259 founder questions, answered by founders.
Every question on this page has a direct, cited answer from a real founder in the archive. Click any question for the full answer + the episode it came from.
How do I find my first customers?
Phonely started with small businesses paying 30 to 100 dollars a month — thousands of them — because "that's what we could get" and the product "wasn't good enough" yet. What kept them was relationshi
→ ▲ 18 perspectivesHow do I validate a startup idea before building it?
Will's lesson from moving out of research mode was to build only "the minimum thing that you need to get a customer validation that they actually want the thing that you solve" — not pretty UI or conv
→ ▲ 12 perspectivesHow do I do customer discovery on a tiny budget?
Shakeel ran 800 advisor conversations across 9 months, embedded inside firms 1–2 days at a time. Consultative approach that became sales when he could describe Marloo in a half sentence and watch advi
→ ▲ 11 perspectivesHow do I avoid burning out in the first two years of building?
Will says the opportunity cost has "weighed on my mind" — "I've missed out on like two years of my life that I could be hanging out with friends, I could be traveling." His justification: the path "gi
→ ▲ 11 perspectivesHow do I know when I've found product-market fit?
For Shakeel, the marker was advisors trying to buy the vibe-coded demo at the Brisbane conference — before the product existed. Unsolicited demand. Half-sentence pitch test passed.
→ ▲ 11 perspectivesWhen should I quit my corporate job to start a company?
Hardy quit first; Shakeel followed a few months later. Together they convinced one of Australia's largest VCs to fund the year of investigation. The forcing function was the commitment itself — both o
→ ▲ 9 perspectivesHow do I evaluate a co-founder before going all in?
Celeste and Asher have been friends "since we were 18" — almost five years — and met "right before we both wanted to Stanford together." She calls him "an amazing product person" and says "he is my li
→ ▲ 5 perspectivesHow do I pivot without losing my team or investors?
Before Fluency's current form, Finnlay's team did SOP creation and "didn't feel the product market fit" — "everything felt like grind," "like Copus pushing the ball up the hill." When they shipped the
→ ▲ 5 perspectivesHow long does a pre-seed or seed round take to close?
Phonely got into Y Combinator in the summer of 2024 and raised a seed round it didn't announce because it was "too busy working." The Series A didn't come until 2026 — a roughly two year gap — and it
→ ▲ 5 perspectivesShould I bootstrap or raise venture capital?
Stephen deliberately bootstrapped Lumiere. He doesn't do well with authority — "I'm a like an a minus entrepreneur but I'm like a C minus employee" — and an investor or buyer would mean "suddenly have
→ ▲ 5 perspectivesWhat does Shopfront actually do?
It's a lightweight, vendor-agnostic layer packaged as a browser extension that sits above and monitors the different AI tools a law firm uses, giving firms a single source of truth for AI compliance.
→ ▲ 4 perspectivesHow do I build a consumer brand on a tight budget?
Nathan's differentiation was going "down this very craftsmanship, technical, nerdy path to make the best socks in the world" while most brands chased "fancy prints." The selling point became the over-
→ ▲ 3 perspectivesHow did Sisterwould find the right manufacturer?
Nathan's advice is to "work with the makers directly," skip middleman agencies, and actually visit factories in person — in countries like China, Vietnam, India or Bangladesh. You can start on platfor
→ ▲ 3 perspectivesHow do founders handle investor rejection?
Jevon's most valuable lesson: "don't take rejection too hard." You have to "get really comfortable with being rejected," comfortable "being told it can't be done," and comfortable with naysayers — whi
→ ▲ 3 perspectivesWhat does YC actually look for in founders?
After applying four times, the fourth application finally had all three pieces together: the conviction of the team, real traction with customers trusting them in high-stakes situations, and a clear b
→ ▲ 3 perspectivesWhat happens when your startup fails? How do founders survive it?
Will's first startup was Spoke Sound, a hardware company turning flat surfaces and artwork into high fidelity speakers that even attracted Chance the rapper and had a patent. He realized after shuttin
→ ▲ 3 perspectivesWhat's it like being a non-technical female founder?
Nam was in his early 20s and his co-founder was 19, selling AI governance to managing partners with decades of experience. Some firms told them to "come back in like 5 years" — so they decided to "rem
→ ▲ 2 perspectivesHow do I hire my first engineer at a startup?
When you start missing your first customers' demands. John pushes back on hiring fast just because you have funding — "you should hire when you're starting to miss your first customer demands." The tr
→ ▲ 2 perspectivesHow do you decide which international market to enter?
Heaps Normal has been distributed in California for the last 12 months, focused on Northern California. Andy says a lot of people get "stars in their eyes" and go too hard too quickly in the US, so th
→ ▲ 2 perspectivesHow should I price a premium consumer product?
Andy wanted all aspects of the beer — including pricing — to be accessible, but it's also a premium product that costs a lot to produce, and "the margins in beer are not very high." They can't compete
→ ▲ 2 perspectivesWhat's the most valuable lesson Sam learned as a founder?
To just do. In the early days Ethan had absolutely no experience in the food industry — what compliance is required on a jar's label, food safety repercussions, how to get into supermarkets, how to sc
→Are big players like OpenAI's Agent Kit competitors or validation?
Elia sees it as validation, not a threat. The fact that OpenAI — "AI by definition by its core" — put out "a no code builder" proves "AI is not there to be able to generate an agent from scratch." The
→Are consumers getting tired of celebrity brands?
The founders think so. "I think the consumer is tired of celebrity brands." They call 2024 "the total apex of celebrity brands" — Alex Cooper, Prime from Logan and Jake Paul, Mr. Beast — and feel "fat
→Are research and entrepreneurship really that different?
Stephen thinks researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists are nearly identical — all "trying to create something new from something that doesn't exist before." The danger isn't the research brain; it's g
→Can a startup really out-execute incumbents on speed?
Nam's biggest wrong assumption: that startups win by relentless execution and shipping faster than incumbents. With tools like coding assistants, incumbents now ship fast too — "everyone ships fast th
→Did anyone not take Finnlay seriously because of his age?
No. Selling to large enterprises in his early 20s, Finnlay says: "Honestly, I never felt that to be honest." He "never felt like I got disparaged against my age," and felt businesses "were de-risking
→Did Finnlay experience tall poppy syndrome in Australia?
Not much. Finnlay says he doesn't "think I or we as fluency has experienced that much here in Australia." The places he does see it: when someone "obviously has money" and a nice car (a mate, 22, boug
→Do US investors discount Australian revenue?
Finnlay had heard the warning — "Oh, they're going to discount it to zero" — but for Fluency it didn't happen: "No, not for us." Accel "didn't anyway." He suspects discounting hits vertical software m
→Do you need confidence to apply to YC?
