Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do.

- He didn’t focus on launching an MVP.
- He ignored early market feedback.
- He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years.

And it worked.

He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since.

Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation.

Why you should listen:
- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvind Jain does things differently at the 0 to 1 stage.
- Why he thinks conviction and persistence are the most important qualities founders need.
- When you should follow playbooks and when to write your own.
- Why it might not matter that most people don't "get" your idea in the early days.

Timestamps:
(2:02) Leaving Google
(3:39) Coming up with Glean
(7:47) Building a Product in a Neglected Space
(11:38) Skipping Lean Startup
(14:11) Using design partners
(16:13) Building for 2 years, with 0 revenue
(20:13) When it's time to launch
(21:12) Why AI was a key tailwind
(26:25) Finding Product Market Fit on Day One
(27:32) One Piece of Advice

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.

In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit.

Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M valuation (!!).

He shares his four-part B2C framework that helped him understand why Evan and Snap were special before anyone else.

If you want to understand why Snapchat took off when so many other consumer startups fail to do so, check this episode out.

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M.

But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him.

So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk.

If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.