+10% Each Week

Went for a lovely walk in the woods. We were encouraged to do better than "So what do you do?" as an opening question.

Many interesting people. Ended up having dinner with a YC founder whose company with hundreds of employees does at least 8-figures of revenue. He built the business with his cofounder from nothing starting in 2019.

What struck me about this human was his presence and generosity. He was very kind, helping pay for my parking fee, distributing dinner plates and taking the smudged one for himself, then serving us rice Chinese style just dumping it on our plates without asking, and covering the dinner bill too.

He mentioned being busy, often leaving the office at midnight 7 days per week. His company only raised a couple rounds of early funding, so they are scrappy and profitable. But he clearly just lives incredibly intentionally and fully.

After Phu shared his startup idea, this man was very supportive. He didn't say anything negative. Asked a few questions then said, very simply, "something that helped us in our early days was emulating Brian Chesky. He put a paper on his door with the Airbnb customer count and aimed for 10% growth every week."

First we went through some basic assumptions. Phu asked how much traction they had going into YC and if it was necessary to be big in order to apply. Then we discussed how 10% weekly growth forces you to target stress points and key blockers in scaling effectively. At some point you cannot sell by hand, linearly.

10% each week ends up being >100x YoY.