YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Browder

lines on the record: 119
first: 2026-05-18
most recent: 2026-05-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I was fresh off the boat. I'm not trying to get in trouble, but I was like, fresh off the boat from the UK, came down in breakfast close. And yeah, but I would say all of the luminaries are incredibly nice people, but Mark Andreessen is by far my favorite, and I'm very fortunate he's my first investor at Do Not Pay and also first institutional investor for my fund.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was Maul Candrieson. Like so many founders after Do Not Pay got all of the hype and we were starting to get a lot of usage, he reached out on X and he said, do you want to have breakfast? I was very mission driven. I was not one of these like Stanford founders or anything. I was actually on the verge of making do not pay a nonprofit. In fact, I had a pitch to like non-profit style investors, not investors, just funders to make a legal nonprofit to help people with their rights. I was that focused on fighting the system. And I went to this breakfast and Mark convinced me that the biggest organizations are for-profit entities and you can have 10 times the impact of a for-profit company because the incentives are aligned. And do not pay was a very small example of this, but I guess you're seeing this today with open AI, with the 150 billion dollar lawsuit where they switch from non-for-profit to for-profit. So that was the first major lesson I learned, I would say.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think at the earliest stages, the only fraud that can be as ideological, which is not illegal. It's not illegal to say you've had childhood trauma when you've actually grown up middle class. And that's a huge, huge issue. It's interesting because the best founders are hustlers in some ways. So it's a balance. I actually think it's becoming easier and easier. The world is becoming much more transparent. You have Twitter sleuths who will detect anything. As several companies recently have been taken down because of someone published an article about stock two or something like that, an entire company is done. So I think actually that the illegal type of fraud is becoming harder.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes it's so early that it's definitely possible. From my latest fund, I've done 33 deals so far. The median across the entire fund is five. The minimum is 1.5, maximum is 21.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it varies depending on how many co founders there are, if it's just one. Sometimes I don't mind solo founders. If it's like three dropouts from Harvard, then the price reflects that.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the good news is that with all sorts of red flags, young founders are very bad at lying. If they say we've kind of best friends and then they start interrupting each other, you kind of know that that's not true.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very beginning, there's three reasons why precede companies fail. They run out of money, they run out of hope and co found a disputes. The running out of money comes down to pitching, and I'm lucky to have pitched almost everyone in Silicon Valley over the years successfully and unsuccessfully. And so I teach them how to present their business. Running out of hope is also really important. I want them to make them feel like they're making progress every single day, encouraging them to ignore all of the kind of vanity signals of being a young founder in SF and actually focus on their customers. And then co-founder disputes and building the team, I sometimes recruit my smart friends who are not ready to start a company into their organization. And I get them the vesting and all the boring stuff. Everything that YC would say, I say to them.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've made so many mistakes with Do Not Pay. I'm 10 years in now. I can give them a crash course so they don't make the same mistakes as me in a matter of three weeks. And bear in mind these are very young college first-time founders, so they don't even know the difference between pre-money and post-money valuation and all of this. So it's almost like a one-person accelerator with one partner at the accelerator, me, and then one founder or one company. And you mentioned four seasons. I would say it's not that luxurious. It's adjacent to the four seasons. It's technically a four seasons residence, but sometimes if there's four co-founders, it's four beds in one room. So I'll rent beds for $50 a night and then they all, one company, they live in one room. And I say to them, it's like, it's in California. So it's like Hotel California where you can't check out until you've raised your institutional seed. And then the company is off life support and I can like relax a bit.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Yuzu, where he worked at Do Not Pay, so he lived in the Do Not Pay House. The founder of Micro One lived in my spare bedroom when I was his first investor.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I noticed over the years, so I've tried all sorts of investments over the years and things have done very well, but the best sort of investments are the day one investments for me. And I think everyone is playing different games. Some people are playing the games where they're getting into the hottest companies, 100 million valuation, and then they become worth 25 billion one day. The game I'm playing is I'm getting into founders who, when they're just starting, they're not polished at all and they can really use my advice and my reliving my founder journey to polish them. And I try and get in sub 5 million valuation. And the question I'm sure you have is how do you account for the adverse selection of getting in at those low valuations? And I noticed that over the years, the best founders that I invested in, I actually live with them at some point. I was roommates with the founder of a company called Ashord, where we both rented the house where Facebook was started over the summer at Stanford. I was roommates with the founder of a company called”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Month SaaS plan says very tactical. Then I look for do they have a top 1% skill in something to achieve their business goals? And you see the best entrepreneurs they've proved something in their childhood, maybe they were selling Minecraft servers like Adam Guild or John Andrew, the founder of Wanda. Maybe they were doing sneaker bots like the founder of WAP. My generation, when we were growing up, it was very big to do jailbreaking. So jailbreaking or competitive drone racing, so many of these things. And it doesn't have to be engineering. Like I backed the youngest engineer at Amazon. That was really cool, but it can also be distribution and making sure their sneaker bots get to the right audience.