No — Satya's view is that you don't need confidence to go for it, because what's the worst that could happen: they reject you. When you have nothing to lose, why not give it a try. They applied with j
→Does Finnlay feel the pressure of a big raise?
Not really. He feels "investor pressure a little bit" but thinks it's "more like internally manufactured" — "all of our investors are quite chill." He doesn't feel the weight of needing "a billion dol
→Does Finnlay still think agentic AI is just "RPA on the cloud"?
No — he's reversed the take. He once said agentic AI was "robotic process automation on the cloud" and that VCs were overhyping it; now "I don't agree with it anymore. I think the opposite's now true.
→How did Alessia and Elia end up co-founding VibeFlow?
They met going through co-founder matching separately — Elia at EF in Paris, Alessia on the YC platform from Sri Lanka — and called every day as friends complaining about not finding the right match.
→How did Andy Miller build company culture at Heaps Normal?
They started by thinking about the best and worst experiences they'd had working for different people, then built in the ways of working and employee benefits they'd appreciated. Being remote-first fr
→How did Ben Wood start Waste and Progress?
It started by accident through Off Track, an outdoor gear supply company. Recommended by a friend named Derek, Ben asked for materials; Mitch said they had a tent instead. Ben cut it into panels, made
→How did Celeste Amadon get a consumer VC to invest in dating?
Celeste says Forerunner — a leading consumer VC that "had never really invested in dating" — backed Known because of its "results driven approach" and a flipped business model, not a niche angle. She
→How did Ethan Yong get Umami Papi into Coles?
It started by accident. After moving to the suburb of Hawthorn in September, Ethan drove to Coles Camberwell to buy salmon and a frying pan, got chatting with a checkout worker named Sarah on the stor
→How did Ethan Yong scale chili oil production out of his garage?
One weekend it took Ethan Friday, Saturday and Sunday to prepare, cook, fill, label and package enough jars to meet his orders, and he realised he couldn't keep doing that as orders grew. He needed a
→How did Ethan Yong's role change as Umami Papi grew?
Year 5 is the first year Ethan feels like an actual CEO. The first few years he was very much in the weeds — in production, packing orders — even though the team had grown because a company can't be a
→How did Floriye know the product was ready to launch?
After two and a half years of trial and error, Floriye knew Sisterwould was ready once they "got everything that we wanted and tested it out and loved it in our hair as well as getting the feedback fr
→How did Floriye price Sisterwould, and why did she lower the price?
Floriye says you first have to decide what kind of product you're creating — FMCG, premium, or in the middle. Sisterwould went premium and high quality with a vision of being in Sephora, then looked a
→How did Fluency raise its seed round from Accel?
Finnlay raised 6 million from Accel off "a literal two pager" with "no deck no data room." He sent it to about 10 funds, spoke to "18 funds or less total," and what they were building "perfectly hit a
→How did Harvard force Stephen to choose between his PhD and his startup?
The head of staff of his department brought him onto a Zoom call, screen-shared the Lumiere website with his face and bio, and asked "Stephen, is this you?" The department then gave him an ultimatum:
→How did Jevon decide to commit to a hard second startup?
Before committing to Keeyu, Jevon took his partner and son out for lunch at a nice restaurant, reminded them how chaotic things had been 10–15 years earlier — "living on the edge of being technically
→How did Litecard reduce technical friction in its product?
By evolving the product until it needed almost no coding. Brian says early objections were about "too much, sort of coding and technical integrations," but now the whole add-to-wallet-and-scan flow "t
→How did Nam know AI trust, not capability, was the real bottleneck?
Nam says it was "quite obvious" the biggest bottleneck for AI adoption would not be capability but trust. The early versions — AI guard rails sold to developer tools and legal-tech vendors — made sens
→How did Nate Spiteri close a funding round in December when everyone said it was impossible?
Everyone told Nate he was never going to close a round in December and that if he hadn't raised by November he should cut the round and reengage in January. He thought that was "a bit of a load of cra
→How did Nook hit 50,000 users so fast?
Growth hacking. Robert's team realised blue collar workers in Vietnam were already finding jobs through Facebook groups, so they started buying up Facebook groups, consolidated them into bigger ones,
→How did Paire price its socks?
Paire sat in the gap between fast fashion and premium. Fast-fashion brands sell "5 dollar socks or even two dollar socks" and hiking or dress brands sell Merino wool blends "at $50 or even $70," so Pa
→How did Phonely transition from SMB to large enterprise sales?
Will went up market because "there's a lot more money up market than there is in the SMB type of a space." On sales he had no background — "never done enterprise sales" — so he "jumped in with both fe
→How did Sam bootstrap Butter with only $500?
Sam bootstrapped Butter as a solo founder. He taught himself to code but decided it was insane to go through that learning curve while building the whole company, so he designed the product and outsou
→How did selling a bad product make Abby Huang a better salesperson?
Abby's funniest story about getting better at pitching: if you can sell people and get them to pay for a product that doesn't even work, that takes real sales skill. Back when she was "poking in the d
→How did Shakeel Lala raise venture capital before having a business idea?
He convinced one of Australia's largest VCs to back him and his co-founder Hardy on a single trust exercise — give us a year, we'll either come back with a product in market or come back honest about
→How did SipHRD get started?
It started at a party two years ago. Phung and Daniel were "sitting down about 10 20 shots in drinking" and decided "we should start a business" — and alcohol came into play almost immediately, since
→How did Sisterwould get into retailers like Revolve and Chemist Warehouse?
By reaching out from the very beginning — "opportunity doesn't just come, you have to go and get that opportunity." Revolve in the States was one of their first partnerships (Rina is from the States a
→How did Sisterwould get its products onto celebrities like Lindsay Lohan?
Floriye and Rina contacted celebrity hairstylists on Instagram or messaged their agencies, sending an authentic message about who they are and what their brand is. Lindsay Lohan gave them her personal
→How did the idea for Sisterwould come about?
Floriye had been in the beauty industry for 16 years and used to formulate her own skincare for her dad, who has psoriasis all over his body. She set out to create a new skincare line, brought in her
→How did the TikTok ban affect Dime and its clients?
When the message popped up that you could no longer use TikTok, Abby's team was freaking out about where they'd get their content, and there was a moment of shock. One of Dime's clients was slightly i
→How did Umami Papi get its brand partnership with Legos?
Legos, a legacy Australian brand around for about 100 years, approached Umami Papi first. They wanted to leverage Umami Papi's connection to a younger audience, while Umami Papi wanted access to Legos
→How did Will raise his Series A from a LinkedIn post?
Will's Series A "came from a LinkedIn post about cycling." Base Ten's Caroline saw it, reached out, and months later Phonely had 16 million and a 100 mil valuation "without running a formal" raise.
→How do Andy Miller and his co-founder divide responsibilities?
Andy works on the brand and his co-founder Benny brings the beer — Benny is the professional brewer. Asked whether he'd give up music or beer for life, Andy joked he'd give up music because he can mak
→How do Australian founders raise capital from US investors?
