Startup insights from Jason Fried, Peter Thiel, Jony Ive, and more

#1 Basecamp founder Jason Fried: Customers don’t care about your features and technology

Jason recounts how when he was selling shoes growing up in Illinois, representatives of the major shoe brands would arm salespeople with facts about all of the fancy new technology (e.g. the difference between the Nike Air versus the Zoom Air, the Goodyear rubber outsole and the midsole, etc.).

However, when Jason told customers about these technologies, they didn’t care.

When you actually watched customers buy shoes, they really only cared about a few key things: What does it look like? Is it comfortable? Can I afford it?

Jason saw the same thing selling tennis rackets.

He’d tell customers about all the latest technology and the difference between graphite versus fiberglass or natural gut string versus synthetic. Nobody cared. They’d look at a tennis racket and ask him if it came in other colors.

Jason has observed the same pattern across websites and software:

“Companies are obsessed with features and the technologies because that’s what they do all day. But they don’t actually watch people buy stuff. When you watch people buy stuff, they just want the simple stuff. They want the stuff that solves their problems and just works. They like the way it looks. They like the way it feels. It’s comfortable. It’s affordable. That’s what people want…. Yet companies keep talking about the specs, the technology, and the features.”

Jason advises founders to really listen to what your customers are saying and watch how they buy your product:

“You’ll find out that they just need a few things done really, really well. And that is really, I think, the secret to all this stuff. It’s figuring out the basics. Nailing the basics.”

Full video: 10 Things I’ve Learned | Jason Fried at BIG Omaha

#2 Peter Thiel: The university system today is like the Catholic Church circa 1500

When he announced the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, Peter Thiel did not expect it to generate the enormous amount of controversy it did:

“It somehow hit this incredibly raw nerve because there’s a lot of anxiety around education in our society… I think the anxiety is that education is seen as the sort of absolute be-all-end-all for everything. And then because it’s costing people so much money and a lot of students are graduating with so much debt, there’s an awful lot of anxiety. Are people getting what they’re paying for?”

Thiel says the biggest misconception about the program is thinking he wants to end universities and have everyone become an entrepreneur:

“It’s quite the opposite. I believe the future will not have a one-size-fits-all approach… If there’s anything unnatural about our current system, it’s that it’s one-size-fits-all: you go to Yale or you got jail.”

Thiel believes the future will have an education system that offers vastly different kinds of tracks for different people.

“The analogy that I’ve used is that I think the university system today is like the Catholic Church circa 1500. It’s seen as the only path to knowledge. It’s the way you get saved. If you get a diploma, you’re saved. If you don’t get a college diploma, you will go to hell—or sort of our modern equivalent of that.”

Thiel is not proposing to create some alternative unitary church.

“What I think will happen instead is it will be much more fragmented. And the somewhat disturbing message that I have is that like the 16th century reformers, you have to figure out how to save yourself, which is the absolute last thing people want to hear.”

Full video: Northwestern Engineering “e@nu Speaker Series with Peter Thiel: Developing The Developed World”

#3 Balaji Srinivasan: “Startup founders need to be ideologically motivated”

“One should be a startup founder if you are fundamentally ideologically motivated... The reason I say ideologically motivated is that a startup is so hard, and it’s so economically irrational to persist with it at certain times. You need to have a cause greater than yourself—that you believe in—that you’re working for.”

Many people are not ideologically motivated and that’s fine too, but if you are ideologically motivated, Balaji suggests asking yourself: “what is the single most effective thing you can do to achieve that goal?”

He recalls a quote from Larry page that “10x is easier than 10% sometimes.” It might be easier to do something paradigmatically different and better through a startup than it is to improve an existing system by 10%.

Full video: Startup Grind “Life After Startups & the Blockchain | Balaji Srinivasan (21.co & a16z) & Michael Gasiorek (SG)”

#4 Jony Ive explains why curiosity is fundamental to creating

“Being truly open, inquisitive, and curious has become the very basis for all that I do now and how I think. Having a genuine relish for being surprised and for learning is fundamental to creating.”

However, in traditional education or working environments with lots of people, curiosity requires intent and discipline.

“In interactions with larger groups, many of us gravitate towards the tangible and the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier, and more socially acceptable to talk about what is known.”

But curiosity and wanting to learn is far more important than being right. In fact, it’s fundamental to creating something new. As Jony explains:

“Crucially, the delight and joy of curiosity and learning can temper our fear of doing something completely new… and you find yourself actually listening. To listen well means you need to be quiet. Great ideas can come from the quietest voice, and I really worry how many good ideas I have missed because I wasn’t listening or I couldn’t hear a thing for the usual deluge of opinion. I think it would be great to resist the urge to fill every moment of every minute with opinions and to listen.”

Full video: California College of the Arts - CCA “Sir Jony Ive's 2021 CCA Commencement Honorary Doctorate Address”

#5 Sam Altman: “One of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time”

“I don’t think you can beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. My new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. And I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try to go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth.”

Sam continues:

“And so I think that when you’re thinking about a startup, it’s really worthwhile to think about something you’re willing to make a very long-term commitment to because that is where the current void in the market is. You get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people… The best companies just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves. But they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you’re going to be one of those companies, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you… It is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long term by doing this company really well than a bunch of short term things along the way.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Sam Altman: How to Build the Future”

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