Hawaii. 11 years later, we still hadn't done that. The truth is, I didn't want to sell a business, and I still don't. My lawyer begged me, don't do 4 years. An exited founder should not do more than a year and a half after an acquisition. After that, if you don't fit the culture, it just doesn't work. Co-founder, Lactiga. We chose a rare disease as our Trojan horse. It triggers FDA incentives like expedited review and a priority review voucher, which has a significant market value that biotechs can trade with each other. Founder, Quartermast Advisors. Selling Paladin was the hardest thing I've ever done professionally. People asked if I was drinking champagne every night. The biggest thing I felt was relief. I'm just so glad it's done. We landed the plane. CEO, Section. Only in Silicon Valley can you sell your companies for a combined $250 million and feel like you haven't made it. My kids aren't impressed either. They're like, where's the unicorn? Where's the billion-dollar exit? Co-founder, Bose.ai. Leaving a company you founded is fraught with mental health issues. It's like a wealthy person saying, "I'll pay for your kids' college and house, but I own 50% of your child." I ended up depressed, overweight, and drunk. Shannon Burns Susko, 2x exited CEO, founder, Metronomics. We sold on our three-year highly achievable goal. The buyer paid the value of three years out, 60 times top line—one of the top three mid-market deals on Wall Street that year. But the big story is that we didn't kill ourselves. Chapter 12: Everything Else. Mitchell Hora, founder and CEO, Continuum Ag. In one teaspoon of soil, there are more than 8 billion microbes. A tiny little teaspoon? More microbes than there are people on the Earth. James Bates, founder and CEO, AdvieNow Medical. From a pure altruistic standpoint, AT&T had money to burn and hired a bunch of smart people. Probably 80% of the money was wasted, but 20% invented wonderful things. Oliver Gunasekera, CEO, Impossible Metals YCW22. Typically, each centimeter in diameter of these nodules is about a million years. The seabed looks like a driving range with trillions of potato-sized rocks lying on the floor. Scott Wharton, CEO, Tandem PV. China deployed 300 gigawatts of solar last year. San Francisco uses 1 gigawatt, so that's 300 San Franciscos of power. They did more than the entire United States did in the last 68 years. John Bucknell, CEO, Virtus Solis Technologies. NASA asked Congress for more than a trillion dollars in today's money in 1980 to build space solar power. Congress said it isn't economical. 40 years later, all the reasons it didn't make sense back then make sense today. Founder and partner, Quantonation. If anybody has a machine that's able to break encryption, nobody will know. It could happen in China, it could happen in the US, and for sure they would not warn anybody else that this has happened because it's too much of an edge. Co-founder and CEO, CertiK. You'll actually see a different person show up to work on the first day. They've been warming up these LinkedIn profiles for a while. 500+ connections, the perfect resume for the job. You think there's no way this person is fake. That's the highlights edition. If you want to be in the next one, book a pre-interview from the link in the book. Thanks for listening.