Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.
We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.
Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.
Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.
In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.
More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.
It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.
Speaking of [Ronald] Reagan on the faith of the founders, he was particularly fond of George Washington, who he cited nearly 200 times, and almost twice as much as all the presidents since [John F.]Kennedy combined.
How many people in the pews know that [ Jonathan Edwards] is both a founder of evangelicalism and, say, an idealist who denied that the material world exists?
I was the Specials' founder, main songwriter and keyboard player.
You can't always say what's popular and you ought to go with it. I think that's why the founders were concerned about direct democracy. That's why we have a republic and that's why we have representatives who who are supposed to look at the issues and to look out for the next generation as well.
[John] Adams was the best and most colorful stylist among the Founders. Although [Tomas] Jefferson is widely regarded as the smoothest writer, Adams is by far the most engaging and imaginative.
[John] Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin.
The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
Being a founder is like being a parent. You always stay involved.
