literally no one has been able to explain this to me.

nobody will remember: - your salary - how “busy you were” - how many hours you worked people will remember: - if you hopped on a quick call - when you hopped on a quick call - how many quick calls you hopped on - how you made them feel when you hopped on a quick call

what you think matters in a career: - working hard - showing up early - keeping a long-term view what ACTUALLY matters: - hopping on a quick call - how many quick calls you hopped on - how fast you were able to hop on a quick call

you have got to be kidding me

mr. beast says he plans to make 30 people use microsoft teams for 1 whole calendar year, with the last person standing taking home $1 million

"yeah let me run it by my legal team real quick" my legal team:

amazon's hybrid work policy, explained:

PARENTS: please check your kid's candy this halloween - i just found a 12-month enterprise salesforce contract for 15 seats with auto-renewal and a $50,000 early breakup fee inside this snickers bar

you say you're "dedicated" to your startup are you dedicated enough to spend 15 years training a shark to chew the undersea data cable of your biggest competitor? or are you an armchair founder?

PARENTS: please check your kid's candy this halloween - i just found an 18-month enterprise salesforce contract with AI features and a $100k early breakup fee inside this snickers bar

"yeah let me ask my doctor real quick"

you know the drill!

he died doing what he loved: shifting paradigms across scalable B2B SaaS and picking low-hanging fruit with seamless integration for key stakeholders

1. company raises $1mm in funding 2. coincidentally, other company raises $1mm in funding 3. they each sign $1mm contracts with each other 4. both are now at $1mm arr 5. both raise $10mm at $100mm 6. repeat the process from step 3 until your revenue is $10 trillion 7. acquire microsoft and now you have a $3 trillion revenue-generating business why is no one doing this?

wow TIL

pov you're reading a post that starts with "after 4 incredible years..."

hey everyone, finally launching my side project i built using chatgpt. check it out here: http://localhost:3000

feeling grateful, someone just bought a $437 billion lifetime plan for my ai agent side project 🙏

chat is this real

bestfriEND. boyfriEND. girlfriEND. it all ends. but you know what doesn’t end? an enterprise contract with salesforce rt if u cried

"per my last email" - cliché - too polite - passive-aggressive "for those who lack reading comprehension" - woah - unique - aggressive-aggressive

my credit card once declined for a $20 cursor subscription i closed my laptop in shame, and promised myself no matter what it took - I would never be broke again. 5 years later, i asked chatgpt to build me a cursor competitor with zero errors, and now i make $500k a month. things change fast once you flip that invisible switch of self doubt to the OFF position.

me: “so how'd you get into tech?” founder who took a non- traditional path through stanford, google, stripe, and openai: ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|။|||။|||။၊| 45:37

big day coming up

startup idea: datadog, but for cat people. datadog is a $48b company. there are about 3 dog people for every 2 cat people. using this ratio, we can comfortably assume DataCat would be a $30b startup. who is building this?

founders, i cannot emphasize this enough, do NOT share your startup ideas. i did, and it's cost me $250mm (and counting) the year was 2007 and i was visiting my good friend brian in san francisco i couldn't afford a hotel, so i messaged him: "hey brian chesky, could i crash at your place? i'll buy you a 6-pack of beer for your troubles" fast-forward 18 years...he obviously stole my idea and created airbnb now he's worth like a million dollars, and i look like an idiot don't make the same mistake i did. never visit san francisco

it's the best time to be alive.

cheating in engineering interviews is rampant these days. here's how i make sure it doesn't happen: - camera on, the whole time - participants need to answer questions with their eyes closed (yes, really) - the entire meeting takes place in an open field at an undisclosed location - we blindfold them and spin them around in a circle 100 times to shake the ai microchips out - we'll ask them if they've ever used a computer before - if no, automatic disqualification (too risky) - we ask them 3 logical paradoxes at the start of each interview (if they were ai, they'd be unable to answer them) - we'll fact-check every answer using chatgpt to make sure they're telling the truth sure, each interview takes 72-hours, and we have a 0% acceptance rate. but this is what it takes in 2025.

