The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025

• Clay: reverse demo (prospect shares screen, you guide) → $100M ARR.
  • “You don’t sit in the passenger seat while instructor lectures you.”
• Hire managers who can do the work they manage, not pure admins.
  • Sam Corcos: stepping back from engineering during scale was a mistake.
  • 17,784 hours tracked over five years to prove it.
• Partial AI automation (40%) beats chasing 100% completion.
  • Brex fraud agent: auto-resolve high-confidence cases, route rest to humans.
  • Binary 100% bet has zero value if it fails; hybrid ships now.
• Enterprise sales runs on emotion and story, not logic or features.
  • Lead with specific buyer pain; founder energy is contagious.
• Entry-level hires are AI centaurs; Shopify hired 1,000 interns in 2025.
  • New grads use AI reflexively — treat this as a hiring edge.
• Prove the hardest part works first, then build everything else.
  • Mercury CEO: 90 conversations (founders, lawyers, investors) before writing code.
• Include target users in AI eval rounds from day one, not after ship.
  • Figma AI: 1,000 FigJam examples surfaced real failure modes pre-launch.

X discourse

• @quotesdaily100: “Nobody teaches you this when you join a company: Your manager is not your friend.” (1486 likes)
• @lennysan: “My biggest takeaways from @rabois: 1. The team you build is the company you build.” (734 likes)
• @geoheaton: “if you compete on price, you’ll always lose.” (545 likes)
• @Alfred_Lin: “Many of these seem basic, but it’s surprising how many companies don’t do them.” (405 likes)
• @buccocapital: “Worth reading. Instill entrepreneurial DNA: Hire and promote people who truly get it.” (235 likes)

First Round Review — annual roundup featuring Rabois, Corcos (Levels), Thawar (Shopify VP Eng), Akhund (Mercury CEO), Kapoor (Figma PM), Reggio (Brex CTO), and 20+ others · 2026-01-06 · Read on review.firstround.com