The best decision I ever made was giving half the equity to my co-founder to join the team, which ultimately led to our success. I believe that being super generous with early employee equity and attracting founder-quality people is crucial for the first ten employees.

In the early stages of your startup, you are the brand; the way you communicate and the effort you put into personalization will stand out to potential customers and partners.

After graduating, I focused entirely on my startup but struggled to achieve profitability, which taught me the importance of having paying customers.

Building a strong brand that customers know and love is crucial; it allows you to source most of your traffic directly, reducing dependency on platforms like Google.

The second time as a founder, I focused on building something that works and sought to disprove things with my first set of customers.

I learned the importance of networking and building relationships, which helped me transition from selling carpets to investing in startups.

The first time I founded a company, I was overly concerned about what others thought, including my team and investors. The second time, I focused on building something that people genuinely wanted.

Despite a rough start with poor investment outcomes, I focused on connecting people and hosting events to build my network.

I had no choice but to bootstrap my company for the first year. I focused on optimizing for a fast and efficient fundraising process because I was warned that a long fundraising process could kill a company.