Startup insights from Jan Koum, Aaron Levie, Sam Altman, Ben Horowitz, and John Collison

Every Sunday, we send out 1 free insight + 4 new bonus insights for premium subscribers (upgrade to Premium for $5/mo here).

Today’s insights:

1. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum: “We always had competition… But we said our destiny is in our hands”

2. Box founder Aaron Levie: “Sales should be used to close big deals, not to drive product adoption

3. Sam Altman: “Most founders get delegation wrong”

4. Ben Horowitz explains why you must look at employee behavior through a “cultural lens”

5. Stripe founder John Collison: “People underestimate anecdotes”

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum: “We always had competition… But we said our destiny is in our hands”

“We always had competition - like from day one. There was actually a point in time where there was a new messaging app popping up every month. And every month there was an article on TechCrunch about how this awesome new messaging app is going to take down all other messaging apps.”

But the early WhatsApp team basically just ignored it:

“We didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We actually - on purpose - tried to stay under the radar. But it was just kind of funny to see this dog and pony show that happened with all these apps. There was PingMe. There was MessageMe. There was GroupMe. There was Kick… There were 10 different messaging apps at some point which kept getting all this publicity.”

Jan and team said:

“Good for you. Have all the publicity you want. We will just stay under the radar and not have any attention drawn to us.”

Jan continues:

“We always had competition - be it big guys like iMessage or Facebook Messenger or little guys like Kick… Even today we have apps like Telegram… But we always said that our destiny is really in our hands. We can’t worry too much about competition. We have to worry about our product and our users. And if we spend a lot of time thinking about competition or looking at competition, we’re going to fail.”

Full video: Stanford Online “How to Build a Product IV - Jan Koum, Co-founder of WhatsApp - Stanford CS183F: Startup School“ (Apr 2017)

Box founder Aaron Levie: “Sales should be used to close big deals, not to drive product adoption

“Make sure that the product itself is something that can be adopted, spread, and utilized without any friction by the end user. Sales should really be used to close big deals, not to drive product adoption.”

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