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Three Green Flags I Look For in Founders

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The Toyota Production System

April 1, 2025

Taichi Ohno invented modern, just-in-time manufacturing at Toyota. Near the end of his career, Ohno gave up his entire playbook in one slim volume, The Toyota Production System.

So when I found an antiquated looking copy in a Little Free Library near my home, I had to give it a read.

Whether or not you’re in manufacturing, Ohno’s lessons can help your business perform at a higher level.

Waste is the Enemy

“The basis of the Toyota Production System is the absolute elimination of waste.” – Taichi Ohno

For generations, manufacturing had worked the same way. Create parts, assemble them into finished goods, sell the goods.

How else can you do it, right?

But as an engineer at Toyota, Ohno couldn’t afford to buy huge numbers of parts he might not use. The Japanese market was small and people couldn’t afford to buy as many cars as Americans could.

For Toyota to keep its head above water, it had to eliminate waste. So instead of pushing parts through the assembly line, Ohno did it backwards.

Once Toyota had an order for a car, each station would ask the station before it for parts. This made sure that Toyota only created the parts it would actually use.

They called it “just-in-time.”

At the time, it was a fringe idea. Today, factories all over the world use Ohno’s system.

Staying Close to the Product

“Stand on the production floor all day and watch — you will eventually discover what has to be done.” – Taichi Ohno

Ohno wasn’t some MBA recruited into a management training program. He started out on the shop floor and even as a top executive, he spent much of his time there.

The best founders today operate just like Ohno. Elon Musk spends lots of time on the factory floor at Tesla and SpaceX, even sleeping there during busy periods.

Sticking close to the product is critical outside manufacturing as well. Brian Chesky obsesses over every screen of the Airbnb app, even though he has countless engineers working for him.

Listen to Employees

People often think assembly line employees just turn the same screw all day. Not at Toyota, they don’t.

Every single employee has the authority to stop the production line. They use an “andon cord,” a cord they pull that stops the line when a problem arises.

At Toyota, everyone is responsible for quality, not just top managers.

Ohno didn’t just trust employees to spot defects. He also relied on them for new ideas on how to improve Toyota’s manufacturing process.

In any business, the frontline employee knows more about what’s happening at the company than anyone else does.

Good managers listen to them. Rotten managers dismiss them, certain they know better.

Wrap-Up

You’re probably not making cars like Ohno. But those of us in tech have a lot to learn from Toyota.

We love to pile on the perks. Ohno, on the other hand, was laser focused on eliminating waste.

We burn a lot of time in meetings. Ohno spent his time on the factory floor.

We bury ourselves in layers of management — Ohno preferred to learn from the workers on the line.

Ohno stayed focused because he was devoted to the mission: making a great car and advancing Japanese industry. How many of our companies in tech have such a clear purpose?

I can think of a few: Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril. And they’re some of the most successful companies in the world.

Drop Taichi Ohno into any of them today, and I think he’d feel at home.

More on tech:

Three Green Flags I Look For in Founders

Tesla Model Y: A Case Study in Product Design

Your First Cybercab Ride

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How Elon Is Cutting $4 Billion a Day in Federal Spending

March 31, 2025

My interview with the @elonmusk and the @DOGE team tonight on #SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/KKpxEPtu1Z
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 27, 2025

“If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, the officers would be arrested.”
Elon Musk

America is $36.2 trillion in debt. We’re adding another trillion every few months. At this rate, we are headed for national bankruptcy.

So of all the things the new Trump Administration is doing, DOGE may be the most important. In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Elon and his team share the incredible progress they’ve made so far.

Slashing Waste

DOGE is cutting $4 billion a day on average, seven days a week. Elon’s goal is to cut the federal deficit by half, or $1 trillion.

The wasteful spending DOGE is finding boggles the mind. $2 billion went to a brand new nonprofit founded by Stacey Abrams. $10 million went out the door to promote “gender equality in the Mexican workplace.”

Do you care about gender equality in the Mexican workplace? Yeah, me neither.

Whenever anyone points out this waste, the Beltway types say “That’s just a small percentage of federal spending!”

Perfectly true. But if you add up all these instances of waste and fraud, we’re talking about a huge amount of money.

The Cost of Living Beyond Our Means

When we spend money we don’t have, we must borrow to make up the difference. A lot of that borrowed money comes from China.

With every cent we spend, we have to ask ourselves “Is this worth borrowing money from China to do it?”

Heavy borrowing also crowds out private investment. The $2 trillion we need to finance the deficit every year could’ve gone somewhere else.

