Auren Hoffman Quotes

when someone tells you "no one's ever lost money doing X," that's usually a sure sign someone's about to lose money doing X

When people around you know that you have low-EQ, they can help you help them.

Low-EQ leaders can mitigate frustration by being explicit about their low-EQ (and that they are unlikely to pick up on non-verbal cues).

one of the most satisfying things in life is marking a Jira ticket as DONE

one simple way to measure the health of a society: track the % of people that have a good relationship with their parents
(the higher the better ... though Laffer curve here too if we ever hit it)

the best thing you can do in a complex organization is work on making it simpler. the easiest way to do that is to reduce the number of white-collar employees. fewer full-time employees means decisions can be made much faster.

anything wrote or recurring can be done with APIs, software, or contractors (that you can treat as APIs).

any massive expertise can be rented — you can always rent the world-class expert but you usually cannot hire her. you only need employees for the most strategic parts of the business. most businesses can cut between 50-80% of the people making $80k or more.

the analogies of businesses to sports teams are wrong on so many levels. sports teams are capped. businesses are uncapped.
businesses are more like the NBA than an individual basketball team.

Scientists think from first principles ...
Founders think from last principles

the second-worst dinners are fundraisers and the WORST dinners are fancy auctions
— do everything possible to avoid those dinners

too much introspection is very harmful
the more time you spend thinking about yourself, the less happy you are.
simple solution: spend more time thinking about other people.

now: bots pretending to be humans
soon: humans pretending to be bots

The total number of salespeople in the world will never, ever, be greater than it was in 2021 (the peak)

2021 was the high point for people employed in sales around the world. since then layoffs and now AI mean the total number of sales people going forward will ALWAYS be lower than 2021

Price is important.
It is doubtful the meter would have taken over the world if Napoleon decided to charge a small tax every time the meter was used.

venture capital is actually team sport.
the Midas Award goes to a person, not a firm. that’s insane and will change.

never higher someone that has "Senior Architect" as their current title into your start-up

determining data quality takes a lot of work ... and that really slows down the data sales process.

one area most data companies can do a better job in is transparency. most data companies don't even publicly publish their schema, their fill rates, or have an open docs site. that is going to be table-stakes for having a data company in the future.