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have a huge list of heuristics and I have small signals and big signals. So a small signal would be let's meet at 11 p.m. And the best founders would say sure the mediocre ones would say, oh no, can we meet Tuesday week? So we meet at 11 p.m. And then I just like hit them quick fire with questions. And everything they say, I want them to validate. And it's almost like a visa interview. For example, they'll say I'm at 5,000 in revenue. I say, let's look up your stripe right now. Fake ones get really nervous. They're like, oh, I don't have my stripe on my phone. What serious entrepreneur doesn't have the stripe app on their phone? And then I go into like these tactical questions. Like, what's your goal for the next three months, six months, one year? A D minus answer would be some vague nonsense. Like, I want to get a partnership with Anthropic. An A plus answer would be, I'm going to like fly to Milwaukee to meet with a dentist to get them to sign my $500 a month.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I escaped the UK to go to Stanford, and there was a Stanford review article, which is a student publication, and the publication said it's easier for a Stanford student to get into YC than it is for them to get a job now. We've seen a rise of, I would say, fake founders, where they don't have that connection to their problem and they're just starting something just because it's cool or because they have nothing to do for the summer. And actually being an investor, you have to be very careful about backing students over the summer because part of the signal is they've dropped out and they're going all in on this but of course during the summer you can't actually tell if they've dropped out so i'm actually scale back a bit during the summer not because i'm in capri like all the other vcs but because you have to worry about these fake founders”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one thing I look for is a deep connection to the problem that they won't give up. I go back to my own journey. I missed a do not pay. I'm the type of person to get 10 parking tickets just to test out the service or wait on hold for hours to save 20 pounds or dollars. And I look for those founders with a really deep connection to the problem. So for example, I was in the very, very first preceded of a company called Owner.com with Adam Guild. He built the initial version of the product to help his mother's dog grooming business. So many of these founders come up with these BS stories, but that is a real story and he really did it to help his mother. And similarly with me, I really did it because I hate the government with parking tickets. And so I look for that sort of founder market fit where they're their own first customer. And I joke, if you're building for yourself, at least you have one customer.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think young founders have no option but to succeed. If you back a Google engineer, the first thing they'll do is they'll hire 10 of their friends and it's like this endless scheme of hiring. The first thing a young founder will do is they'll build the product and they don't have anything to fall back on, especially if they have a chip on their shoulder. The only thing they can do is succeed. And so I think the grit level with young founders is 10x. Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass. If you don't have a true dedication to win, they'll give up at the first opportunity.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a saying among the teal fellows that they have an expiry date. We all know these people who are very hyped and then maybe didn't stay relevant and they just some of them lost their minds. And so that was always a huge fear of mine. You always have to constantly be reinventing yourself to kind of stay relevant and adapt because the world changes very quickly. I started do not pay in high school when I was 17. That was a completely different world back then. That was in 2015.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're not motivated by the fear of losing, I think you're asleep at the wheel. Only the paranoids survive and the world is changing. It feels like the world is changing a year's worth of progress every few weeks, so definitely the fear of losing.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for having me. Growing up in the UK, I'm proud to have known of you before you became a world famous podcaster.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're not motivated by the fear of losing, I think you're asleep at the wheel. At the very beginning, there's three reasons why precede companies fail. They run out of money, they run out of hope and co-founder disputes. There are three types of people. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened. Pitching VCs is like a game of poker, you should never reveal too much information about what you're seeking. I put all my teal fellowship money and I invested it in Adam Guild and other amazing entrepreneurs. I think when it's all said and done, it'll be in the eighth thickest. If you back someone who's above average IQ, very smart and never give up, of course they'll succeed. The VCs will say anything to get you to sign right there and then, anything for every anthropic employee who's making $20 to $100 million, there's 7,000 block employees being laid off. It's not sustainable. You can't have 50,000.”
2026-05-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source