Finnlay names two misinterpretations Australians have — that it's "really easy" to "just go to the valley" and raise a massive round, and the cognitive dissonance that it's both hard and possible at o
→How do I avoid leading with bias in customer interviews?
Elia says it's "a super hard process" you only learn by doing — and you'll "always learn something that you do wrong." The fixes: read the mom test, narrow the problem and who your customer is before
→How do I balance my creative vision with the business bottom line?
Ben came from a perfectionist mindset and learned to make trade-offs through communication and business fundamentals. He and Frank set clear intentions up front, time every step to the second to know
→How do I build a software product if I'm not technical?
Selina wrote almost every line of code before her CTO joined, despite coming from a non-technical starting point. Her advice: large language models are "super intelligence at your fingertips for like
→How do I build differentiation when AI makes apps easy to ship?
Hung names two ways: really understand your customer, and if your features are similar to competitors', win on distribution. "Only by working with them can you actually build something that they want
→How do I build globally from day one?
Co-founder Hardy in London, dev team in Wellington, distribution across the UK and APAC. Shakeel and Hardy split responsibilities by geography from day one, with clean async division of labour.
→How do I compare startup programs like EF, Ewer and YC?
Elia breaks down three programs. Ewer was very early stage but where he "really learned about the basic of startup and customer discovery." EF "nailed" co-founder matching because they put you "in a r
→How do I develop a food or drink recipe I'm happy with?
SipHRD ran roughly 15 trial recipes on the lychee flavour alone, rejecting ones that were too sweet, too florally, lacked flavour, or had a bitter aftertaste. Their bar was a not-too-sweet drink — "us
→How do I find my first investors and angels?
Nate's first angels came mainly from LinkedIn outreach — he did 20 or 30 calls a week and asked each person to introduce him to someone else, keeping a referral pipeline going. He also used networking
→How do I grow a founder-led brand on LinkedIn?
Hamish's core advice is that every time you post, the next post should be incrementally better — constantly analyzing what landed, what didn't and how to improve it. He borrows the YouTuber logic: pos
→How do I know when my MVP is ready to ship?
For Sam it was more of a gut feel than a metrics or user-feedback call. Having learned from his previous experience, he knew he wanted to ship quickly and iterate rather than wait for a perfectly poli
→How do I make a health app social without making it toxic?
Selina got pushback that social features could bring "negativity or toxicity" to a sensitive topic, so gymii is designed as "a really safe type of social space": users have complete control over how m
→How do I market a heavily regulated product like alcohol?
In Australia, models "have to look 25 plus or either be it" even though the legal age is 18, because anyone can flag your brand to a committee that audits your content. SipHRD proactively asked the AB
→How do I price my product when I don't have customers yet?
Hamish's approach was to keep testing. Order Editing changed its pricing almost every two months. They launched it at like four hundred dollars a month, then thought "can we sell it at 500," found out
→How do I stay focused instead of starting too many companies?
Stephen's hard-won rule is to scope yourself down and only start new things that fit inside your existing umbrella. After Lumiere hit ~50 people he got arrogant, started a separate "assistant company,
→How do I tell my team and customers the startup is shutting down?
Acknowledge what's happened, don't beat around the bush, don't sugarcoat it — but offer a way forward. Robert says telling the team and customers was far harder than telling investors, because employe
→How do I test different value propositions early on?
Hamish's advice is to take advantage of the fact that no one knows who you are and no one cares about your messaging yet. If you've got 10 sales calls in a month, you can take every single sales call
→How do I test if people actually want my product before launch?
Hung's method: build something, get it to customers as fast as possible, and let them tell you if it's good, not good, or missing something — but remember that positive words mean nothing without paym
→How do men and women view disconnection differently?
From Sam's research and the commentary he sees online, women are more open about their challenges with disconnection, while men tend to carry more of the emotional association and stigma around it and
→How do you balance a full-time job and a side hustle?
Ethan's honest take: a lot of the reality is that it's very hard to do both of these things very well, because it takes your focus away from one thing to another. He didn't think about balance in the
→How do you balance grinding on a startup with enjoying your 20s?
Hamish admits it's probably not super balanced, and he balances it by way of acceptance. He decided at 20 that he wanted this by the time he was 25, reverse engineered what he'd need to do, and framed
→How do you build a following on social media as a founder?
Kiki grew her personal Instagram to ten K with the series "I quit my job in private equity to start" a yogurt company. The key was building on her personal account, not the company's: "the real conver
→How do you build trust when your AI touches sensitive systems?
Keeyu touches sensitive APIs — Shopify, ERPs, warehouse data — so Jevon's team rolls out each workflow carefully: do internal dev and testing in their own environments, then run "5 5 workflows" with t
→How do you keep customers when your product keeps breaking?
About a year and a half ago, "30% of our calls were just not working." Will kept his champions by over-communicating — "here's what we've done, here's what we think the issue is" — and by refusing to
→How do you push through a difficult personal transition while building?
Truth Systems started right after Nam and his co-founder went through breakups. His advice: a personal transition is "your opportunity to turn the lens you have on life back to yourself" — figure out
→How do you sell a product that's a brand-new category?
Jevon says ecommerce throws up "constantly new categories" every two or three years, and Keeyu is creating one. Part of the job is educating customers who "for decades" have done customer service reac
→How do you sell a prototype to a bank or large institution?
Satya says it depends on the size of the customer — selling to another startup is a different ball game from selling to a public company or a bank. Because they knew they'd work with larger institutio
→How do you set boundaries when you're building all the time?
For Kiki and Elan, there are basically no boundaries — but it doesn't feel like a problem. Their days blur work and life: dinners, supper-club walks, farm visits, Kiki "in bed at 11 p.m. editing" and
→How do you stay sane comparing yourself to faster-growing startups?
Will is "very competitive" and felt the pressure that "we should be better, we should be bigger." Looking at where Phonely actually was, he landed on the reframe that "comparison is the thief of joy."
→How do you train robots to do physical tasks?
Jason says they train robots much like how humans interact with the physical world — cameras on the robot perceive the world, then a neural network outputs actions to command the robot's joints and mo
→How do you turn old gear into new products through upcycling?
Ben's studio takes tents and backpacks that are past their use-by — no longer functional for the extreme outdoors — cleans them, cuts them back into their original components, and sews brand new produ
→How do you win on Shark Tank as a founder?
Nathan over-prepared — "I was repeating the script three days straight before we record it" — then pivoted his pitch a week before recording. Instead of leading with numbers he turned the stage into a
→How does a fintech build trust with cautious customers?
Transparency. Nhi says Vietnamese people are naturally cautious about new financial products, so MaiMoney tackles this by being as transparent as possible about its partnerships — which fund managers
→How does AI fit into a retail media platform?