saas founder maslow's hierarchy of needs

posthog is against remote work. it simply doesn't make sense for us. i have no idea how to build a tv remote. i doubt anyone on our team does. does it involve magnets? maybe. i don't know, and you don't know either we'll stick to product analytics (and working remotely)

If you're thinking about applying - our (successful) @ycombinator application had: i) $0 MRR ii) a product under a week old with no users iii) No previous founder exits and no network in Silicon Valley ... and an idea that we ended up changing once we got in anyway

i'd love to, can we have a prep call to discuss this please

Hello everyone! We’ve got some exciting news to share. We raised a Series E – $75M at $1.4Bn, led by @peakxvpartners with significant participation from existing investors. We can now proudly upgrade our status from unicorn adjacent to unicorn. Most will talk about how they feel humbled at this stage and, let’s face it, even the biggest fans of LinkedIn will glaze over. So, I’m going to tell you a story along these lines instead. I was in San Francisco last week. One evening I’d been at a dinner with a group of other startup founders. Afterwards, I was walking back to my hotel when suddenly, out of the gloomy darkness, probably 100 yards behind me, I heard “JAAAAMES”. If you’ve ever walked along Mission late at night, this meant I was either about to get assaulted, or a high five. I turned around and saw a guy leaning out of his car window. “OH MY GOD NO WAY! IT’S THE POSTHOG GUY. I LOVE POSTHOG!!”. I probably wouldn’t have recognized my mom in those conditions. It really struck me that we’ve always felt supported by our users and fans – we’ve been able to do so much of our work with a smile on our faces. We are very lucky. Either that or our billboards with my face on worked. So, why’d we raise? We are starting Act 2 of PostHog. We are going deeper into being a devtool, not "just" analytics. We will keep improving our existing tools, and adding more of them to generate better insights into how your products are performing, but we're also going to start working on generating pull requests for you. Today, we know that engineers like you start work, and immediately wade through escalated support tickets, Slack, email, whatever customers said in the latest call – often only by the afternoon to start working on new features. We want you to be able to start work, and then immediately see a list of PRs, already made for you automatically based on all the things that popped up since you last logged in. This means for smaller issues, your workflow gets you straight into merging, closing, unblocking, or editing. It doesn’t stop there, though. Once a feature is released, we add things like event tracking, feature flags, experiments and even messages to be sent for feedback, automatically. This is likely to overload my inbox, but if you’re interested in hearing more then email me back. We’ll gradually be releasing the very earliest versions of this to keen early adopters for feedback. On Peak XV Tim and I first came across Peak XV when we saw our friends at Supabase raise from them, then Arnav (someone who has been working with us closely for years) introduced us to Shailendra. We just clicked. Choosing Peak XV was about the people. In every meeting with Shailendra, he has come across as genuine, excitable, and hard working. Peak quickly proved themselves a delight to work with, and when we received an offer from them, we felt they were the best way for us to keep building. And that’s all that really matters to our users. So, on that note, please go back to building your companies! - James, Tim and our spiky little team at PostHog

billionaires are just people that bought the domain then actually did the project

the secret to productivity at big tech companies

just saw the most incredible founder in a pitch meeting. they had cursor open with voice mode enabled as the vcs asked questions and raised objections, they'd update the product in real-time to address their concerns "what happens if openai builds this?" -> add a banner at the bottom of the website politely asking openai NOT to build it "i'd be more excited if you were soc 2 compliant" -> website immediately updates to add a soc 2 badge "any big logos you've signed?" -> boom, homepage now lists google and meta as customers this feels like the future of building. immediate feedback and pivoting. i of course had to invest - this plus the pitch (hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood) was too much to resist bullish on the future of ai

pre-seed startup red flags 🚩🚩🚩🚩 - no chief AI officer - zero viral billboards - doesn't own a .ai domain - founder hasn't appeared on any podcasts - hasn't raised $250mm from late-stage VCs what'd i miss

startup idea: diagonal saas. vertical saas is a $100 billion industry. horizontal saas is a $500 billion industry. each has a lot of competition. competition = bad. but i don't see anyone investing in diagonal saas. and multiplying vertical and horizontal together, we can see a $50 sextillion opportunity waiting to be uncovered. who is building in this space?

