Stories.
How founders actually built what they built. What the record says, not what the keynote said, with sources at the foot of each page.
Sam Altman, OpenAI.
Sam Altman
Think in decades
Leah Busque, TaskRabbit.
Leah Busque
Everyday problems hide big markets
Stewart Butterfield, Slack.
Stewart Butterfield
Failure contains hidden treasure
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan AI.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack: The 23-Year-Old Who Told San Francisco to Stop Hiring Humans
Controversy is a strategy. The billboards that got him death threats also got him 300+ enterprise customers in months. Sometimes the best marketing is being impossible to ignore.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb.
Brian Chesky
Do things that don't scale
Patrick & John Collison, Stripe.
Patrick & John Collison
Solve boring problems beautifully
Suhail Doshi, Mixpanel.
Suhail Doshi
Question the industry standard
Dylan Field, Figma.
Dylan Field
Browser-first when everyone said native
Lucy Guo, Passes.
Lucy Guo: From Pokémon Card Hustler to World's Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire
"Leave the door open when you leave. Lucy disagreed with her co-founder and left Scale AI after two years. She kept her 5% stake. That stake made her a billionaire. Sometimes walking away, gracefully, is the best decision."
Julia Hartz, Eventbrite.
Julia Hartz
Build with your co-founder spouse
Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Turn pain into purpose
Amjad Masad, Replit.
Amjad Masad
Persistence beats privilege
Apoorva Mehta, Instacart.
Apoorva Mehta
Fail fast until you find it
Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab.
Mira Murati
Know when to lead, know when to leave
Anton Osika, Lovable.
Anton Osika: The Swedish Vegan Who Built the Fastest-Growing Software Company Ever
"Open source is the ultimate distribution channel. A single tweet about GPT Engineer made Anton a celebrity overnight. Build something valuable, give it away, and the world will find you."
Melanie Perkins, Canva.
Melanie Perkins
Persistence beats everything
Gabriel Pereyra, Harvey AI.
Gabriel Pereyra
Cold emails can change everything
Lin Qiao, Fireworks AI.
Lin Qiao
Build the infrastructure others depend on
Guillermo Rauch, Vercel.
Guillermo Rauch
Open source is the greatest distribution
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI.
Aravind Srinivas
Turn rejection into redirection
Ilya Sutskever, Safe Superintelligence.
Ilya Sutskever: The OpenAI Co-Founder Who Tried to Fire Sam Altman, Then Built a $32B Company
Reputation is the ultimate currency. Ilya raised $3 billion for a company with no product, no revenue, and 20 employees. When you've helped create an entire field, investors bet on your vision, not your spreadsheets.
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood.
Vlad Tenev
Make the complex accessible
Michael Truell, Anysphere (Cursor).
Michael Truell
Build what developers actually need
Alexandr Wang, Scale AI.
Alexandr Wang
There's a premium to naivete
Scott Wu, Cognition AI.
Scott Wu
Master your craft before you scale it
Tracy Young, PlanGrid.
Tracy Young
Build for the users everyone ignores
Why stories
Company histories get rewritten after the fact. These pages keep the dated record: what was tried, what worked, and what the founders said at the time.