For Brian, "AI revolves a lot around data, and it's about how much you can gather." Litecard uses an AI-driven customer onboarding journey for partners, and looks at AI to speed up building brand expe
→How does Dime market to Gen Z consumers?
Abby believes this next generation is very moldable and malleable in terms of who they look up to and what brands they follow and purchase. It's no longer chasing after the loud luxury — for Gen Z, it
→How does Dyna price its robots?
Many of these businesses are price sensitive and low margin, like restaurants, so the robots have to be somewhat cheap for the economics to make sense. Dyna runs a robotics service model — they don't
→How does Hamish McKay think about scaling Order Editing to 5 million in AR?
Hamish describes going through a period of anxiety and then clarity. Order Editing will finish the year doing about two and a half in ARR — roughly 3x on last year — and he was freaking out about how
→How does Known onboard new users?
Known runs an in-depth onboarding conversation — often by voice — that starts by asking you about "the first chapter of your life," then follow-ups about childhood, college, career, how friends would
→How does MaiMoney's partnership model with fund managers work?
MaiMoney partners with licensed fund managers and lets them do what they do best — managing the investments — while MaiMoney provides the tech and infrastructure, handling onboarding, customer servici
→How does Order Editing make money for brands?
Beyond saving customer-service time, Order Editing monetizes the post-purchase moment. When a brand gives someone a Grace period, that customer can also buy more products, so the checkout total is no
→How does Paire engineer its own fabric?
Unlike most DTC brands that just work with a factory, Paire "actually start from the very materials itself" — from the yarn, weaving it into fabric, then sending that fabric to a clothing factory for
→How does Stephen keep his closest relationships while living far away?
He builds fixed habits that keep core people in his life — for example, a standing workout call over Zoom with his college roommate three times a week, where they each go for a run and talk on the pho
→How long does it take to launch a product?
Two years, across four different launch dates. SipHRD's original date was end of last year, then slipped to 2023, March 2024, October 2024, and finally August — mostly because "we didn't want to relea
→How many investors do you have to talk to to raise a pre-seed round?
Nate reached out to almost 1000 investors across the whole spectrum just to see who had interest and who was a fit. He came back to Australia after four years in London with a "super thin" network, so
→How should an early startup think about pricing its first customer?
Satya says pricing is always tricky and they're still refining it. In their space it has to be a hybrid approach — part value-based, part outcome-based, part seed-based with thresholds. The key is to
→How should founders think about fundraising as a process?
Nate says you almost need to treat fundraising like a sales pipeline, especially at pre-seed when you don't have much revenue or product. It mirrors finding your ICP: it takes a while to find your fir
→How will AI change the health and wellness space?
Selina thinks AI "is going to massively change that space." Two forces stack: health and nutrition awareness is "increasing exponentially," especially in Gen Z and millennials, and AI can shrink thing
→How will the way people build AI products change in the future?
Satya expects more startups building narrower, vertical-specific models. Only a few big players have the dollars to build general-purpose models; ambitious teams will fine-tune or build more narrow ve
→If I don't get into YC, how do I get the same intensity?
Two things, per Vivek and John: take "sell before you build" to heart, and find a community of founders to grind around. John says just "finding a community of founders to be around" and "grinding wit
→In 10 years, will robots or humans do these jobs?
In the rapid-fire game, Jason gives a measured take: for performing surgery in a hospital he'd still trust the human surgeon over robots, because safety and precision matter so much — though maybe Dyn
→Is a GPT wrapper a real business?
Hung thinks the bad rap is unfair. "You don't have to train your own models to be different, and you can be a GPT wrapper without having all of the bad marketing names to it." He reframes a model call
→Is an accelerator worth it for a first-time founder?
Nate says that as a first-time founder it'd be very difficult to build without an accelerator setting — going it alone could take 5 or 10 times longer. Accelerators like Antler have experts who see th
→Is building a company in Europe harder than in the US?
Asked if building in Europe is "hard mode," Elia says "for me 100% agree with that." The two main reasons: network — in San Francisco "you have to make zero effort to meet anyone you want" — and belie
→Is it harder for an independent brand to break into grocery stores?
Yes — "it's hard." There are many hoops, pay-to-play models, and big margin cuts, and grocery stores are "really built for these legacy brands" at scale. But the flip side: "if you can break in, you c
→Is it scary to build in public as a founder?
Selina admits documenting the build is "a very humbling experience" and "kind of scary to put yourself out there," especially going from a private Instagram where she knew everyone to posting publicly
→Should founders stay in school or drop out?
Asked what he'd do if Truth Systems didn't exist and money wasn't a factor, Nam said he'd probably go back to school — because he values interdisciplinary environments where you can fail without every
→Should I anchor my startup to a high valuation?
No. Robert thinks "Too often founders ground themselves to valuations too early." Nook was valued at $20 million but they basically just picked a number in the middle of the 15-to-25-million range the
→Should I do free pilots or paid pilots with early customers?
Paid, every time. John says "a big lesson we Learned is that you should do paid pilots." Their free pilots felt like validation but weren't — customers "did not really care, they were just either bein
→Should I launch before the product is ready?
Yes. A YC partner pushed them to "launch launch something, it's okay if it has a bag" — people who need it will tell you what to fix. The mindset shift: "you're never gonna feel ready anyway." Elia's
→Should I open a physical store for my online brand?
Paire opened its first physical store and recouped the investment in 10 months. Nathan's reasoning is that "people just love visiting a store, shopping in the store, they love the service, they love t
→Should the technical co-founder be in fundraising pitches?
Nate says the CTO should never be in pitches, or at least not the initial call. You might do hundreds of pitches — that's hundreds of hours that could go to product development — so one dedicated pers
→Should you become a founder?
Will's blunt advice: "I recommend that you don't be a founder" — because "it's so hard and there's a lot of luck involved." The exception: if you feel "so strongly, so passionately that I have to do t
→Should you rebrand a company with a damaged reputation?
Joe decided not to rebrand. The brand is tarnished from an investor perspective, but from the customer perspective it's still a very relevant brand — within the pharmaceutical industry everybody knows
→Was there a market that looked perfect but turned out harder than expected?
The Philippines. Brian says almost everyone told them it was a great market because shopping habits there are "very similar to the shopping habits of people in America," but they "didn't know where to
→What actually happened to StrongRoom AI before Joe bought it?
StrongRoom essentially went into administration after a large funding round and very public, serious events — discrepancies in the financial records, misstated revenue that investors reported as fraud
→What advice did a successful founder give Abby Huang?
One of the really successful founders Abby spoke to recently — someone running a company doing crazy amounts on Amazon — told her to really get good at one thing. If a client tasks you with something
→What advice does Nhi have for early-stage founders?
Resilience. Reflecting on building a startup as an early-stage founder in Vietnam, Nhi says it's important to keep pushing through, because "being able to be resilient and... push through to all those
→What are My cash and My green?
