Auren Hoffman Quotes

The most important thing about data, which people often forget, is that it has to be true.
Truth beats everything.

You can’t build a good model with data that is just 65% accurate

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.

CEOs still need to do lots of cold outbound
... until at least $100M ARR

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime ...
unless he doesn't like sushi, then you also have to teach him to cook.

The easier it is to join data, the more data will be transacted, moved, and used.

HR isn’t about compliance.
It’s about great capital allocation

One of the best things about the rain is that you find out where all the leaks are in your home

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

Hire people for things you are good at.
This way, you’ll know exactly what to look for in a candidate AND be able to evaluate that candidate’s work meaningfully.

EQ is SUPER important if you want to climb the corporate ladder.
EQ is much less important if you want to found a company.

Great data companies look like the ugly child of a SaaS company (like Salesforce) and a compute service (like AWS).

DaaS companies have their own unique lineage, lingo, operational cadence, and more. They are an odd duck in the tech pond.

traditionally monopolies' products do not improve much. and competition forces products to be better.

today, the opposite is happening.
high-competition spaces (like universities) are getting worse. low-competition spaces (like Amazon, Apple, Google) are getting better.

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.

Most people think low-EQ people are robots (just cost-benefit weighing machines) that don’t care as much about other humans.

But there does not seem to be any correlation between EQ and actually caring deeply about others. High-EQ people are just better at showing they care.

the easiest way to increase data’s value is by linking it together.