How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start? | Office Hours

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Every founder looks at Airbnb and just imagines Airbnb in the early days must have been something special. And actually, they kind of all look the same.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
For founders just starting out, they think that the trajectory and the growth graph of all the successful startups looked like this. You know, just like constantly up and to the right, and they don't see the early days.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:20)
It might be hard to imagine, but the founders of companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox, at one point or another looked indistinguishable from other startups getting started in their time. We like to put companies on a pedestal as if they were great from day zero, but it isn't actually like that. It's actually the tens of thousands of decisions along the way that made them great. Every company, no matter how successful it becomes, has to start somewhere. And that is what you'll hear about today.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:09)
Jared, I would love to hear about SoluGen. I really like those guys. I've talked to them a few times, but I was not in the interview. So what was that interview like?

**SPEAKER_5** (1:16)
So SoluGen produces industrial chemicals, primarily hydrogen peroxide. For a long time, it was like just hydrogen peroxide, and now they make other stuff. So like hydrogen peroxide, the same stuff that you buy in like a drug store that you put on like a cut or something, that's what they make. And they had invented a new process for making hydrogen peroxide that uses a new organic catalyst. And you don't need like massive heat and massive temperature, and it won't blow up on you. And because they had this process scaled down, they were able to start making really small quantities. Talk about humble beginnings. I remember the Solagen interview, because it was a really fun one. This was back when interviews were still in person. And if you remember back in the old in-person days of interviews, when people had like hardware products, they would actually bring them to interviews.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:02)
Yeah, it was great if it was food.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:04)
Yeah, because we would eat them.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:07)
They bring in hydrogen peroxide.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:08)
They literally brought in hydrogen peroxide. So they showed up to this interview, and we're like sitting in this room, and the hydrogen peroxide guys walk in, and they literally have a beaker of hydrogen peroxide, which I think at the time was like most of the hydrogen peroxide they've ever produced. And during the batch, basically their goal was to figure out how to sell like bottles of hydrogen peroxide. Because they wanted to generate revenue and to prove that this was a real business. So, rather than trying to like raise $100 million to build like a giant facility, they literally set up shop in their garage, and they would just start making bottles of hydrogen peroxide and selling them to anybody who would buy a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Today, they actually have this huge plant in Houston that ships out like tanker truck fulls of hydrogen peroxide like every day.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:54)
In the interview, what did they say that convinced you?

**SPEAKER_5** (2:59)
Well, the cool thing was one, these guys clearly had like great backgrounds to be doing this. They were definitely experts in this. But unlike some of the academic science folks that we interviewed from time to time, these guys were doers.
They weren't waiting for anyone's permission to go do the thing. They had made the hydrogen peroxide and brought it in, and they were trying to find somebody to sell it to. They clearly had a bias for action.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:22)
It's the doer mentality that applies to any kind of startup idea in interviews. And also the willingness to admit that you may not have all the answers. You may not be able to think all the steps of head of how you build a big company, but you're down for the ride. Like you're ready to do it, and you're signed up for the journey, and you'll figure it out later. You have to be comfortable with this idea that you know you're going to do a thing, and you're going to work really hard at it, and you don't really have all the details worked out, but that's okay.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:51)
One of the best lessons I've learned in my career is to not worry too much about what it's like at the top of the mountain. The most important thing is to decide that you're going to make it there, and to take that first step on the journey. And sometimes that first step means building a demo before you even have any customers.