They're MaiMoney's two flagship products. My cash is a flexible, high-yield savings alternative offering up to 4.8% with no withdrawal penalty — versus local cash savings accounts that generally yield
→What are the biggest bottlenecks in second-hand fashion selling?
Nate points to logistics, pricing and sizing. Logistics is a huge one in Australia — moving large amounts of stock is a time and cost sink. Pricing is weird because it's demand-based not retail-based,
→What are the pros and cons of being a solo founder?
Selina was a solo founder until December and is now "a big advocate of finding a co-founder." The pro of going solo: "you can really do whatever you want every day" with no one to report to. The cons:
→What are their top priorities for the next few months?
Priority one is seeing through demand — saturating New York City outside of grocery stores through pop-ups, demos, and events at places like a Pilates studio, a coffee shop and a bagel place, growing
→What changes after the product is built?
For Selina, launch flipped the job entirely. "The app is finished, honestly," so the team is now "spending a lot of time on the marketing aspects" — active on social media, making content fun and enga
→What changes when you move a robot from the lab to a real laundromat?
In an air-conditioned office the room is cool, but in real-world scenarios you don't control the temperature, so overheating becomes more severe. Laundromats don't necessarily have the best Wi-Fi, so
→What did athletics teach Will about being a founder?
Will sees "a very strong correlation between professional athlete and founders" — traits like ultra endurance, "dealing with situations that you might not be able to control," and "working almost delu
→What did the first version of Heaps Normal beer taste like?
Andy's co-founder Benny brewed the first versions of the XPA in his kitchen using old long neck beer bottles and a domestic kettle. It was very low-fi — the equipment couldn't get it completely non-al
→What did the first version of VibeFlow look like?
It was VibeFlow without AI, built within a month. People could import their UIs from tools like Lovable and then "build the backend manually with this drag and drop interface" — "there was no AI invol
→What does "the messy middle" feel like for a founder?
Shakeel calls it "the void" — the 6–7 months after both founders quit their jobs but before they'd committed to an idea. Constant pitching of ideas to each other. Frameworks that didn't work. Two co-f
→What does Affil.ai actually do?
Affil.ai builds AI compliance for financial affiliate marketing. As John explains, "we help companies basically make sure that everything that they write about is meeting credit card marketing guideli
→What does Fluency mean by a "work ontology"?
An ontology, in Finnlay's words, is "just like a tech word for a queryable graph" of "nodes and edges" — built over time, "non-monotonic" so "the present can affect the past." Fluency's has three laye
→What does it mean to "sell before you build"?
It's the YC mantra John says reworked his mind: "the best thing is just always to launch, put yourself out there, see, sell before you build, see who's actually like interested in your product before
→What does Keeyu's "wow of the week" mean?
It's a ritual Tyler, the co-founder and CEO, runs with the engineering team. Every engineer joins one 15-minute customer product call a week, hears something, then goes off to solve "a really small li
→What does Nhi believe needs to change for more people in Vietnam to invest?
Three game changers: financial literacy, regulation and trust, and a mindset shift. Nhi says a lot of people don't invest because they don't know where to start, that stronger regulations would bring
→What does Satya miss about working at a big company?
The people — the co-workers — and the chance to work with incredible folks again, whether by hiring them or working with them in his own company. But once you start building your own company, Satya sa
→What does Shakeel mean by "frameworks don't find markets"?
The consulting reflex of building decision trees and ranked criteria to identify the "right" market sharpens thinking but doesn't surface real opportunity. 2-3 months of frameworks produced no market.
→What does the "verbs not nouns" idea mean to Hamish McKay?
Hamish references an Oscar Wilde quote he loves — that "we're verbs not nouns" — meaning you should never describe yourself as, for example, "I'm a founder." Instead it's "I'm just doing the founder t
→What does Y Combinator actually get you — the badge, the network, or the mentorship?
Both founders pick the network. Alessia: "for me it's definitely the network... everyone wants to help each other, so that's the biggest value." Elia agrees, noting "their logo badge YC is crazy" but
→What early mistake did Jevon make building Keeyu?
Chasing product-led growth, Jevon built a light version of Keeyu as a Shopify app that didn't include all the integrations — on advice that the big Shopify ecosystem would make it "just explode." It d
→What has building Fluency cost Finnlay personally?
He lists his "skateboarding ability," "mountain biking ability," and "a more extended friend network" — but says the "number one cost to be honest" is "time with family." He misses his family, his bro
→What inspired Nhi to start MaiMoney?
Two things. First, her own experience navigating personal finance across Vietnam and Australia — realizing that despite studying finance, she didn't truly understand how to plan for her long-term fina
→What is "John Gpt"?
"John Gpt" is what the founders called John manually pretending to be the AI for their first customer. There was "no actual product" — "we only built the front end" with "no actual like AI or anything
→What is a "world model" and why is Fluency building one?
Where an LLM "predicts the next sentence, word, what's called a token," a world model "uses the same architecture to predict the next most likely event." For Fluency it represents "how work gets done
→What is a wallet led marketing platform?
Brian Pham describes Litecard as a "wallet led marketing platform and wallet, meaning Apple and Google Wallet" — the wallets people use every day for bank cards and boarding passes, repurposed as a me
→What is AIducation, Hung Bui's learning platform?
Introduced as Vietnam's first AI powered learning platform, built by Vietnamese for Vietnamese. Hung describes it as an all in one personalized platform that takes the student as the core and builds t
→What is Butter?
Butter is the app to hang out with new friends. It helps young adults find and build friendships by connecting over social plans — think weeknight dinners, going for a run, grabbing a coffee — and its
→What is co-founder matching like at EF and YC?
Elia calls it "one of the most important process in a startup." At EF in Paris "they celebrate break up" so you don't lose time — he met around 60 people in three days. The YC co-founder matching plat
→What is Dime?
Dime is a marketing platform founded by Abby Huang that connects brands and Gen Z consumers through a network of student ambassadors, data-driven campaigns, and in-person events. It has worked with br
→What is Fluency?
Fluency is "a platform that maps how work actually happens in Fortune 500 organizations." It gets deployed onto everyone's laptop, takes screenshots, scrapes system and network logs, and builds a "wor
→What is gymii.ai and what problem does it solve?
gymii is "an AI powered consumer app, that has the goal of making nutrition tracking easy and social." Instead of manually logging food, you take a photo or snap a video of a meal and the AI breaks it
→What is Hamish McKay's most controversial startup hot take?
"Fuck growing to be as big as possible" — for certain people. Hamish's point is that different types of people want different types of businesses, and people should build businesses that they want to
→What is Keeyu and what problem does it solve?
Keeyu is "an AI powered platform for proactive post purchase ecom ops." When a shopper hits buy, there's angst that the order won't arrive on time as promised — and normally "the brand doesn't know so
→What is Known and what does Celeste Amadon mean by "intelligence for human connection"?
