Startup insights from Travis Kalanick, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, and Aaron Levie

Every Sunday, we send out 1 free insight + 4 new bonus insights for premium subscribers (upgrade to Premium for $5/mo here).

Today’s insights:

1. Uber founder Travis Kalanick explains how to attract great talent to your startup

2. Jeff Bezos: “Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”

3. Mark Zuckerberg explains his strategy for open source

4. Palmer Luckey explains how he used science fiction to come up with the idea for Anduril

5. Box founder Aaron Levie tells the story selling 25% of the company for $80k

Uber founder Travis Kalanick explains how to attract great talent to your startup

Travis gives two pieces of tactical advice:

1. Write an inspired blog post “Write a truly inspired blog post that describes the company, the mission, the vision, how it's amazing, why you're amazing and why it's going to be amazing if that candidate comes and works with you.”

2. Inspired networking. “This isn't for everybody, but if you can really go out there and talk to everybody you know and find those amazing people, and inspire the people you know to help you find amazing people, you're going to do a good job.”

He continues:

“If you can do both of those, then what happens is you get amazing people quickly. And there's a few situations where I've seen that, but it doesn't happen very often. But if you do neither of those, you're going to have a mediocre team or no team at all.”

Full video: Tech co “Travis Kalanick Startup Lessons from the Jam Pad - Tech Cocktail Startup Mixology“ (Oct 2010)

Jeff Bezos: “Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, the concept was “universal selection of books.” And as they added new product categories, Amazon kept their founding vision of universal selection.

But as Jeff explains:

“We realized very early that the only way we were going to get to universal selection of all product categories is if we invited third-party sellers to join us.”

Amazon’s first two implementations of this (Amazon Auctions and Z Shops) both failed. But their third attempt (Amazon Marketplace) succeeded.

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