Katelyn Gleason
@katgleason
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founder ceo building eligible, yc s12. early at drc (yc w11, acq’d) posts are mostly about the things that inspire me, work, and ideas.
Brooklyn, NY
Joined July 2010
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"I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw
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founder of duolingo is crazy impressive
• sells first startup for a few million
• reinvests back into himself and authors recaptcha, sells to google
• sprouts idea for duolingo in 2009
• private beta in 2011, launch 2012
• 3 mill users by 2013
• 200 million users by 2017
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most startups will fail because the people working on them will give up
just keep going, that’s half the battle
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in my early 20s i jumped from job to job to job. everyone had written me off as “extremely bright and capable but tragically unable to commit”
it wasn’t until i was working on my startup, all my eggs in 1 basket, that i got anchored and stopped jumping ship
wandering ≠ lost
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both airbnb and doordash are run by “non-technical” cofounder/ceos
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controversial take:
companies who just figured out that remote is cool & works
will next figure out that they don’t need half their workforce
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i bet craigslist has had the same team of less than 50 working there for 20+ years. just chilling in their own lane. solar systems away from any drama. touching millions of lives a day. generating hundreds of millions in revenue a year. tens of millions of profit a month. nbd.
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i can’t think of any generation defining startup that was founded after 2014
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aws just gave us $200k in funding to move to serverless containers and some other modernizations (just free money not an investment i.e. no equity etc) and my mind is just completely blown away by this
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a decade or so of unreasonably hard work is the barrier of entry to a rare life.
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stripe is a master class in how to balance everything perfectly: product, design, writing, press, fundraising, twitter, people
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employees who join a startup while its hitting its inflection point but before its next venture round are pretty much winning the lottery
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• working full time since i was 17
• put myself through college
• went to school for theatre
• didn’t know a soul in startups or silicon valley before i moved to mv
• started my company 10yrs ago with 5k to my name, parents house was foreclosing absolutely no fall back
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achieving mastery in your field of choice can provide a sense of autonomy and detachment from life's everyday dramas. arguably more valuable than the money it can generate. and likely more meaningful too.
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didn’t turn on rev until 2016
• $1 million in 2016
• $13 million in 2017
• $36 million in 2018
• $250.77 million in 2021
• 2021 went public still had 100m+ in the bank account
🔥🔥🚀🚀
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on track to do $4M in *net income* in 2022. nowhere near where we aim to be but proud of this milestone ☺️🔥
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zoom’s total funding amt= $146M
sure i know that sounds like a lot..
but..
slack’s total funding amt= $1.4B
both started around the same year
zoom has been playing a very different game since day one
we like that game
i wanna play that game
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canva just low key blowing past $1b+ in revenue. this is what true exponential growth looks like. crazy impressive
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one aspect of the paypal mafia that we don’t talk about enough is its saturation of nontechnicals.
peter theil, reid hoffman, and keith rabois, for example, are all nontechnical (in the traditional sense) but are world-class in strategy, theory, determination, execution.
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whenever i see major drama in startups: takedown pieces, ceo oustings, lawsuits, boardroom battles
it almost always traces back to one thing: the company got ahead of itself in fundraising and they can’t live up to expectations in terms of growth in users or revenue
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has anyone considered signing on employees like pro sports teams sign on star athletes?
- set schedule
- aggressive comp
- set duration / commitment
- options / benefits deals
- both sides know it’s not forever
- come in, do great work, make an impact & move on with a stake
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jobs: 50 million of his own money in - still writing checks for monthly shortfalls
pixar: 10 (?) yrs in, no growth, a couple of shorts, and only ~15mins of toy story ready
book starts here then covers up to/after pixar’s unique, high risk, ultimately brilliant ipo
mesmerizing
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for those of you who don’t know i recovered from covid19 in april
today my heart rate hung out at 140 bpm for hours and now i’m in the ER for possible blood clots
when i tell you this happened out of nowhere, i mean it
& once again ring was my 1st indicator something was up
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guys, leonardo da vinci was 51 when he started painting the mona lisa
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slack (17m before pivoting to slack)
zoom (1997 early at WebEx)
lyft (5yrs "zimride" before lyft)
uber (10 years of travis blood sweat and ramen from other two startups)
it is the gritty folks coming back for round two, three, and four who are the real mvps this year 🔥🔥
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success is when reality catches up to your imagination ☺️
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no lay-offs, no ppp loan, no downsizing salaries, no fundraising since 2015 and we only burned ~20k last month
we’ll continue to be cautious but man.. together, we are resilient 🔥
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i hestitated putting this out there because i am a person who desperately seeks validation from others (unfortunately)
my biggest fear was a whole bunch of people would be like “you don’t even know if you have it!”
