Ty Walrod

@onchainestate LFG 🚀

There are two types of crypto families. Don't be that guy.

@thisiskp_ Thinking of you all, KP <3

Life update: Been busy the last couple months spending quality time with this lil nugget … baby Liam We had a challenging December and January to put it mildly but somehow navigated that Early Jan, we brought him home but only after 2 days, he had to go back to the hospital because of oxygen issues Later in Jan, we brought him home again for 5 days but this time he contracted rhinovirus and had to spend a few weeks in the ICU Now he is back to a regular unit and gearing up for his big surgery called “Glenn” on Feb 24 Our hope is to keep him healthy, stable and happy so he has a successful surgery He’s a resilient little champion .. I’m so proud of him. He teaches me perspective.

@Jobvo @Replit I'm always googling precise boiled egg times 😅 Maybe I'll just make my own egg app with replit

Instead of starting a timer for the eggs, I made an egg timer app with @Replit so I could just press “soft boiled”

YC on why vertical AI agents could be 10X bigger than SaaS:

@codycandee Heck yeah, congrats, Cody and team! 💪🔥

Bounce raises $19M Series B! >20x growth since our A round 2 years ago! Now, 13k locations, 100 countries, millions of bags stored. Soon Bounce will be everywhere you are - read more about our big vision and new products in TechCrunch: techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/bou…

YC Request for startups just dropped with gov tech at the top @ycombinator

Founder exploring ideas? Check this out 🤙

The number of acceptable excuses for not building whatever you want is approaching zero.

AN ODE TO EARLY EMPLOYEES I once had someone tell me: “Hari, you’re essential to this company, and we might have died if not for you. But we’re founders and you’re not, and nothing you do can change that." That single sentence shapes the entire way I think about the people at a startup: founders, founding team, early employees, and everyone else. Until the 1990s in Silicon Valley… … being a founder was the toughest job around. It wasn’t cool to be a founder back then. Everyone thought “entrepreneur” was just a fancy way of saying “unemployed.” The greats busted their ass in the proverbial garage for years until they shipped something. They didn’t have AWS or a million open source libraries. They set up servers to run that shit, and built their databases and components from scratch. They tried desperately to recruit early employees because no one wanted to give up their cushy job. Even if they could find the rare person who wanted to change the world, the company was (probably) going to fail and they would get yelled at by their SO or their parents for wasting their life. There were very few VCs, so capital was precious. Founders had to give up onerous terms during fundraising, because they had no power. 3x liquidation preference + participating preferred was the norm back then. Starting a company and finding product-market fit is hard enough. Imagine if it was this much harder. And so, those who had the courage to start something in the face of such immense adversity, were celebrated once they succeed. They were truly one in a million. Special. Today, founders are still treated as if in a class of their own The world has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Virtually any founder(s) — assuming one of them can code — with the glimmer of an idea, can raise millions of dollars before there’s a product or revenue. Creating a prototype has never been easier. Literally a weekend project. Yet… “founders” are more celebrated than ever. Adored, even. I don’t think I truly understood this until I became a founder myself. As a founder of a pre-seed startup in 2019 who had accomplished exactly nothing to date, I suddenly had access to VCs and invitations to exclusive events. Way more than when I’d been a non-founder-COO who had been critical to building a successful Series B startup. It’s like moving up from economy to business class. Except I’d paid in blood, sweat and tears for that economy ticket; and I’d managed to enter business class simply by putting on a suit and walking in like I belonged. The burden of building has shifted from “founders” to “founders & founding team” When early employees join a startup today, they’re not joining a de-risked company with PMF. They’re usually joining a company with a Figma prototype and a bunch of money in the bank. Don’t get me wrong. The money is important. It means they aren’t working for peanuts like some early employees might have, back in the day. A staff engineer or head of operations at a seed stage company is usually making $140-180K base in SF / NY. That capital is incredibly valuable because it buys time to build and sell things. And the founders either had a lot of credibility, or undertook a herculean effort to raise that capital. Raising money is not easy. But the risk from that point on is not that different from that of a founder. 99.9% of the hard work is still ahead. Which means that early employees, particularly “ex post facto founders” (h/t Jason Lemkin: early employees or execs who shoulder “founder-like” burdens), are — according to current norms — left with the worst deal in the ecosystem, when it comes to equity, respect, and influence on a risk-adjusted basis. Here is a list of things that founders are subject to, that early employees don’t have to deal with: 1. Months spent in the wilderness, exploring if the idea can even become a company 2. Reputational & social capital risk with investors & employees Here is a list of things that both founders and ex-post-facto cofounders take on: 1. Reputational risk with partners, suppliers, customers 2. Day-to-day stress of success and failure 3. Stress of shielding junior / rank-and-file employees from the ups and downs Here is a list of things that all early team members (founders, execs, and early employees alike) take on: 1. Lost opportunity cost of making a “market” salary 2. Risk of product-market fit 3. Brand risk In return, founders make 1-2 orders of magnitude more equity; typically control the company through board seats and super-voting rights, and several orders of magnitude more recognition in the ecosystem for their role in the company. Here’s a visual to make it clear. Founders deal with some of the worst parts, and get some of the best perks. Later-stage employees deal with the best parts, and don’t really get any of the perks. You see lots of red and green in those columns. But why are we okay with a sea of orange and yellow for the columns in the middle? Of course it’s hard being a founder. I’m just saying that it might not be 10-100x times as hard, which is what the equity, voting rights, and recognition would imply. Take two co-founders with 30% each at a Series A, four years in. The apportionment would imply that they were each twenty times as valuable as the next strongest employee, and three to five times as valuable as all 20 employees to date, combined. If you’ve started or helped build a company before, you’ve hopefully learned that this is pretty much never reality. This is why nothing frustrates me more than accepting “first employee gets 1%” like it’s gospel. Being a founder is harder than any other role at the company. (Most) founders earn every bit of the money and credibility they get. So this is not about tearing down founders. Hell, I’m a founder now. This is about putting the founding team, ex post facto founders, and early employees where they belong. This ends up hurting both sides: - Companies get hamstrung and have to deal with too many transitions, because many of the best early employees leave 3-4 years in, very consistently. - There are too many companies being started, because lots of people with an entrepreneurial streak end up starting something even if they would have otherwise opted to be an early employee… because being an early employee is just such a bad deal. OK, SO NOW WHAT? Here are a few suggestions; many are controversial, so pick and choose what you like. Any of them would be a step in the right direction towards a trusting relationship and celebration of those who enabled the company in its earliest days: Be generous with honorary titles. Apparently Jack Ma made every one of his early employees a “co-founder” of Alibaba. They had like 17 co-founders. I’m not sure if we need to go that far, but I love the push behind the sentiment… personally, I’m trying out co-founder, founding team, and early employees. And if someone establishes a function — e.g., sales — give them the benefit of “founding head of sales” or “founding designer”. Allow people to get promoted into these honorary titles. It’s normal to promote high performers with title and compensation, so why not here? For example, someone starts as founding team and knocks it out of the park (i.e., behaves like an ex-post-facto cofounder), honor it by promoting them to co-founder status one or two years in. If someone is an early employee (or a ridiculously strong exec) but earns it, make them a co-founder or founding team later on. Notion did this their COO, Akshay Kothari, and Rewind did this more recently with Paul Stamatiou. Being a cofounder shouldn’t give anyone immunity. Underperforming co-founders shouldn’t get to coast or rest-and-vest. Such breakups are hard, but it’s even worse for morale if you let cofounders play by different rules or be held to a lower standard. Get more generous with early employee equity. Get rid of this silly 1% benchmark for first employee. Set up a dedicated “founding team pool” of 10-15% in restricted stock for the first 5-10 employees. Grant your first few employees several percent (at least); and if you want to trust but verify, split it across multiple “promotion” grants issued upfront, or set up a 6-year / 5-year vest for them. That way, your early employees can look at your 25% to their 4% and feel that it’s at least in the ballpark of reasonable. The founders would still each get perhaps twice the equity of the first 5 employees combined… but it starts to approach a “fair” setup.3 Institute friendly equity management policies Early exercise and / or an extended exercise window. The reasons not to do this are administrative and dumb, so push back on your lawyers if they tell you not to do this. (Not legal advice.) Earmark restricted stock for your founding team, not options. Your early employees deserve as “cheap” an exercise as possible for the risk they took. Founders and early team members should play by the same rules when it comes to liquidity. If there is a secondary in a financing round, founders, founding team, and early employees should get to participate in proportion to their (vested) holdings. Once the company crosses certain milestones (5-6 years in, Series C/D+), get more friendly to secondaries. If you don’t, they’re going to happen anyway in quiet handshake deals, and the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. None of this stuff is rocket science! Just… Reward people in proportion to their contribution. A neutral third party should be able to take a fresh look at the arrangements and say “yeah that seems okay.” Because right now, it’s a deeply skewed incentive and reward system. Startups innovate all the time. Let’s apply some of that creativity to treating critical teammates the right way.

