Andrew Chen

Was it like Ben calling you, Mark calling you, like, hey, we're starting the academy? What was the conversation? Yeah.

So actually, my board member at Maven is Andrew Chen.

Mm-hmm.

And so Andrew called.

Who are some people that you've been learning from over these last few years?

Oh, I mean, two people come to mind immediately.

Obviously, we already talked about Andrew Chen, so I'll leave him aside.

He's been an amazing mentor to me in building Maven.

It was Substack.

So Andrew Chen from Andreessen introduced me to the founder.

They were raising a round that was, I think, flat to the round prior.

This was a few years ago, and I could've probably gotten, like, a 100K check in or so- It would've been an angel check, but I didn't, and I don't know if they've fundraised since.

And that is you kind of built all of these supply relationships first.

Why did you do that instead of going out and selling an enterprise product and then maybe building the supply? I'm going to reference Andrew Chen's book,

The Close Stock Problem, right? Love the book.

It's something I always go back to.

At that time, I did not think continuous improvement in a very formal way.

For me, it was like, okay, let me solve a problem, right? Like my boss gave me a problem and I need to solve it, okay?

Yeah.

But my first real exposure to continuous improvement came when I was working in Krasno.

I think like it needs a commitment, right? We had a clear commitment from our CEO.

I think that really helped out.

And then the second one was my boss, CEO Andrew Chen.

He was very supportive of this program because he has gone through something like this in the past from his previous experience.

It's a choice whether or not each state or each city wants to have startups or not.

What does it actually look like to build a startup from day one? In this episode, Matt Perrault sits down with a16z general partner and Speedrun lead, Andrew Chen, to talk about little tech, the tiny teams at the very beginning of building a company.

Andrew shares what life looks like for founders who are often just two or three people building from a kitchen table, focused on getting a product to work and finding their first customers.

They rarely have lobbyists, policy teams, or even the time to participate in debates about rules that could directly affect them.

And so I, this was kind of around when like Brian Balfour was writing a lot about growth.

Andrew Chen was writing a lot about growth and they were doing this thing called reforge.

So I did a couple, I did like their, I think, I think it was in their first or second cohort of their kind of training and then community online.

And so it was just kind of this moment where I just, I mean, I also had this kind of acute insecurity as a non-technical person at that point of just like, you know, I'm not gonna like, I remember coming across like how Airbnb at one point to get their listings on, to get more distribution for their listings, they had like an automation that would auto publish their, like when a listing went on their site, it automatically published it on Craigslist too.