and i just don’t have the spirit to deal with that right now
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startups are so hard. if you’re a first time founder you’ll go through periods, sometimes spanning years, where you’ll make every rookie mistake in the book and repeatedly feel like you’re getting punched in the gut.
you’ll hire the wrong people. bring on the wrong investors.…
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i can’t think of any great founder who was in it for the money
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our net income grew by 70% last month... no big deal 🙈🔥🔥🔥
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we haven’t raised capital since the end of 2015 — proud founder 🔥
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“we only ended up spending ~80 million — we really didn’t need to raise as much as we did”
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“mom supported the fam by working 3 jobs a day for 12 years after her chinese medical license wasn’t recognized by the us. one of her jobs was as a server at a local chinese restaurant, where i learned about the restaurant business from the front row, as a dishwasher.”
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100 percent of users who were paying us 77 months ago still pay us today
the sample size is, of course, small
but damn that doesnt change the fact that it feels 🔥🔥🔥
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test came back positive this morning
20 days+ symptoms and still positive
i’m terrified
i hestitated putting this out there because i am a person who desperately seeks validation from others (unfortunately)
my biggest fear was a whole bunch of people would be like “you don’t even know if you have it!”
and i just don’t have the spirit to deal with that right now
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if you’re working today, you’re not alone
i’ve worked 8 out of 10 of the last thanksgivings
this doesn’t make you weird, it doesn’t make you an addict and it’s not hustle porn
it’s reality for a girl who chose a path that came with a great responsibility to her customers
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“proof that non-technical people can start, build, and manage highly complex technology businesses, as long they possess grit and the ability to relentlessly learn”
+ surround themselves with world class engineers from day one
founding team: stanford for dd/ harvard for airbnb
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in the early days of a startup it’s common to hire generalists but as time goes on you’ll need specialists
another way to say this is
in the early days you want initiative but as time goes on you’ll need efficiency
efficiency: significant outputs with minimal wasted effort
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• first entrepreneur in my family
• yes i’ve had to sacrifice a lot to get where i am today... solo “non technical” female founder building an api co in healthcare but i’ve gotten here and i’m still going
if you’re early and wanting the same
just do it and then keep going
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“the problem was that everything was new and nothing worked.” 😂
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we haven’t raised capital since the end of 2015. rev is growing, bank balance is compounding, doing millions of annual recurring *net income* per year 🔥🔥
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pretty sure i’m the only female founder left still working on my same startup from the yc s12 batch, woah
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doing millions in ARR every year and being profitable (we only burned 60k last month) is less sexy i’m sure but damn it feels 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
it lets us outlast competitors & peers
while also meeting the high expectations of our most discerning customers
next up: escape velocity
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left is your oura ring healthy
right is your oura ring covid19 day 12
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you’re in your early 20s with loads of credit card debt. you’re working as a waitress because your summa cum laude college degree is pretty useless and you can’t wrap your brain around being stuck at a 9-5 job.
late night shift ends and you’re on a subway ride home. you run…
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hi, i’ve officially cleared covid19 😍
(negative results to prove it!)
thank you
@goforward
for being the only doctor that would care for me in-person during the pandemic 🙏
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the initial wave crashing into our company that occurred when we added conventional minded people to an independent minded team was mind numbing
i didn’t realize how unconventional & independent we were and how that’d impact the new employees
hardest year of my life (2016)
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emily dickinson once wrote: "luck is not chance — it's toil. fortune's expensive smile is earned." the harder we work the more luck shows up for us in return.
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we might be the only yc company still led by its female founder that’s doing over $10M in ARR while generating millions in profit each year. still nowhere near where we aim to be, but already daunting if true.
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also... steve jobs was 52 when the iphone was released
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it’s pretty hard to be phil jackson, michael jordan and jerry krause all at the same time
& that’s what it takes to be a successful founder
if you can pull that off while working a normal 9-5 work week
then god bless you
but i can’t
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quiet saturday morning working in the comfy area @ hq ✨👩🏻💻
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how long before we have a 100B company with only 100 employees
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people are always surprised by the simple lifestyles of great builders but what they don’t realize is that most aren’t in it for the money
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we haven’t had a single resignation since 2021. here are some of the comp and perks we offer the team:
• work from where you’re most productive. if that’s HQ great, if not that’s ok too.
• 4 day work weeks with rotational fridays to cover biz ops plus two all out sprints a…
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unpopular opinion but i think ideas are just as important as execution
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years ago we had a competitor raise $50M, clone our apis end to end, and fail miserably. it got so bad that at one point they bought ads off my full name. dead now / they were acqui-hired.
really is okay to just ignore competition and put all that focus on your customers.