How about building homes to help with the housing crisis? That would measurably improve the lives of Americans. But instead, the money went to foreign countries and tricky nonprofits.

Should DOGE Be Permanent?

Fixing the federal budget is incredibly difficult. But every problem comes down to people, and Elon has the best people in the world on it.

When I listen to Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and former rocket scientist Steve Davis tell us how they’re going to fix government, I want to believe. Surely, the efforts of all these brilliant people won’t come to nothing.

There’s only one change I’d make to DOGE: make it permanent.

Right now, DOGE is scheduled to close on July 4, 2026. That gives the Washington blob every incentive to wait them out.

If DOGE were permanent, the Washington establishment would understand that there is nowhere to hide. You can’t tie Elon up in lawsuits for a year and then get back to feeding at the government teat.

Wrap-Up

How will Elon overcome the lawsuits that try to stop his work? And will DOGE become permanent?

Just 71 days into the new administration, we can’t expect to have an answer to all these questions.

But in just a couple of months, DOGE has made incredible progress. However formidable the opposition, I’m certain of one thing: Elon and his men will outwork them.

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Three Green Flags I Look For in Founders

March 28, 2025

Here’s how I know I met a great founder: he’s at a customer site when we talk, sitting next to the Pepsi machine. Too often, investors look for the wrong things when they meet a founder. Did he go to Harvard? Is he in San Francisco? Is a big name investing?

These things don’t matter. Here are 3 green flags I look for instead:

1) At a Customer Site. Let’s go back to the man by the Pepsi machine.

That fellow was Zach Barney, founder of Mobly.

Zach was carving out time to meet with me in between customer visits. He was clearly focused on his customers, going to their offices in person even though it was almost Christmas.

Any founder this customer obsessed is bound to win.

I invested in Mobly shortly after our meeting. And sure enough, Mobly has grown like crazy since then. In fact, I doubled down recently.

2) Goes to Customer Conferences. Whenever I see a founder gripping and grinning with Mark Cuban at SXSW, I cringe. But when I see a founder who sells SaaS for the trades at a conference of plumbers, I reach for my wallet.

The great founders go where their customers are. Sometimes, that’s their office, like Zach did above. Other times, that’s an industry conference.

For most founders, these boring conferences filled with boring customers are a much better use of time than SXSW or TechCrunch Disrupt. Here’s a rule of thumb: if it’s cool, it’s probably a waste of time.

3) Transparent. The great founders give clear answers to questions.

Me: “Where is ARR right now?”

Them: “We’re at $485k ARR as of this morning.”

See how easy that was? No obfuscation.

These amazing founders don’t just give me any info I ask for. They also have a habit of sending over a link to the data room, which has more information than I could ever use!

It’s not typical to send a data room link to a small angel like myself. And I don’t ask.

But I notice that over and over, the best tend to do it.

They have nothing to hide. On the contrary, they’re proud! They want to show off how much they’ve accomplished.

Wrap-Up

What do these 3 green flags really tell us? They’re signs of a founder who’s honest and deeply focused on his customers.

Not every great founder has all 3. But whenever I meet an entrepreneur, I’m on the lookout for these green flags.

If you’re a founder, try to make these good traits part of how you do business every day. Be forthright. Keep the focus on the customer.

And if you’re an investor, forget about the Stanford pedigrees. Find some folks who have a great product and talk to their customers. Give them money.

The results might surprise you.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

More on tech:

Meet My Latest Investment: Mobly

Five Things Founders Should Never Pay For

Why European Founders Should Move to America

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Five Things Founders Should Never Pay For

March 27, 2025

I recently had a founder offer to pay me for advice. I said no and gave him the advice for free. Advice from an investor is one thing you should never pay for. Here are a few others:

1) Accelerators. No legitimate accelerator charges you money. Real accelerators give you an investment, typically over $100,000. If they’re not doing that, I guarantee you the program will be a waste of time.

2) Pitching Investors. You should never, ever pay to pitch investors.

A ton of founders make this mistake. I guarantee you that your money will be wasted.

No real investor would charge you to pitch them. These people aren’t investors. They’re scam artists.

3) Investor Intros. Just like you should never pay to pitch, you should never pay for introductions to investors.

Startups do not raise money through agents. Instead, founders speak with investors directly.

I introduce great founders to fellow investors all the time. But I never, ever charge for it.

Anyone who does is a scammer.

4) Advice. You should never pay an investor, founder, or anyone else for advice.

