Auren Hoffman Quotes

bots aren’t a technical problem.
so many sites (including X) have the ability to get rid of them, but no real incentive to to do so

the most valuable seed investors are the ones doling out AWS credits like candy

as you get older, the amount of the known gets smaller

What kind of people make the best startup founders?

my thought: People that follow 35% of the rules.

We all know that people that follow 100% of the rules make terrible founders … as the rules are often wrong and inhibit innovation.

But people that follow 0% of the rules also make bad founders. those people really live outside society.

Great founders know which of the rules are super important to follow and which rules are ok to break.

Low-EQ leaders need to rely on emotional translators. They can entrust other high-EQ executives with translation and interpretation. They can tell you when someone does X, they really mean Y.

if someone gives you advice to not take their advice ...
you end up stuck in a recursive loop.

one of the most frustrating things is seeing people that clearly are not reaching potential because they are not working hard enough

Advice for standing out as a hire:
(1) Manage your manager
(2) Push your manager to go faster
(3) Do what you say you are going to do
(4) Never let people wait for you

This will make you indispensable because 99% of people don’t do this

From running a data company and investing in dozens of data companies, here are some learnings about data businesses that I wish I knew 6 years ago:

Data businesses are MUCH harder than I thought
* There are often only a small number of buyers
* Data businesses can be SUPER competitive
* Can take a lot of dev infrastructure which can be costly — it is a fixed cost but costly nevertheless
* If you are a horizontal data business (selling to many industries), you never are great for any one industry
* Just because you get to $10M ARR, doesn’t meant mean you have REAL product-market-fit

Being too religious is only good when you are right
If you are right, you get to go to heaven. But if you are wrong, you need to jettison your old beliefs.

Working at a data company is like being an archivist at the Library of Congress.
You know your job is important but you also know it is a supporting role that helps other people shine.
you don’t write the Constitution, but you help preserve it.

remote works well from 1 to N
remote is super hard from zero to 1

the more join keys, the more valuable to dataset

If you are an investor and you are trying to value a dataset, the easiest thing you can do is first recognize how many join keys there are in this dataset that can allow end-users to bring in additional data.

All successful people push others to move faster. That is the main common trait of successful people.

99% of people want to start a company
but just 1% of people really want to run a company

there is no need to have completely uniform HR practices across your company.
each department (eng, marketing, sales, etc.) can be its own mini lab to run experiments … and when they work well, you can roll them out to the entire company