Known is a dating product Celeste co-founded with Asher; she introduces herself as "the co founder and CEO of known, where we're building intelligence for human connection." Instead of swiping, Known
→What is MaiMoney and what problem does it solve?
MaiMoney is a fintech platform in Vietnam that gives everyday investors access to wholesale investment products and the technology to grow their wealth. Nhi's framing: "we want to bridge the gap by ma
→What is Order Editing?
Order Editing is a software company that online shoppers use to make changes to their order after they buy something online, while online retailers pay a monthly subscription to use the software. Hami
→What is Paire?
Paire is a sustainable apparel brand co-founded by Nathan Yun that "uses material science to create clothes that are comfortable, functional and sustainable." It started with socks and is now "more of
→What is Phonely and what problem does it solve?
Phonely lets you "answer your phone with AI that talks exactly like a person." If you have a receptionist or use a call center, Will says Phonely can automate "about 80 or 90%" of those workflows and
→What is Reforge Labs, Robert's new startup?
After Nook, Robert took another swing with a new co-founder, Oscar, building Reforge Labs — which builds performance marketing agents: an AI data analyst that sifts through performance and marketing d
→What is Sam's long-term vision for Butter?
Sam wants to create a world where every in-person interaction is built on Butter — so that no matter where you went or what you did, you could always find the community you wanted. He believes that un
→What is Sisterwould and what makes it different?
Sisterwould is a premium hair care brand, scientifically formulated with skincare ingredients for your hair and scalp, and an inclusive beauty brand whose products carry Braille and a tactile imprinti
→What is StrongRoom's next big move?
Joe says the next big move is to make no moves at all. He believes it's more important to know which market you're not going to enter than which one you are — so you'll see StrongRoom pull out of a bu
→What is the best advice Brian Pham ever received?
"Never go to sleep curious." Brian got it from an Apple executive he'd built a relationship with over 6 to 12 months of email and LinkedIn — advice he asked for from someone with "decades in the indus
→What is the best place to start a business in 2025?
Brian's answer is Silicon Valley. Asked for the best place to start a business in 2025, he said "Australia was a close second to be honest," but "it seems like Silicon Valley is the closest you are to
→What is the half-sentence pitch test?
If your proposition is sharp enough, someone will want to buy before you've finished describing the product. Shakeel hit this around the tail of the 800-conversation period.
→What is the most misunderstood thing about what Joe did?
That he bought it to flip it. Joe says a lot of people — especially private equity people and investors — assumed he'd turn around and flip it in 18 months. But that "has not even once crossed my mind
→What is the most valuable lesson Floriye learned as a founder?
That she wishes she'd known about founder stories, podcasts, communities and mentoring before she started — instead of just learning along the way. She and Rina got mentoring, joined communities, did
→What is the most valuable lesson Hung Bui learned as a founder?
That each of us has a different version of reality, and he was so immersed in his own that he never got a reality check on whether others would want his product. "It took me a year to fix that mistake
→What is Umami Papi?
Umami Papi is Australia's cult chili oil brand, founded by Ethan Yong. The name is a play on words — umami is a Japanese word for flavour and Papi is a Spanish word for father figure, so put together
→What makes Phonely different from other voice AI companies?
Will names three things: "two and a half years of battle scars of just obsessing over one problem," a PhD background that lets them build, train and optimize their own models, and being opinionated so
→What should I think about before moving abroad to a new country?
Stephen treats it as "a two way door" — usually reversible, so trust your intuition early (you can sense your trajectory in a city within a few months). His strongest practical advice: throw parties a
→What surprised Andy Miller most about Heaps Normal's customers?
They were really blown away to learn that Heaps Normal was the best selling beer — out of all beers, inclusive of alcoholic and non alcoholic — at some of their favourite bars in Sydney and Melbourne
→What traction has Known seen so far?
Celeste won't share live numbers, but says in Known's beta — "back in the late summer and early fall of 2025" — they set up "around 1,500 dates" and "know of a couple hundred couples that are dating."
→What warning signs tell you it's time to pivot, not patch?
For Hung, two tickers signalled a deeper problem. First, even though users signed up, "there was basically no activities on the platform." Second, there were no paying users, and a monthly active numb
→What was Celeste Amadon's Marina Green fundraising moment?
While "walking along the Marina Green with a potential investor" during her raise, a woman grabbed Celeste by the wrist and said "you don't know me but I know you because you set me up with my boyfrie
→What was Hung Bui's first startup before AIducation?
It was called Personal AI and it focused on the mental side — a service that let you talk to AI pals or friends, similar to character AI at the time, aimed at a new generation who prefer to talk to th
→What was it like cooking for Gordon Ramsay?
Ethan was a contestant on Gordon Ramsay's Food Star. He calls it one of the most real experiences for him — being in the kitchen, cooking for Gordon Ramsay, and having him critique his food. Ramsay sa
→What was Robert's biggest regret with Nook?
Not pivoting sooner. Robert looks back fondly on the impact Nook made and the team he upskilled, but says "My biggest regret was probably not pivoting sooner."
→What was the Brisbane conference moment for Marloo?
A week before the Financial Advice Association of Australia conference at the end of 2024, Shakeel and Hardy vibe-coded a working Marloo demo. They paid for an exhibitor stand. Financial advisors trie
→What was the funniest robot failure during training?
At a real restaurant you get a stack of napkins to fold one by one. Early on the robot would pull out many napkins from the stack at once, making a big mess on the table when it was only supposed to f
→What was the hardest day Nam remembers as a founder?
Fundraising the pre-seed in January in Poland — cold, getting "a lot of nose back to back," and up against a deadline from his parents that he'd have to go back to school if nothing happened. Nam says
→What was the moment Floriye thought the business might break?
It was the Covid pandemic combined with the bottles collapsing. There was "so much fear in starting a business," and as the bottles were failing Floriye asked herself "am I meant to start this." Her w
→What was their most rewarding moment building the company?
On the way to a Christmas gathering in Pennsylvania, Elan stopped at a huge co-manufacturer for a factory tour. After she left, two young women who run the social accounts of competing yogurt brands r
→What were the biggest challenges building MaiMoney?
Nhi names three: building trust in the fintech and financial services space in Vietnam, bridging the gap between traditional finance and technology, and scaling. She says products like managed funds w
→What would Brian Pham do differently if he started Litecard again?
Study the data faster. Brian says "if I was to do it all over again, I would decide and study the data faster" — instead of getting excited about the technology first and figuring out the data later,
→What would Floriye text her day-one self in one sentence?
She would tell her day-one self: "I'm really proud of you and don't be scared and keep going." Floriye says she's now in a place she would never have dreamed of when she started three or four years ag
→What's it like to build a medium sized company on purpose?
