Mateus Costa-Ribeiro

What great entrepreneurs are made of by @pmarca: 1. Openness to trying something risky 2. Conscientiousness to embrace deferred rewards (5-10y) 3. Stubbornness 4. High IQ 5. Not neurotic to handle uncertainty and discomfort to the level of ostracism

Your payroll reveals your values. If your first five hires are not all engineers, you’re not a software company; you’re an online company.

When someone says "there are no bad questions", do they really mean it?

Not all customers matter. Ignore churn if your strategy requires you to focus on a different customer segment. That’s product hyperfocus.

The best way to learn isn't: - Buying a course - Reading a book - Hiring a coach The best way to learn is to have a mission. An interesting challenge outside your current skillset. Once you have one, then you can use books, courses, and coaches as tools for that mission.

My productivity doubled when I: (A) Turned off notifications from WhatsApp and social media; (B) Stopped double-tasking during calls — no other window’s open while in Zoom; (C) Began taking notes of small tasks that cross my mind instead of jumping to get them done.

This new book is made entirely of interviews, speeches, and communications from Steve Jobs's life. Here are my favorite quotes:

Meta’s lucky to have Apple as a competitor. A rising tide lifts all boats. Now they are the Samsung/Android of VR headsets. Apple’s premium $3.5k product will raise awareness and grow the VR addressable market that Meta’s tackling.

Historical platform shift. So many groundbreaking software (AI) and hardware (AR/VR) launches announced in the last 12 months. What a time to be in tech!

Reviewing Fund I portfolio this AM: I did 8 $5M on $25M seed rounds with Tier 1 firm leading. Only 2 gone on to raise progressive strong rounds in good time. Rest too slow, no PMF, no urgency. Compared to 17 $2M on $10M where 14 have gone on to raise great rounds. 🤷‍♂️

Some form of “laziness” is inevitable. Eg: I stopped writing Python loops for my code; GPT does it for me fabulously well. Hopefully people will stay energetic though for creative tasks like software architecture and inventing new products.

@ahbilbaoo @truora Worked well for me. Tks!

Chat GPT en tu WhatsApp??!! 📱🦾. @truora la rompió con este producto 🤩. Lo descargue ayer y ya lo uso todo el día 🤳😃. Si quieres usarlo tu también, sólo tienes que dar click en este link para tenerlo en tu whatsapp 👉 wa.link/va93ww Compárteselo a tus amigos, vecinos, socios, colegas de trabajo, familia (a mi mamá por lo menos le encanta). Felicitaciones a @ddbilbao y a todo el equipo de #Truora. ¡¡Una chimba de producto!! 👏👏👏

Taking orders from stakeholders (sales, ops) is the worst kind of product management. Melissa Perri calls it “waiter approach”. >50% of your time should instead be in: 1) living your user’s routines; 2) shipping your hypos to watch if they generate an a-ha moment in users.

@brunokoba_ Great insight. Does “great” here include academic excellence or only great startup execution?

Underrated trait when looking to hire top talent or invest in a founder: whether he/she has seen what "great" really looks like.

The first sentence is a quote from Jag Duggal’s @20vcFund podcast interview.

Churn is the number one product metric you should track. It’s telling you (1) your marketing overpromised and frustrated users; or (2) your product is dispensable. That’s actionable feedback you can get for free every day.

GPT is the next AWS: hard-to-replicate infrastructure that powers web companies. It allows your startup to ship a fantastic user/machine interface in days. Their business model: state-of-the-art technology as a service. Solid defensibility. Far greater margins than SaaS.

I’m against outsourcing software development. Founders should code. That boosts product creativity. Eg: I had the idea of sharing Excel dashboards with clients — which they loved more than PDF or native ones — after reading the openpyxl API doc and realizing how easy that was.

@brunokoba_ @arturtavr Beautiful.

From the Steve Jobs Archive book released a couple of days ago. With each passing year I agree with this more and more. It should be the default mindset of every professional. Thanks @arturtavr for the recommendation (as always!)

Most founders out there are building “vertical SaaS” or “B2B software” in some industry with a “massive TAM”. It’s VC-friendly. I miss though watching people build something they’d personally use.