The ethos of Silicon Valley is paying it forward. I might live in Jersey, but even I know that.

You help others because someone helped you. You also never know when that person who needs your help today could help you with something!

If someone devotes several hours a month every month to your company, it’s fine to give them advisor shares. This is usually 0.25-0.5% of the company. I got these myself in a startup once.

But you don’t pay cash.

5) Networking Events. I’ve seen these “Startup Networking Night” things they want $100 to attend.

Networking events are not worth paying for. In fact, they’re not worth attending for free.

It’s fine to pay to attend a conference where your customers will be. But a generic “networking night” is a waste of time.

Wrap-Up

There is no shortage of people out there trying to scam founders.

The founders most likely to be ripped off are the outsiders. Women, minorities, people without networks, people outside SF and New York.

It’s messed up, because early stage founders have hardly any money anyway. But that’s reality.

But there are also decent people who want to help you. Find them. Don’t waste your time with the shysters.

More on tech:

Why European Founders Should Move to America

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Gambling Man: Masayoshi Son (Part Two)

March 26, 2025

Masa’s first fund was tiny: about $300,000. Years later, he raised $98.6 billion, the largest venture fund in history.

How he grew to become the world’s largest technology investor is the subject of the new book Gambling Man.

Skipping the Line

Masa didn’t operate like Sequoia or Kleiner. Those firms raised money and invested it, growing gradually. Masa was too impatient for that.

He borrowed massive sums against SoftBank’s assets, such as the Comdex trade show. Being in Japan, he was outside the major networks in technology. But he had an advantage the Americans didn’t: access to dirt cheap loans in yen.

Masa piled on loans from Japan’s top banks, then invested that money in startups.

Meeting Jack Ma

In 1999, Masa met a young Chinese entrepreneur named Jack Ma. Ma was working on a quirky idea: an online yellow pages.

He called it Alibaba.

If you’ve been investing in startups for a while, you probably see the potential here.

Yellow pages can match buyers and sellers of anything. Ma had a chance to stand in the middle of commercial flows and rake off a percentage for himself.

This was a huge opportunity.

Placing the Bet

What convinced Masa wasn’t so much the details of the market or the product. It was his assessment of Ma as a man.

“[Masa was] drawn to the hungry look in Ma’s eye, the ‘animal smell’ of a fellow underdog.”

Masa judged Ma correctly. Ma was incredibly ambitious and energetic — a lot like Masa himself.

The online yellow pages were a hit. Later, Alibaba launched Taobao, Alipay, and a host of other businesses.

The company is worth over $300 billion today on the public markets. Masa bought 30% of the company in 2000.

This is likely the greatest investment in the history of venture capital.

The Dot Com Crash

All that leverage made Masa a fortune when times were good. But during the dot com crash, Masa’s financial picture grew dire:

“Within eleven months, as the dot-com bubble popped and SoftBank’s share price slumped, Masa lost 96 percent of his paper wealth.”

Masa sold assets for whatever he could get. The fire sale provided enough cash to keep his head above water, barely.

This scare would’ve broken a lot of people. But Masa was undeterred.

“‘I used to be the richest guy in the world. I lost 99 percent of my money,’ Masa said, ‘but I am coming back.’”

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Bit by bit in the 2000’s, Masa began to regain his wealth.

But debt continued to plague him, and he was broke again by 2008. His debt exceeded his net worth, which was primarily in SoftBank shares.

No matter how grim his balance sheet looked, Masa wouldn’t stop taking big swings.

He made prescient bets on Asian startups Grab, Didi and Coupang, netting big gains. There were also some duds, including billions lost on WeWork.

In 2016, Masa did his best deal since Alibaba: the acquisition of British chipmaker ARM.

7 years later, SoftBank took ARM public. By then, its chips were in heavy demand for processing AI workloads,

With its 91% stake at IPO, Masa and SoftBank have scored a gain of around $80 billion.

Wrap-Up

Masa is a man who takes big swings.

When he loses, he loses big. When he wins, the sums boggle the mind.

What kind of VC brings home $80 billion? Only Masa.

People love to poke fun when he takes another giant loss. But that’s part of his business model.

Masa’s tiny first fund makes me feel a lot better about my little “fund.” It’s right around the same size as his was! We all have to start somewhere.

On the whole, Masa’s approach isn’t for me. It isn’t for most people.

I don’t want to leverage myself to the hilt and risk bankruptcy. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

But the world needs a Masa or two. A crazy risk taker who just wants to believe.

Gambling Man is a fascinating story. If you invest in startups, check it out!