Both Hamish and his co-founder Carol decided before they started the business that they were going to grow what could only be described as a medium sized company — there was no ambition to build a mas
→What's next for MaiMoney in 2025?
Nhi says 2025 is about scaling the platform: introducing goal-based investing features for life goals like a wedding, buying a house, or retirement; working with more fund managers to originate more p
→What's next for Umami Papi?
A hot honey. Ethan describes it as a spicy honey made from Australian honey — "salted caramel meets sweet chilli." By the time the episode airs it's likely already at Coles, or at least online.
→What's one brutal startup lesson Nathan Yun learned?
Nathan tried to be well-equipped by listening to startup podcasts to learn from "other people's mistakes," but found "there's always gonna be challenges out of expectation." His honest take: if he wen
→What's one underrated piece of advice for starting a consumer brand?
"Be naive — your naivety is your superpower." Ethan says this because in the early days you have no idea about risk, and that lets you just do things. Now he's "way too calculated," thinking about foo
→What's Sam's advice on choosing a long-term partner?
Make a list of your non-negotiables — on a values-driven level, based on the life you want and the type of partner who fits it, not surface traits like being tall or attractive. After being single for
→What's Sam's advice on making and keeping friends?
"It really is an effort thing." Sam says a lot of people wish they had more or deeper friends but won't actually take the steps — putting in the time, organizing the catch-ups again, talking to people
→What's the advice for getting into a competitive AI research lab?
Show you can do the work — but not for them yet. Nam cold-emailed Dr. Megan Ma at the Stanford lab, and by the time she responded he already had something to show. Don't ask for 15 minutes to "pick yo
→What's the biggest mistake first-time founders make with money and product?
Being a perfectionist. Vivek's most valuable lesson is "just not being a perfectionist" — they "took too long to launch" chasing a perfect story and a perfect product. On money, "money is everywhere,
→What's the danger of chasing traction?
Traction can mask a broken business. Robert's team felt like they were "actually moving" because of user and revenue growth, but the real problem was burn rate and profitability — hidden costs and shr
→What's the difference between an ambassador and an influencer?
Abby prefers the word "ambassador" because the term "influencer" gets tossed around now in a way it wasn't meant to be used initially. A brand ambassador can be an influencer or a micro-influencer, bu
→What's the difference between investing in Australia and Vietnam?
Nhi points to the superannuation system. In Australia, employers put a portion of an employee's salary into managed funds, so even if you're not actively investing you're building wealth in the backgr
→What's the difference between making consumer products and commercial products?
Consumer products demand design, marketing, user research and testing because people see them as an extension of themselves. Commercial products can be much more functionally driven — less marketing,
→What's the downside of building your startup so publicly?
Two downsides: perception and a personal toll. People think Sourmilk is "a lot further along than we are" and ask where they can buy it, when most brands aren't in grocery stores for at least their fi
→What's the hardest lesson about moving from research to founder?
That building a startup is actually quite hard — Jason says it's been a year and it's definitely harder than his research for his PhD. In a PhD he was minding his own research; for a company building
→What's the hardest part of building a company?
For Ben, the hardest challenge is maintaining mental balance — the emotional fluctuations of starting a business without a business or design background, and being with your co-founder 50 to 60 hours
→What's the hardest part of expanding a consumer brand to new countries?
According to Ethan, it's not as simple as sending a bunch of pallets over to the supermarket and letting it sell itself. In a new market people don't know your brand, so you have to invest time and mo
→What's the most important lesson from building a startup?
Three answers: Hanson said "being patient and not losing hope"; Phung said "Progression over perfection... especially being the person creating the content"; and Daniel said "embarrassment is the cost
→What's the most valuable lesson Satya learned as a founder?
That startup advice is true, but only in certain contexts — people miss that asterisk. Satya's takeaway is to take everything with a pinch of salt, lean more on his own intuition, and have the courage
→What's the most valuable lesson they learned as founders?
Stay connected to customers and do things that don't scale. Alessia warns against "trying to achieve perfection on your product on your own without being connected to your customers." Elia: "solve a p
→What's the one piece of advice Stephen would give his younger self?
"You should lean into the things that create a sense of belonging in the place you are." For Stephen, that meant doing stand-up comedy in Vietnamese — which rooted him to Saigon and changed his life a
→What's the one thing Finnlay would do differently?
Going back to the "2023 Swinber accelerator days," his answer is agency: "you can be like super ambitious from day one and you can just do things... agency is so powerful to just like do." Just try an
→What's the secured-debt play for buying a company out of administration?
Joe's loose plan was to buy the secured debt and become a secured creditor, which let him see everyone's bids and use that position to make a higher bid and negotiate. As he puts it, it was "a not a v
→What's your advice for creatives who don't see themselves as business-minded?
Ben — who says he doesn't have Twitter and is "basically me in a nutshell" on this — advises going straight to the founders doing analogous, similar things and learning from them, rather than only rel
→When should a non-technical founder go back to school for the skill?
Selina taught herself enough to ship the gymii MVP in two months, but she's "doing a master's in computer science now" because she wants "a stronger technical foundation." Her stance: traditional CS e
→Where did the idea for gymii come from?
Selina has been a competitive golfer for 16 years, playing from the age of seven through college, so nutrition always mattered for performance. She'd tried tracking but found it "such a cumbersome exp
→Where did the idea for Keeyu come from?
At the start of Covid in 2020 everything shifted online, and a brand Jevon was at ran a big online warehouse sale. The storefront stopped syncing orders with the warehouse, so when the dust settled tw
→Who is Finnlay Morcombe?
Finnlay Morcombe is one of the co-founders of Fluency, the platform that maps how work actually happens in Fortune 500 organizations. He and co-founder Ollie are self-taught devs from Melbourne who re
→Why are high-performance technical textiles so hard to recycle?
Because the properties that make them perform — like a tent that's both strong and waterproof — come from fusing materials together. A canvas tent base is cotton coated on the inside with PVC, a plast
→Why are they betting on dairy yogurt now when alternatives took over?
Their bet: "people still care about protein, but now they're caring a lot more about gut health." The industry, led by Chobani, trained consumers to ask "how much protein is in your yogurt?" — Sourmil
→Why are they building their yogurt brand in public?
Because Sourmilk is a perishable dairy product on cold chain, they can't follow the usual CPG playbook of making product first and selling later — they have to create demand before production. Buildin
→Why build research and product at the same time?
Jason's two-sentence pitch for why Dyna is different: they do both the research and the product, and the best way to succeed is to build research and product at the same time. The feedback loop from p
→Why build robots for everyday tasks instead of humanoids?
Jason's belief is that humanoid robots as hardware aren't currently mature and are way too expensive, while the real bottleneck for useful robots is AI and software. So Dyna first focused on off-the-s
→Why did Abby Huang start working with Casetify?
