Andrew D'Souza

I sucked at working for people. Every boss I ever had hated me. I thought it was them, and then it just kept happening over and over. At a certain point you realize you're not employable — and starting a company was the last line of defense.

You're never going to have enough data to jettison the thing that's working for the thing you're more excited about. It has to be that founder instinct — and you have to do it before you have enough data.

If we hadn't started by giving ten and twenty dollars to Uber drivers four years ago, we would never have been able to give millions of dollars to an e-commerce entrepreneur.

The founder wants to do something else. The company's fine and it actually just needs new leadership... and then needs to sort of swallow the pill of: my company needs something that I can't give it, and I need something that I can't get from my company. And I think that's a really tough situation for a lot of founders.

When things are going really well, often you're just trying to hang on. But I think what I wish we had done was really fortify our defensibility... We didn't really create a network effect in the business. We had ideas of how to do it, but we were just trying to hang on for dear life.

I think one thing I learned very early was when you put a financial incentive in front of something that people just do out of goodwill, you change the behavior completely. If I introduce you to Alex just because I think you guys would get along, then you both go into that interaction very open-minded. If you know that I get paid if you work together or if he hires you, then both of you come in like, was Andrew really thinking about this from my best interest, or was he actually thinking about it from a monetary incentive?