More on tech:

Gambling Man: Masayoshi Son (Part One)

Liftoff: How Elon Musk Built SpaceX

Super Pumped (Part One)

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Elon Musk (Part 1): Overcoming the Odds

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Gambling Man: Masayoshi Son (Part One)

March 25, 2025

“‘At night I would cry on my own in the hospital room — the treatment [to reduce inflammation of the liver] was really horrible. I kept on asking myself why I had to die at a time like this…’”

Masayoshi Son was 24 years old and on top of the world. But he had chronic hepatitis. Doctors had given him 5 years to live.

Masa ran his budding empire from his hospital bed, determined to recover. And with the help of an innovative treatment from a doctor in Tokyo, recover he did.

It wasn’t the first time this young man had overcome impossible odds. Masa’s rise from destitution to become one of the richest men in the world is the subject of the excellent new book Gambling Man, by Lionel Barber.

The Pig Farmer’s Son

Masa was born in a shantytown in rural Japan, the son of a pig farmer. His family were ethnic Koreans, a group discriminated against by the government at the time and hated by many Japanese.

But Masa’s father Mitsunori was enterprising. He grew the pig farm, eventually using the profits to buy a pachinko parlor, then another.

Soon, the Sons owned a large chain of pachinko parlors. They’d gone from utter destitution to opulence before Masa graduated high school.

A Born Businessman

When it came time to go to college, Masa chose Berkeley. That put him right in the center of the world technology industry.

Masa wasn’t content with just going to class. He worked with a professor to design a pocket Japanese-English translator, an incredible product for its time.

Masa shopped the translator tech to major Japanese electronics firms. Those connections would serve him the rest of his career.

Building SoftBank

After he sold the rights to Sharp for about $1 million, Masa began to ink software distribution deals. He convinced companies to let him distribute their product in Japan, pulling in large profits.

He also published tech magazines and even bought the massive Comdex trade show. Everywhere you went in the world of tech, in the US or Japan, Masa seemed to show up.

Next, he wanted to create products of his own. In a partnership with Yahoo, SoftBank brought broadband to Japan for just $21 a month. It was eight times faster than broadband connections in America.

Wrap-Up

If there’s one theme in Masa’s career, it’s that nothing is ever enough. So despite owning several major businesses of his own, Masa decided to start investing.

It wasn’t enough to run some great technology businesses. He wanted to own them all.

We’ll take a look at his massive swings, huge losses and staggering gains in tomorrow’s post…

More on tech:

Hetty Green: The Witch of Wall Street

The Contrarian

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Why European Founders Should Move to America

March 24, 2025

If you’re a founder in Europe, you should move to the US. At every stage of your company’s life, your odds of success are better here.

Let’s take a look at all the advantages an American company has, from day one to IPO…

Day 1: Getting Funded

A key first step for many startups is an accelerator. The best ones are here, and they want you in person.

YC rules the roost. But there are other wonderful accelerators like Launch, Techstars, and ERA. All of them provide a six figure investment and incredible support.

Europe has accelerators too. But they’re much smaller. They tend to provide less cash to fewer companies per year.

This lowers your odds of getting funded.

Building: Diamonds Sharpen Diamonds

In a fascinating post from Reddit’s r/startups, the founders of YC startup Lago describe what happens when European founders come to America.

Their friends found a higher level of competition right away. The American startups in their YC cohort moved fast, so they started to do the same.

Culturally, Europe is risk averse. People who fail are radioactive.

For these European founders, exposure to a risk-seeking culture helped them change their mindset and be more successful.

Finding Your First Customers

Okay, you got funded and built a product. Time to find some customers!

If you meet a customer face-to-face, he’s more likely to buy your product. So why not go where the customers are?

No matter who you sell to, the best place to meet them is in America. Fortune 500’s, fast moving startups, they’re all here.

And it’s going to be much easier to sell to them across a table than over Zoom from Berlin.

Scaling: Where the Best Talent Is

Your company will be as good as the people you hire. And if we’re talking tech, the best potential hires are here in America.

We have the most experienced engineers. We also have the sales people who have scaled companies to millions and billions of revenue.

If you recruit in Paris or Milan, you can find a few good people. But the talent pool is an inch deep. Every hire will be a struggle.

Or, you could park yourself in SF or NYC and hire as many great people as you need.

Success: European Politicians Hate It

European politicians try to destroy anything new. They hate innovation, they hate technology, and they hate capitalism.

Don’t believe me? Ask Oscar Pierre, the founder of Glovo.

