Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do.

- He didn’t focus on launching an MVP.
- He ignored early market feedback.
- He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years.

And it worked.

He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since.

Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation.

Why you should listen:
- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvind Jain does things differently at the 0 to 1 stage.
- Why he thinks conviction and persistence are the most important qualities founders need.
- When you should follow playbooks and when to write your own.
- Why it might not matter that most people don't "get" your idea in the early days.

Timestamps:
(2:02) Leaving Google
(3:39) Coming up with Glean
(7:47) Building a Product in a Neglected Space
(11:38) Skipping Lean Startup
(14:11) Using design partners
(16:13) Building for 2 years, with 0 revenue
(20:13) When it's time to launch
(21:12) Why AI was a key tailwind
(26:25) Finding Product Market Fit on Day One
(27:32) One Piece of Advice

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.

In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit.

Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M valuation (!!).

He shares his four-part B2C framework that helped him understand why Evan and Snap were special before anyone else.

If you want to understand why Snapchat took off when so many other consumer startups fail to do so, check this episode out.

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M.

But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him.

So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk.

If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.

While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years.

He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel.

Just this week, Assembly launched Universal-1, their most powerful speech recognition model to date. Trained on over 12.5 million hours of multilingual audio data, Universal-1 is 22% more accurate than APIs from Azure/AWS/Google and has 30% fewer hallucinations than competing models.

In this episode, we go through how Dylan came up with the idea, how he saw Gen AI coming long before others, and what he did in the early days to grow to $1M in ARR.

Andrew is the founder/CEO of Enable. And he is riding a rocket ship:
2020: $17M Series A
2021: $45M Series B
2022: $94M Series C
A few months ago he raised $120M at a $1B valuation.

But it took him five years from the time he started Enable in 2015 until he was able to raise his first round in 2020.

Andrew was running a profitable development shop as he built the first version of Enable. He often had to chase down customers so he could make the next payroll. He had to balance serving existing customers while building an entirely new startup. Ultimately, he had to move to SF to raise a round and accelerate growth.

We go through the details of how Andrew turned a 'boring' enterprise software company from the UK into one of America's hottest new unicorns.

Alex started Apt2B in 2010. He sold couches online before IKEA did. It took him over 3 years to make as much money as he used to as a furniture salesperson. But it paid off. After growing the business to $6M in revenue, he sold the company.

Post-acquisition he grew the company to $40M in sales. In this episode, we dive deep into what Alex did to get started, how he closed his first few customers and what he did to grow to $1M in revenue.

From landing a Super Bowl ad to selling couches at Costco, this episode is full of sales and marketing anecdotes you can steal. You don't want to miss it.

Following the sale, Alex is now back at it as the founder and CEO of couch.com, a platform to help people find great furniture.

Every founder wants to build the next $1B+ company. So it’s normal to get inspired by what companies like Apple, Shopify and Microsoft do. But it’s also a huge mistake.

In this episode, we look at what Shopfiy, Fullscript and Spellbook did to find product-market fit. In many ways, it’s the opposite of what they do now, as big succesful companies.

Big companies are operating in a post-product-market fit world. Pre-product-market fit startups are in a different world entirely.

The same rules don’t apply.

Spellbook is ChatGPT for lawyers. They've raised $30M in the last 6 months. They now have over 2,000 law firms as customers. But it wasn't a straight line-- it took Scott 6 years to get here.

For the first 5 years, Scott worked on a legal tech platform called Rally. During that time, Scott along with his co-founders and their small team ran hundreds of experiments, pushed dozens of landing pages and built a process to test feature after feature.

In this episode, Scott goes through his process to test product-market fit. It was because of this process that he was able to jump on the AI-enabled opportunity and grow 12x in one year.