startups, you're overthinking your free tier literally make every feature of the product free, with a small catch to use the product, you have to recruit five friends to be users as well and those friends each have to recruit five friends after just 14 layers, you now have all 8 billion people on earth as users launch a $100 paid tier, assume a modest 5% conversation, and boom - a $40 billion arr business thought this up while on a walk today. it's not hard to do this startup thing if you're driven

just had PostHog's first cashflow positive month :)

just saw the craziest founder at the coffee shop: - no chatgpt open - no .ai domain for her startup - actually, i don't think her startup used ai at all - wasn't wearing a patagonia vest or google hoodie - had a simple and clear mission: perform hundreds of medical tests with a single drop of blood people like this still exist, and that gives me hope

oh you're a founder? name everything you've found

we pivoted 5 times in the first 6 months of creating our startup 18k customers later, this is what we learned with each pivot leading up to and including in our @ycombinator batch...

warning: actually non-meme content... @timgl and I jumped on some quick calls and ended up raising a $70 million series D led by Stripe. and of course we decided to announce this with the help of our newly created irl hedgehog Max. see reply for a link to a post on how we’re going to use the $$$, but here’s the tl;dr version: - we'll build even more products, like messaging, support, CRM, a lot more - all the tools + your data + Max AI = shareholder value

me: so, how much money did you make after the acquisition friend: guess me: private jet? friend: more me: malibu mansion? friend: more me: not... friend: that's right. one full year of slack enterprise. cash.

so, a startup gets acquired, and they're vague about the number. here's a cheat sheet: "six-figures" -> exactly $100,000 "mid-seven-figures" -> $3,000,000 and not a cent more "terms were not disclosed" -> investors got paid back, maybe "thrilled to be joining the team" -> an acquihire if there ever was one "combination of cash and stock" -> $100,000 and millions of illiquid rsus none of the above -> sold for ip and a couple herman miller office chairs did i miss anything here

met a founder worth $800mm. he drives a 2012 corolla. lives in a regular house. wears the same shoes every day. said he made his fortune making up stories on the internet. meanwhile, there are founders with $20k in the bank asking chatgpt to make them worth $800mm with zero errors. quiet money is different.

are airfryers just small ovens with big marketing?

i've made over $300 million from angel investments. how? because i have no problem lying on the internet. do things that don't scale

"i can't raise any venture money" proves you're just incompetent 1. create a product with a free trial 2. get one user to sign up (save their credit card details) 3. "accidentally" charge the card for $1 4. take that 1 second of revenue, annualize it, and pitch VCs at $31.5mm arr with low churn 5. profit your problems are just that. problems

you don't become the world's first trillionaire by playing it safe

you get very lucky when you ship a lot

congratulations to the svp of logo design at google who just secured a $7.3mm bonus from this strategic initiative

serious post incoming... i'm kind of obsessed with keeping teams small. the bigger we get, the easier it would be for us to slow down. once momentum is lost, it's lost forever. small teams have been an incredibly effective way for us to avoid this trap. to work, a small team has to: - be genuinely small. 3 to 6 people is ideal. each team should own an area of the company and behave like an early-stage startup. - run itself. they should decide on their own goals, make the final call on what features to ship, own growing revenue for their product, etc. - be flexible. moving people between teams, or creating new ones, should be trivial. no one should feel trapped working on an area of the product that doesn't interest them. small teams aren't without tradeoffs. there will be overlap sometimes, and ownership can be fuzzy, but these are things you can mitigate. the benefit is you create teams that are highly accountable, motivated, and move fast. and here's the best bit.. most of our competitors have 500+ employees but a single one of our small teams isn't competing with a company of 500 people they're competing with a team of 30 people in that company who can't move as fast because of all the bloat and process they deal with this means we can out ship companies that are much larger than us, despite still being relatively small. and we can maintain that advantage as we grow by keeping our teams small.