Oscar is facing 6 years in prison for “misclassifying” delivery workers as self-employed. In America, that’s a lawsuit at worst. In Spain, he could wind up behind bars.

Behind bars, for doing something dozens of companies all over the world do — delivering food.

It’s so hard for your startup to succeed in Europe. And if you beat the odds and make it big, some brain dead politician is standing there with handcuffs.

Just get out. Come to America where you don’t have to worry about this.

Wrap-Up

Europe is beautiful and has so many wonderful cultures. But it’s not the right place to build a startup.

Is it possible to succeed there? Sure. Klarna, Spotify, Monzo, they’ve all done it.

But the odds of success are lower. And you want to give yourself every advantage.

Come to New York. Come to Austin. Come to SF.

We want you. We need you. We will help you succeed.

More on tech:

The Danger of Dev Shops

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The Danger of Dev Shops

March 21, 2025

After 18 long months, the product was finally live. Customers poured in. And then, all hell broke loose.

Held Hostage By a ‘Tech Partner’

This founder had launched a LinkedIn Content Creator app. Early users loved it, but the project had an Achilles heel.

The founder explains what happened next on a fascinating post on the SaaS subreddit.

A “tech partner” (also known as a dev shop) had built the product. Now, they were getting greedy.

Seeing the avalanche of sign-ups, the dev shop demanded more money than originally agreed.

When the founder refused, the dev shop ceased work and wouldn’t honor the agreement. That left the founder with a product he doesn’t understand and can’t maintain.

How Dev Shops Rip You Off

This, my friends, is why you don’t use dev shops.

These companies tend to be scam artists. They promise the world and don’t deliver. Then, they hold you hostage for more money whenever they please.

If you don’t do what they ask, they walk off with the code and leave you high and dry.

What Can This Founder Do?

So, what options does this founder have?

If he had a contract with the dev shop, he can try a legal letter or even a lawsuit. But frankly, since most of these dev shops are in foreign countries, it’s probably pointless.

He’s better off starting over, building a new product himself.

Building a product on your own used to be difficult without a technical background. But today, apps like Lovable, Replit and Cursor make it easy.

He should be able to hack something together in a week or so. And it might be way better than what that shady “tech partner” created!

How I Avoid Dev Shop Hell

As an investor, I want to avoid messes like this. So when I meet with a founder, I ask who writes the code for his startup.

If the answer is anyone outside the company, it’s an instant pass.

If you want to build a great business, you can’t count on sketchy people overseas to build your product. You need to do it yourself.

Wrap-Up

In today’s world, it’s never been easier to hack together a product. There are no more excuses.

Protect yourself against the misery this founder is dealing with. Ditch the dev shops and build it yourself!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

More on tech:

Should Startups Worry About Corporate Espionage?

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Should Startups Worry About Corporate Espionage?

March 20, 2025

Rippling has accused Deel of putting a spy inside their business. With moles infiltrating companies, should startups be worried?

The truth is, if you have an early stage startup, it’s almost impossible to get anyone to care about it.

Spies? You should be so lucky! At least that would mean someone had heard of you.

The biggest problem a tiny startup faces isn’t espionage. It’s indifference.

Getting the Word Out

Instead of keeping secrets, you should shout from the rooftops about what you’re doing. Let everyone know and get their input, especially if they’re familiar with your market.

When you meet an expert on your market, interview them. Find out what they’re struggling with, and see if you can address it.

Those folks could soon become your customers.

Forget about Stealth

Put the company name on your LinkedIn and Twitter. Get a website up. And to heck with “stealth.”

Now, if your startup involves something highly technical and IP-driven, that’s a little different. No one is saying you should share all the IP behind a new drug or medical device with the world.

But most startups aren’t like that. They’re making a software product that’s driven by solving a customer problem, not by developing unique IP.

Dealing With Investors

Startups should lean toward being open to the world, and especially open to investors.

The best founders I’ve worked with are highly transparent. The weaker ones refuse to share info and try to get investors to sign NDA’s (good luck with that).

In order to give you a check, investors have to know what they’re investing in. You can’t refuse to tell someone anything then turn around and ask for their money.

Wrap-Up

Rippling might need to worry about spies, but you don’t. Odds are, no one is interested in spying on a tiny pre-seed startup.

Instead of hiding what you’re doing, put it in front of as many smart people as possible. They’ll give you ideas and connect you to customers, potential employees and investors.

Leave the stealth to Lockheed Martin.

More on tech:

Turning an MVP Into a Serious Business

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