Naval Ravikant: “You only have to be right once” In the clip below, Naval reflects on how it took 13 years after starting his first startup when he was 23 before founding AngelList. “Entrepreneurial ventures fail all the time. Most of my companies failed. I actually started seven companies, and I’ve launched about 40 or 50 projects over my career. And AngelList is the first one that I would truly say is product, market, entrepreneur fit for me that might succeed down the road.” He tells the audience: “It’s a low hit rate over your career, but you only have to be right once… So just keep trying, just keep iterating… a lot of it is market timing and you learn a lot of lessons.” In his essay How To Be Successful, Sam Altman writes: “’I will fail many times, and I will be really right once’ is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.”

Balaji Srinivasan: “If you have runway, you’re not dead. You iterate until you survive.” In the clip below, Balaji is asked for his thoughts on pivots, and he lists several examples of massive companies that pivoted from their initial idea: • YouTube started as a dating site • PayPal was originally built for beaming money between PalmPilots • Slack started as a gaming company called Tiny Speck • Opsware (sold for $1.6B) started as LoudCloud He continues: “Even Google initially thought it was going to make its money from enterprise search and that was a non-starter. Overture came up with the concept of auctioning ads and Google basically just copied them and executed it better.” Balaji tells the audience: “Basically you iterate until you achieve product/market fit, and then you accelerate… If you have the runway, you’re not dead. You iterate until you survive and thrive. And then you become big.” Source: @StartupGrind