Sam Gerstenzang
8,966 posts
Sam Gerstenzang
@gerstenzang
The world's slowest incubator: @boultonwatt. Build products, teams, companies. Previously @stripe and elsewhere.
- All of us living in small NYC apartments already knew it cost nothing to live in a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
- Crazy to think: had Peter Thiel held on to the $1B of FB shares he sold it would have compounded at ~30% IRR and be worth ~$30B, and he'd certainly be worth more than he is now.
- Pinterest is a $23b public company and has >500 million MAUs...and feels kind of culturally irrelevant?
- I love the idea that you could have a kid with Sergey Brin, and be like "oh, the autism was from the vaccines" truly unhinged story.
- Replying to @thoggei suspect 'been acquired' is doing a lot of work here
- I always love looking at founders crushing it and see if you can spot it on their resume. Edwin, who bootstrapped Surge to $1b in revenue in 5 years, looks like he can't hold a job down:
Alex Wang timed his exit perfectly. Scale AI was being beaten by a startup rival that never raised VC and was profitable the whole time - Insanely cool. BVP opens up their original investment memos for Shopify, Twilio, Linkedin, Pinterest and more:
- ~News~ Excited to share that I’ve joined the @Stripe team, working on Stripe Checkout, and helping build out a team in NYC + remote 1/11
- Once you have good taste, so much of making something good is just high tolerance for grinding it out when it's still not. yet. good.
- This is my last week at Stripe. It was the best job I've ever had. Thank you to our customers and to my one-of-a-kind teammates. What an incredible company, product, culture, team. I learned so much. I'm starting a new company – more on that soon.
- So much VC-founder discourse doesn't pass the sniff test. Like searching for "mission driven" founders. Do you think Larry Ellison cared that much about databases? Travis about transportation? Drew about file storage?
- "When an adult reads a great book, they say 'that was a great book' and put it down. When a child reads a great book, they say 'that was a great book' and start from the beginning again." -Roald Dahl
