Kirk Simpson

Premature scaling is death. At the end of the day you don't know whether anybody cares yet, and prematurely optimizing for something that you're not sure actually has value is a waste of time at a startup.

The energy of working with another human on trying to bring something to life out of nothing — there's nothing like it. It's like a drug that I just can't give up.

Until Peter, who was at OMERS Ventures at the time, wrote us our $500,000 seed check, I probably did 150 pitches to anyone who would listen.

free is a great marketing tactic it's not a product strategy

I'm the founder co-founder of a company that we're not a hundred percent proud of the product and that's quite frankly a really shitty place to be

key hires can be just as influential if not more so than founders

Candid feedback is hard to give it's actually easier to receive than the sandwich approach.

Taking advice from them without filtering it yourself is very dangerous.

Focusing on your weaknesses is oftentimes a waste of time you're never going to get as good especially as you're scaling as the people that you can hire and surround yourself with focus on your strengths.

I learned all the shit that I never, ever wanted the business to be.

Incentives are put in place that are oftentimes time-based and that really, really kind of fucks with your head because suddenly you're not going into work every day because you absolutely want to drive performance.

how do you create an environment that becomes the formative experience in somebody's career

the challenge with entrepreneurs is that when you have to do everything to keep the business alive you don't get really good at any one given thing

you can't do it part-time all of us were part-time and it just doesn't work part-time