Startup insights from Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Horowitz, Travis Kalanick, Aaron Levie, and Palmer Luckey

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. Mark Zuckerberg explains why startups often beat big companies

2. Ben Horowitz: “To be a good CEO people have to want to work for you”

3. Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s advice for startup founders: “Preemptive deals are bad”

4. Box founder Aaron Levie: “Make sure you’re benefiting from a major technology tailwind”

5. Palmer Luckey on the importance of rewarding people who move quickly

Mark Zuckerberg explains why startups often beat big companies

“Large companies are slow and lack conviction.”

Mark wonders why a large company like Google didn’t beat Facebook in social networking:

“It wasn’t a super novel idea - there was Friendster and Myspace before… It’s not that they had a lack of talent - I mean we were a ragtag group of children and they had all these serious engineers and serious infrastructure.”

Mark thinks it’s because ”people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition.”

At first social networking was a fad service for college kids. When it decidedly wasn’t a fad, people were skill skeptical that was going to make money. Once it was making money, people thought the switch to mobile was going to be pretty hard. Then, once Facebook had figured all of these things out, it was too late for anyone - the incumbents had lost their advantage.

Mark speculates that there was probably a team deep inside these incumbents that believed in the idea of social networking, but a VP-level person ended up “pouring sand in the gears” because it wasn’t the highest priority.

“Even for things that look like they belong to large companies because they have a big distribution advantage, I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two thirds of those. And then there are all these things where there is not an apparent big advantage because it plugs into an existing distribution channel and those are just kind of free.”

Full video: South Park Commons “Mark Zuckerberg on Llama, AI, & Minus One“ (Aug 2024)

Ben Horowitz: “To be a good CEO people have to want to work for you”

“What's the fundamental thing that you have to be able to do in order to be CEO? People have to want to work for you. That's it. Because if nobody wants to work for you… you can't actually do anything.”

Ben urges founders to consider the reasons people actually want to work for a person:

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.