Skip to Content

The 10 Commandments of Startup Success

Tim Ferriss

Guest host Tim Ferriss shares advice you’ll want to etch into stone: The 10 Commandments of Startup Success. We teamed up with Tim’s own podcast, the Tim Ferriss Show, to bring you this special remix. You’ll hear actionable lessons from every episode of Masters of Scale’s epic Season One.

Learn More

Never underestimate your first idea

Medium’s Ev Williams

Medium and Twitter founder Ev Williams knows: You should never put a limit on your first idea. It could span your entire career. Ev shares what he learned in every iteration of his grand vision to connect the world’s brains. A reminder that passion and perseverance can be paths to scale.

Learn More

Customer love is all you need

OpenAI’s Sam Altman

Better to have 100 users love you than 1 million that kinda like you. The true seed of scale is love, and you can’t buy it, hack it, or game it. Ask Sam Altman, the former CEO of Open AI and past president of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s legendary start-up accelerator. He knows that a product that’s deeply loved — even by a tiny base of users — is one that can scale. Plus: an epic story of customer love from Chef Dominique Ansel, famed inventor of the Cronut.

Learn More

7 lesser-known laws of leadership

The Masters of Scale team brings you a special blend of leadership tips from Season One guests — including clips we haven’t aired yet. In this bonus episode, we’ll share our favorite insights from Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Zynga’s Mark Pincus and more.

Learn More

Let fires burn

Evite, SurveyMonkey & Gixo’s Selina Tobaccowala

The best entrepreneurs? They let fires burn. Knowing which problems NOT to solve is just as critical as knowing how to solve them. You have to conserve energy for the biggest blazes, and learn how to sleep easy while other fires smolder around you. Learn from serial entrepreneur Selina Tobaccowala about how to choose which fires to fight.

Learn More

Imperfect is perfect

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late. Why? Because your assumptions about what people want are never exactly right. So don’t fear imperfections; they won’t make or break your company. What will make or break you is speed. No one knows this better than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He shares the origin story of his early mantra, “move fast and break things” and how it applied as Facebook evolved from student project to tech giant.

Learn More

Learn from every “no”

Walker & Co.’s Tristan Walker

The best business ideas often seem laughable at first glance. So if you’re hearing a chorus of “No’s” — it may actually be a good sign. So don’t be discouraged by rejection. Instead, learn the different kinds of “no.” That’s what Tristan Walker did. After stints at successful startups, he launched Walker & Company, makers of the Bevel razor, and learned the secret of how to talk with investors who may or may not share your vision.

Learn More

Raise more money than you need

Minted’s Mariam Naficy

Think you’ve raised enough money for your startup? Think again. You’ll face a minefield of unexpected expenses — and opportunities. So raise more money than you think you need — possibly a lot more. MInted founder & CEO Mariam Naficy shares her white-knuckle experiences founding startups that survived two financial crashes – online cosmetic company Eve.com in the ’90s, and the design boutique Minted.com today.

Learn More

Do things that don’t scale

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky

If you want your company to truly scale, you first have to do things that don’t scale. Handcraft the core experience. Serve your customers one by one, until you know exactly what they want. That’s what Brian Chesky did in the early days as co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. He shares their route to crafting what he calls an “11-star experience.”

Learn More