Larger brand deals like Casetify came after Dime found more of a product-market fit, having tested and iterated with smaller brands at low cost. Casetify was founded in Abby's hometown, so she had a p
→Why did Hamish McKay build Order Editing in public?
When Hamish decided he wanted to be a founder at 20, one of the first things he did was start posting on LinkedIn — before he had a company — because he thought it would increase his likelihood of bec
→Why did Heaps Normal become a B Corp from the beginning?
Andy believes "all business should be a force for good" — giving back to the consumers and communities they draw value from — and that this should be normal, not celebrated as unique. They built the b
→Why did Heaps Normal launch during the pandemic, and how did it survive?
Heaps Normal launched in the thick of the pandemic — Andy says "we were shitting ourselves." One journalist summed it up as launching a summer beer style in the middle of winter, with an unknown brand
→Why did Litecard open its first European office in Amsterdam?
Because partners and customers were already in the region and Europe was too large to serve remotely. Brian says "the reason why we went into the European market is because we had partners and custome
→Why did Nam decide to start with lawyers as the first market?
Nam and his co-founder had a research background at a law school, so they came in with relationships and credibility already, and trust was built organically. Law is "low leverage and entirely people
→Why did Nook's home renovation idea fail in Vietnam?
Nook started as a copycat of US home renovation startups like "block renovation," assuming that bringing the exact same thing to Vietnam would work. It didn't — in Vietnam, like China, houses are buil
→Why did Sam build Butter?
Sam moved cities six times from his late teens up until his mid-20s, and every time he'd start from scratch — rebuild a community, build a social life, then up and move again. He found that consistent
→Why did Stephen Turban start Lumiere in the first place?
Not as a grand mission — he wanted to quit his Harvard PhD but didn't know how, and figured it would be "really awkward if I don't have something else to do." A working company would give him "a choic
→Why do real estate, gold and bank deposits dominate investing in Vietnam?
Nhi says these three are the main financial products in Vietnam — but each falls short. Real estate is seen as safe but is very capital intensive and not accessible for the everyday investor; gold pre
→Why do startups die — and what should they focus on instead?
Joe says the biggest reason is trying to do too many things. StrongRoom had seven products with only about eight engineers left, scaling horizontally and vertically at the same time and pushing into t
→Why does Celeste Amadon call dating "a political problem"?
Celeste, who began her career in politics, says "dating is an inherently political problem" — she ties it to the loneliness epidemic, noting people now spend "30% less of our lifetime with other peopl
→Why does Celeste Amadon say dating apps are "perversely incentivized" to keep you single?
Celeste argues today's dating apps "have been designed and tweaked and redesigned and redeployed to keep you single" — they are "perversely incentivized to try and keep people on the apps for longer"
→Why does distribution matter more than the product itself?
Hung argues that with the cost of development now cheap and code easy to deploy, distribution, brand and image are what's fundamentally important. He points to Fireflies AI — founded by two students f
→Why does Dyna build the robot arm and the AI together?
Jason argues physical AI is extremely hard, and pushing real-world performance is a matter of both software and hardware. If your hardware always breaks you can't run an AI model on the robot for 24 h
→Why does getting your first investor make fundraising harder, not easier?
Nate found that contrary to what people think, getting the first investor doesn't make the rest follow — it almost doubles your pressure. Once you've secured, say, 300 K against a 750 target, you don'
→Why does Litecard sell to agencies instead of just brands?
Because the brands often aren't the ones executing their own marketing. Brian says "a lot of the times, maybe the brand and the retailers aren't even executing their own strategy. It's the agencies th
→Why does Nathan Yun say DTC doesn't mean online?
Nathan's reflection is that "DTC doesn't really make sense. It just means direct to consumer. It doesn't mean online." It means cutting out the middleman to get customers the best price — which is exa
→Why does Sam launch to a narrow, specific audience first?
Disconnection is a huge problem that targets a massive market, but Sam believes it's important when you first launch to figure out who would be most inclined to use the product immediately, so you hav
→Why does Sisterwould put Braille on its packaging?
Because there are 2.2 billion people who suffer from blind and visual impairments, and only 15% of them can actually read Braille. So Sisterwould included Braille but also added its own tactile system
→Why does Stephen Turban post deliberately controversial content?
Because, as he puts it, "attention's king so once you have attention then after attention you can have everything else." People are bored; most content is boring; being interesting and authentic earns
→Why doesn't VibeFlow let AI touch the raw code directly?
Because reliability. You iterate with the AI on the logic with a visual feedback, and "once you agree with the AI of what you want to build... the code is generated deterministically." That avoids the
→Why is Australia a good place to test a startup?
Brian says Australia "has been a release point for a lot of us and UK based companies," Apple and Google Wallet's latest releases "after the US come to Australia first, like a majority of the time," a
→Why is being a non-technical commercial founder a superpower?
For a B2C product, Sam says it's a distribution game — so coming in as a commercial founder with a content and brand-marketing background gave him the upper hand. He could figure out how to deliver, p
→Why is folding laundry so hard for a robot?
Traditionally robots are automation tools you pre-program with an exact sequence of motions, like packaging items into a box. But clothes are deformable — the shapes are always different and not in ri
→Why is most conventional yogurt not actually probiotic?
Elan learned that "when I looked at conventional yogurt on the shelf... most of it isn't actually probiotic." Many yogurts pasteurize after they ferment, which "kills off all the bacteria," and the st
→Why pick a hard problem to work on?
Will says he "got lucky at how challenging of a problem it was to solve," because "it's always good when you find a hard problem" — "that means that people will pay a lot of money to get it right."
→Why should founders keep investors who said no engaged?
Nate keeps everyone who said no on the current investor updates. Many were pre-revenue passes or wrong-stage passes, and a lot have come back to congratulate the team on its growth — relationships he
→Why was Keeyu's first version "a vitamin, not a painkiller"?
The first version was a centralized platform that brought together all the ecommerce systems that manage an order to detect issues — but as Jevon says, it "turned out that that was a vitamin for retai
→Why was the 24-hour napkin test such a breakthrough?
Most robot demos are very brittle — it takes many shots to get even one video that works, and prior works often hit only 70% or 80% success. Dyna shot a 24-hour video of a robot folding nearly 800 nap
→Why would you buy a company that's in the middle of a public scandal?
Joe says that's a question he still asks himself. He had zero plans of buying it until probably two days before the administrators were trying to make a decision — but as a healthcare professional, ta
→Why would you start a fashion brand with socks?
Nathan called socks "literally the least interesting item in fashion," but he picked them because the slipping-ankle-sock problem kept reminding him, it's a very low-cost and overlooked item, and "a g
→Will XiaoHongShu (Red Note) last in the US market?
Abby doesn't see XiaoHongShu fully integrating into the US, and doesn't think it ever could because of all the restrictions, the risks, and the Chinese government. For very US-based brands, XiaoHongSh
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