i have never been so sure something will be so underwhelming

imagine hopping on a quick call at 8:57am right here

okay, wow. i was skeptical, but chatgpt is operating like a full-time employee

winning comment imho

would anyone like to be my mortal enemy? deel/rippling cloudflare/vercel posthog/?

there's just no way

pov: you've convinced a room full of senior managers at deloitte that you can help 10x their productivity with ai

a guy i know makes $250k a year, completely passively all he does is show up to work every day for about ~40 hours / week every two weeks he gets a little over $10k deposited right into his bank account i firmly believe anyone can do this

???????

creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) is the most important thing we've ever done at PostHog. it took us to $1m ARR and to product-market fit. this is how to make your own ICP:

it finally happened i was on a flight and there was an emergency a panicked attendant shouted "this man needs help, does anyone know how to promote synergies and facilitate cross-functional AI-powered collaboration in a dynamic workplace environment?" unfortunately the victim was out of my ideal customer profile so i couldn't offer any assistance still cool

Is this what a POST request is?

i schedule over 3,000 pitch meetings a year the founders and i meet in-person at a coffee shop. super informal, they almost always buy a $9 latte or $8 cold brew i never invest but guess who owns the coffee shop

... so is tanstack about to become what everyone uses?

Tim and I have led @PostHog through 6 pivots, onboarding 30k customers and eventually to product-market fit. i’ve come to see product-market fit as a game. this is how to play & win the 5 levels of product-market fit:

seasonal reminder if you're doing @ycombinator right now, to get a photo with the sign we didn't and it's my biggest regret from the program

opportunities I’ve fumbled/passed on: - universe founding team - roman empire at less than 10 employees - standard oil at less than 50 employees - microsoft at less than 30 employees - founding marketer for a time machine from some old guy at the park to do all the above can't look in the rear view mirror with these things. unless someone is building that time machine, in which case, please go back and dm me a few years ago

imagine hopping on a quick call here

if your resume says you're "excellent at delegating" and you don't send someone else to the interview in your place, it's an instant no from me

the best way to become a 10x engineer is to speak directly to customers. in traditional tech companies, product mangers talk to users, and write tickets for engineers to ship. at each stage, we lose important context.

a few realizations @ycombinator gave me about the human side of tech: * incredible looking companies have less of an idea than you'd expect. it's chaotic everywhere. * the people running them are just as human as you. they're beatable. also, they're motivated by human stuff not *just* money * tech isn't as big a world as it seems - people tend to know each other. the easiest way to get in, is to do remarkably good things and have people want to talk to you as a result - not random "networking". * related to the above - karma is real. it's impossible to be perfect, but try to help others out without expecting anything back.

$20 is the number. once you have that much in your bank account you can ask chatgpt to build you a $100mm arr startup you can raise $1 billion and transfer that to your bank account, then live off the interest then life goes on easy mode.

just saw the most incredible founder at a startup happy hour he was walking around to each person, introducing himself, and asking what they do i noticed he had a microphone attached to the lapel of his blazer when they explained their startup, he'd lean in turns out he had an ai agent listening, who would then build a clone of the startup with zero errors every founder's business went under that night, but now he has 15 separate $1 billion businesses AI is truly shifting paradigms 🙌

the hardest part of our @ycombinator batch was building something people want here's a story about how @posthog did exactly that during the w20 batch...

