Minna Song, co-founder & CEO of EliseAI turned 100 VC rejections into a $2.2B company after 8 years of relentless hustle and survival. While others chased hype, she worked front desks to learn real estate, monitored product 24/7, and personally interviewed her first 400 hires.
Her playbook? Relentless focus on customer pain points, an uncompromising work ethic, and one rule: never die, be the cockroach. Backed by a16z with $250M, Minna proves billion-dollar companies are built by solving “unsexy” problems.
00:00 Intro
02:16 Why 90% of Founders Fail to Find PMF (And How Not to Be One of Them)
05:17 Brutal Lessons From Our First 10 Customers
07:41 Only Cockroach Founders Survive
09:27 The Secret to Hypergrowth
11:59 Forget Shortcut, Just 24/7 Grind
#startup #unicorn #AI
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it's not about working hard no one works easy though. It's how you do things.
Summary :
Be shameless & Never give up.
Thank you song for sharing your experience so honestly and openly .Keep going gbu
I like how honest and simple their journey was. They didn’t pretend, they worked hard and made solutions that people needed. 👌🏾🔥
Hardwork has no other substitute than luck!
Good one!
What a relief. Not a tech bro video but a normal and relatable CEO. More of this please.
Real talk in real life! No BS!!!🎉
I still don’t get what the product is with such a long ramble about a struggle and overworking yourself 90h a week…
I feel very uninspired…
One of the top signals and attributes I look for in founders is resistance and anti-fragility. You can be brilliant, serve a huge market but if you quit when things get tough you can't make it.