@david__booth Maya doing the same thing lol

My 5 month old daughter has been sending one-word messages and emoji reactions via my Apple Watch while I’m carrying her around. So I put a passcode on it, which she promptly tried to hack. Bullish on this one

@sam_kirschner 😅

Me to an LP: “Mmm yes, I live in Piedmont, California” Me to a founder in Brooklyn: “Oh fa sho, I live in Oakland”

I've worked with @PatrickEwers firsthand and experienced how his practice and philosophy, as laid out in his newly released book, help leaders leverage their time effectively. I recommend his book and its principles.

Have you ever tried to share important details with your team or investors only to have your “transparency” backfire in you? You might be confusing precision for accuracy wisdompartners.llc/blog/the-ceos-…

AI startups like @KheironMedical are helping spot cancer at very early stages. This is promising and will reduce suffering and save lives. ❤️

Applications for the third NEXT cohort are open. Kicking off late Feb 🎉 In Cohort 2 we had: - 850 applicants - 100 exec and mid-career job-seekers selected - 75% startup veterans and 25% pivoting - 30% deciding founder vs joiner - 20% founders transitioning to operating

As an early-stage founder, one of your top jobs is to take care of you. If you work so hard that you burn out and quit, there was no point in working so hard in the first place. Please take care of you! Exercise, see friends, eat healthy, leave the house, do things for you.

@Nebraskero Looking for a sunset bird in winter.

What’s your favorite poem?

All the enterprise AI startups going after verticals have the right idea. Pick a market, deeply understand the workflows, build simple software to model the workflows, and use AI to augment the human judgment involved. Huge opportunity in 1,000’s of categories.

@cullinmcgrath lol

They will tell tales about my bravery some day

@gtmfund @SalesHacker 🚀🚀🚀

🎉 Exciting News! Say farewell to @SalesHacker and give a warm welcome to #GTMnow! 👋 GTMnow, an extension of @GTMfund, Sharing insights from working with 100+ portfolio companies backed by 300+ GTM leader LPs. 🚀 We’re strengthening the #media pillar of @GTMfund💪🏼 #vc