your startup before/after @ycombinator reminder to apply

as a CEO, you're ONLY paid for these 4 things. everything else is a waste of time: 1. pick domain name 2. prompt chatgpt 3. appear on podcasts 4. post fire bangers

these AI SDRs are getting desperate

Hacker News got us our first 200 signups (and 800 GitHub stars!) we've had our: • repo • side projects • several blog posts all get to the front page. avoid these mistakes when launching on Hacker News:

in 3 years, @posthog has grown from nothing to more than 10,000 customers our secret weapon? we're asynchronous. it means we can: • focus better • operate remotely across timezones • be more transparent with a wider team here's how we built a killer remote & async culture:

getting ready to add value to every meeting by saying "so what's our ai strategy" unprompted

our first 2 products got zero users. it took us 6 pivots to finally find a viable startup in @posthog here’s how you can save 9+ months & understand why people aren’t using your product:

IM NOT SCARRED BY THIS

venture capital isn’t the only way to fund your startup. there’s also: - the lottery - using one of your three genie wishes for a $25mm investment at $150mm pre - recycling a looooooooooooooot of aluminium cans - 1st edition shadowless Charizard Pokemon card (PSA 10) - credit card points you don’t always have to take the traditional path

i'm excited to announce i've achieved inbox zero (i just deleted all the emails in my inbox without reading them)

i'm not convinced normal product management is good for startups this is what we've tried instead, which has worked well for us so far: 1. PMs don’t control engineers. why? because this slows them down. we want to ship fast, and putting PMs in charge adds latency. 2. engineers make product decisions. this works because engineers understand the technical constraints + the possibilities better than anyone else. 3. product managers exist to give engineers context – e.g. based on in-depth data analysis, competitor research, etc. this plays to their strengths and gives engineers extra context for making decisions. 4. accountability through feedback loops. engineers set their own goals, but product managers own and run regular growth reviews. these exist to highlight opportunities and problems, but it's up to engineers to decide if they should change their goals based on reviews. in summary: - great PMs don't control the team or roadmap. they uncover insights that amplify the team’s impact, and ensure they don’t drift off course. - great product engineers don't need instructions. they drive product decisions using context PMs provide, and their knowledge of what’s possible. getting this dynamic right is how we ship fast, build right, and win.

startups ship more stuff per person than big companies. so at @posthog we introduced Small Teams for each of our many products. each is designed to operate like their own startup. a few key elements: - actually small (2-6 people) - 1 Team Lead has ultimate responsibility

we tweaked our pricing ~5 times before we got to $1,000,000s in revenue. these are 5 unintuitive things we’ve learned about pricing:

48% of the current yc batch use us. it's not the 110% i have tasked our marketing team with though, so i'm pretty upset with them.

what being a cracked engineer means at posthog: - take extreme ownership of ideas: cracked engineers drive ideas to completion, even when others need convincing. and, yes, there’s a fine line between extreme ownership and being an asshole. truly cracked engineers can tread it. - stay optimistic at all times: cracked engineers aren’t intimidated by change, or new ideas. this doesn’t mean you have to agree with every change, but adopting a ‘yes and’ mentality helps new ideas get off the ground that might otherwise die in a committee somewhere, especially when they come from non-senior or new people. make people feel excited and energized: every conversation with a cracked engineer should generate enthusiasm. Cracked engineers build people and their ideas up, and are generally perceived as very helpful. behave in a completely authentic way: cracked engineers don’t play politics – their work does the talking. for example, if you do marketing, talk like an actual human being. this doesn’t work in most large organizations, sadly. apply themselves to the craft. joy comes from the craft itself, not creating shareholder value. cracked engineers apply themselves to the craft of building products with a quasi-religious fervor, and love what they do.

chatgpt knows some pretty cool facts.

1,615 companies have signed up to PostHog in the last 2 days!

tier 2 vc playbook * look at yc companies from the last 3 years * wonder why they aren't as big as airbnb, decide it's bigger batches * publish this thought leadership on twitter