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20VC: How Founders Should Think Through Distribution and Customer Acquisition Today, The Challenges of the Digital Advertising Duopoly Currently & How To Structure Company Post Mortems Effectively with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo

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Feb 14, 2020

Gabriel Weinberg, Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, discusses his journey from physics to launching a privacy-focused search engine. He emphasizes the importance of profitability over excessive funding and shares insights on how startups should approach distribution and customer acquisition against the backdrop of digital advertising monopolies. Gabriel also delves into optimizing remote team dynamics and the benefits of a diverse marketing strategy, shedding light on how founders can assess when to double down on successful channels.

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ANECDOTE

Bootstrapping DuckDuckGo

Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's founder, bootstrapped the company for four years.
He initially wrote every line of code, handled customer support, and marketing himself.

ADVICE

Early Stage Advice

Founders should be willing to wear multiple hats and learn various skills.
Consider bootstrapping initially to maintain control and focus on profitability.

INSIGHT

Path to Profitability

DuckDuckGo became profitable quickly due to its presence in the profitable search advertising market, small team size, and founder's willingness to take no salary initially.
Profitability allows for greater focus on product, retention, and growth by removing fundraising pressure.

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Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. Over the last 12 years, Gabe has scaled DuckDuckGo to doing 1.6Bn private searches every month, a team of 83 full time fully remote employees, raising funding from some of the best in the business; USV and most importantly, being a profitable company. If that was not enough, Gabe has also written two phenomenal books, Traction and Super Thinking.

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Gabriel made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of today's leading search engines and privacy companies in DuckDuckGo?

2.) Gabriel decided to raise $13M from USV 4 years into the life of DDG, why did he believe that was the right time? Why does Gabe believe that DDG never needed any primary capital? How does Gabe advise founders to think when it comes to chasing profitability early? How does Gabe view the relationship between growth and capital? Are they in conflict or aligned? What does Gabe make of the many $100M rounds getting done today?

3.) How does Gabe feel about the lack of free and open distribution today? How does Gabe strategise when it comes to channel diversification? What is the right level of marketing channel diversification to have? How do you know when to really double down on one that is working? How should founders be thinking about channel saturation rates? What have been Gabes biggest lessons on payback period over the last 12 years with DDG?

4.) How does Gabe feel about the digital advertising duopoly on the internet between Facebook and Google? Why does Gabe argue that this duo of incumbents are so much more powerful than any other prior generation of incumbents? How does Gabe think about strategies to reduce their data monopolies?

5.) DDG is 83 people and fully remote, what have been Gabe's biggest lessons on what it takes to run a fully-remote team from Day 1? What mistakes did they make? WHat would Gabe advise founders contemplating the fully remote strategy? Why does Gabe have nor formal hierarchy or org chart internally at DDG? Why is this so important for culture and employee morale?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Gabe’s Fave Book: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

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