Systems thinking beats linear execution

Can this be a big company with that name? At some point, can it be as big as we want it to be, as we think it can be with that name?

You're never for sale. In fact, you have seduced a buyer. They see the fantasy, they fall in love.

We would have a conversation with founders, you're saying like, 'Gosh, I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but who exactly is your target customer?' And three co-founders have three different answers.

Don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users.

One philosophical thing that's important is that we want all of humanity to participate and sometimes people are surprised by that. We have all of humanity. We then have the data to understand what notes will be helpful to actual humanity.

Community Notes adds additional context. It's not fact-checking necessarily, right? So there are cases where the post could be true. But maybe, it's just misleading because there there's no context or there's missing context.

We have the philosophy that users should be able to make up their own minds, right? Like, 'Here's extra context, take it or leave it,' right?

I think one reason perhaps the product has done so well and survived is the nature of the product itself. It is designed to produce information that is found helpful by people who normally disagree. And so even if you have CEOs or leaders who might disagree, there's a good chance actually they'll find it helpful.

Founder led sales is not about revenue on day one. It is about learning as fast as humanly possible to get to that pulse, so that you can earn the right to sell.

For me, I think of it as any function that is going to touch a customer or make a dollar, and actually my remit at Vercel is that, so that includes marketing, sales, all of your technical sales roles like sales engineers or post-sales platform architects is what we call them at Vercel. It's customer success, it's support, it's partnerships.

I love working at well-run companies. It's more fun, your people are happier... But what I've seen is when a company isn't well run like IT isn't working, marketing is broken, there are not enough people in HR, there's a lot of turnover. All of these things I've seen that they're not correlated to the company being successful.

A lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. It didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people, let's really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friends.