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I'm @wesleytian on X and LinkedIn, where I post about startups and what I learned building one.
Wesley Tian@wesleytianA few weeks ago, my startup was accepted into the famous Y Combinator startup accelerator–honestly, a dream come true But in a crazy turn of events, we ended up declining their offer Convos with 30+ top investors and founders helped inform our decision 🧵 Here’s why:…see more
July 10, 2023·1M+ Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytianFor anybody starting a business, here's all of the tools that we use at aragon.ai. (We hit $1M ARR in 4 months, $4M+ ARR in 1+ years): Admin: • Clerky - incorporation • Brex - credit card and banking • Notion - personal task management, team kanban board, and company documentation • Google Workspace…see more
January 23, 2025·342K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytianSF founders be like we’re broke and on that founder salary and be paying themselves $100K a year My co-founder and I are paying ourselves a TOTAL of $28K this year. $4K/mo for me since I started payroll in May and he still lives at home and commutes to SF weekly Stay scrappy
October 11, 2023·143.5K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytian10 takeaways from the Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) x Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) talk at Stripe Sessions today: 1. Jensen has 60 direct reports 2. He doesn't do 1:1s 3. All feedback is done in group settings 4. He doesn't fire people 5. He believes anybody can learn anything (he learned to be a CEO from a bathroom cleaner) 6. As he says, he "tortures people into greatness" 7. Stripe and AI are going to be be massive 8. AGI in the next 5 years 9. Nvidia uses AI heavily to create their GPUs 10. One of Nvidia's core values is "love and care", similar to Stripe's value of "beauty and craft"
April 24, 2024·103.3K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytianWhat's crazy about SpaceX is that for the first 6 years of the company, they didn't raise a single dollar. It was completely self-funded by Elon ($100m) Their first investment was $20m at $420m by FF in 2008. In 2010, they raised another $10m, this time at $530m 10 years in, they had taken in $1b, but only $200m of that was dilutive, the rest came from NASA contracts Incredible capital efficiency and a big reason as to why Elon was able to retain so much equity
June 16, 2026·81K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytianThe best co-founder duo is a combo of a realist who constantly thinks about how to reduce business risk and of an optimist who constantly dreams of an ambitious future
June 30, 2023·72.5K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytianI've noticed two kinds of successful founders: Hyper-impulsive dopaminergic "schizo" geniuses (typically night owls & often pull all-nighters) Type-A conscientious people (typically morning larks & very disciplined) Many founders start off as the first and eventually become the second. (e.g. Zuck, Bryan Johnson) Others fail to transition and destroy their bodies and relationships in the process (e.g. Jobs, Parker Conrad, Musk).
December 4, 2023·64.3K Views
Wesley Tian@wesleytian👋🏼 I think we’ve been doing alright wfh
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February 22, 2025·43.9K Views