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last month:
$679,000+ in net income
$599,000+ in free cash flow
more than three years of this recurring, growing, compounding
LFG
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small stretches of extreme focus can create extraordinary changes that last the rest of your life
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as an early employee at a company that just got acquired i can say i'm sooo happy i bought my shares when i left. wowww weeeeee <3 (sorry for the lameness i'm pretty excited)
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unconventional.. bordering on wild… ideas coupled with a relatively simple most might even call boring lifestyle = the recipe of many successful ppl
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the amount of work that goes into running a successful company from scratch is too extreme for most brains to compute.
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people who build and create do it in part to shut out the chaos and outrage intrinsic to living
this isn’t new to our generation, artists have lived this way for all of history
maker time by definition is quiet, peaceful & though i can’t speak for all — in my case, spiritual
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“if you ask anybody who their best teacher was in their entire experience from a little kid to university, everybody chooses that teacher that pushed them the hardest.” —
@rabois
💪❤️❤️
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i started eligible in a little apartment at the back of this building on castro street in mountain view. i didn’t have much but it was enough, i even found my first whiteboard laid out as trash and dragged it inside. magically lucky time of my life
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one of the most significant risks startups face is scaling before achieving a true exponential fit
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give everyone who works for your company stock options
extend all their exercise windows
(even your receptionists)
test out 4day work weeks
give them the best healthcare
don’t be stingy with the cool whip
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who else is super jealous that alexander got to hang out and learn from aristotle all day
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for girls who are founders & ceos:
- the media will shit on you
- vcs will shit on you (see below)
- employees will shit on you
(see heidi vs howard study)
your hope is your customers ❤️
focus your energy on making something they need
the rest will take care of itself
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our net income grew by 79% again last month, up 571% since may 🔥
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mitch and bill: retired & on vacation
sj: about to change the world
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used to date a guy plugged into hollywood and he’d say:
“most famous ppl don’t have money and lots of ppl with money aren’t famous”
made me think of:
“most high influence ppl on tech twitter don’t run their own startups. lots running their own startup don’t have an audience”
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I’m conflicted because I loooove aoc’s energy but am super frightened of her messages 😳
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girl who was sleeping by 9pm and up by 5am on new years to work.. it me :)
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day 17 wrapping up
tons more water
more vitamin c
more electrolytes
really hard time breathing today
found this post and it was a total game changer
twitter is going to save so many lives
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first comes break even profitable, then comes “oh damn” we banked some $$ last month profitable 🔥🚀
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9 yrs ago. i was a sales girl for a sv startup. (so early that i lived & worked in the same apt with thefounders)
on this night ceo asks all his eng team & me a google interview question
i was the only one to get it right
he never looked at me like just a sales girl again 🙂
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still proud that we managed to avoid the unicorn bubble entirely. <3 have not raised capital since the end of 2015. have spent zero time running around and chasing silly valuations. just nearly 12 years of heads down building a heavier and heavier company. day 1 :)
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being able to put your head down for yrs and build something a small set of users love before opening it up to the masses
is a gift you’re either born into or you earn for yourself
either way to build something great you need it, so it’s an impt problem to solve for early on
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my father spotted some heart irregularities via his apple watch. the data pushed him into taking steps to find out that he needed double bypass surgery.
last night he came out of the procedure successfully.
admire him for catching this early on. possibly prevented a tragedy.
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during our yc s2012 batch we were known as the “batch that broke yc”
instacart, coinbase, and zapier all came out of it
do things that don’t scale at its finest
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my greatest challenge as a founder and ceo has always been keeping my emotions in check
when you care so much
when you give your whole existence to something
anything can set you off
your emotions can become weapons of mass destruction
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“who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it”
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"the difference between baseball & business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. when you swing, no matter how well you connect, the most runs you can score is 4. in business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000."
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one of the largest labs in the country just signed on to double their annual contract value with us
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“meanwhile, as you sit back doing nothing because you’re afraid to make a mistake, someone else is out there making all kinds of mistakes, learning from them, and getting to where you wanted to be.” 🔥🔥
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@balajis
same with the new york city health officials who, in “defiance” of the virus, held huge public gatherings
those same folks are now responsible for the rationing of tests in nyc
frighteningly bad judgement,
it’s a tragedy
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what i noticed around 2014 (so much so that i moved from sf back to nyc bc it felt overwhelming) was that all of the sudden everything became about the money and loads of it — did it distract from what the core of a startup is? ie discovering something that grows exponentially
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