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Ben Horowitz explains the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product…...

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Startup Archivevor 1 Jahr

Watch the full @UCBerkeley lecture with Ben Horowitz here:

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Yeah basically either of these is impossible, thanks Ben, great practical advice :) 10x is that a joke? How can one realistically improve anything worthwhile to lots of people by 10x?? Single example would be helpful:) Very disappointing talk actually, Ben should do better!

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Juanvor 1 Jahr

Google was only 10% better at search

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Ari Akersteinvor 1 Jahr

Yea this is right!

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@namanmanchanda2

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@readwise save thread

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@readwiseio save

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Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10-year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!
5:28

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10-year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

407,653 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”
5:28

Q: How do you build a great company? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through 9 things he has seen the best founders do: #1 Get to know your users really well “The best founders do customer support themselves. They go visit their users—in the case of Airbnb they go live with them. You want to get to know your users really really well.” #2 Have a short cycle time & understand compound growth “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.” #3 Make a long-term commitment “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.” #4 Stay lean until everything is working really well “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” #5 Resist the urge to hire; especially resist the urge to hire mediocre people “Vinod Khosla has a saying that I love: ‘the team you build is the company you build.’ This is really true and I never appreciated how true this was for a long time. If you build a team of great people and you have a product that people love, you’ll have a 90%+ chance of success. Those are both really hard to do, and they’re independent variables. But don’t ignore the team component. The best CEOs I know spend huge amounts of their time recruiting and retaining good talent.” #6 Relentless execution “You have to keep going, and do things perfectly, and get all of the details right. You have to care too much about every experience that a customer has with your company.” #7 Startups are about not giving up “One of the very best companies in the last YC batch applied 7 times before they got in. This is just a version of what happens in startups all of the time: you get beat down, again, and again, and again. And that last time when you get pushed down and don’t think you have enough energy to get back up—that’s the time it actually works. This is what you sign up for if you’re going to start a startup.” #8 Fiduciary duty to take care of yourself “This is a 10 year marathon and you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to take care of yourself. Some people treat startups like an all-nighter: they don’t take care of their health, they don’t sleep, they don’t maintain their personal relationships. It is true that startups are a bad choice for work-life balance. But you have a duty to yourself, your team, and your investors to take care of yourself.” #9 Clear mission “You don’t have to figure this out on Day 1, but all of the most successful startups I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of pretty quickly—in the first one to two years—figure out a really important mission. It’s this mission that gets people to join them. It drives the founders. It gets the media to write about them. And even if you start off building a project that’s just interesting to you and solves a problem in your life—which is how you should start—remember that you should have a clear mission at some point… That is what will convince people to come help you, and that is how you will build this idea into a huge company with a ton of people that really love your product.”

Michael McGuiness

500,017 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Elon Musk: Creating a successful company is pretty straightforward. “The ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company, because a company is just a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service. That's the purpose of a company. People sometimes forget this elementary truth. And so, if you're able to get great people to join the company and work together towards a common goal and sort of have a relentless sense of perfection about that goal, then you will end up with a great product. And if you have a great product, lots of people will buy it, and then the company will be successful. Really, it's pretty straightforward.” Interview with AutoBild TV, November 5, 2014
0:42

Elon Musk: Creating a successful company is pretty straightforward. “The ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company, because a company is just a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service. That's the purpose of a company. People sometimes forget this elementary truth. And so, if you're able to get great people to join the company and work together towards a common goal and sort of have a relentless sense of perfection about that goal, then you will end up with a great product. And if you have a great product, lots of people will buy it, and then the company will be successful. Really, it's pretty straightforward.” Interview with AutoBild TV, November 5, 2014

ELON CLIPS

18,493 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

you can't time the market, but you can: + build a good product that survives any market condition + build a relationship with users through brand and community + provide value and utility
1:06

you can't time the market, but you can: + build a good product that survives any market condition + build a relationship with users through brand and community + provide value and utility

Paradex

17,327 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

"Every software product you build, fate has already decided the outcome. The market is either going latch onto your product and run with it, or it's not. Do not ship a product, find a lack of success, and then try to market your way through that. Because the binding receptors likely don't exist. Once you recognize that the market is immutable, that no amount of tweeting, LinkedIn posting, advertising is going change whether the market wants your product, then you take a different mindset." — Matt MacInnis, COO/CPO at Rippling
0:53

"Every software product you build, fate has already decided the outcome. The market is either going latch onto your product and run with it, or it's not. Do not ship a product, find a lack of success, and then try to market your way through that. Because the binding receptors likely don't exist. Once you recognize that the market is immutable, that no amount of tweeting, LinkedIn posting, advertising is going change whether the market wants your product, then you take a different mindset." — Matt MacInnis, COO/CPO at Rippling

Lenny Rachitsky

29,706 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Ben Horowitz explains why courage is the most important trait for startup founders “Does the founder have the courage to build the company?… Aristotle said courage is the first virtue, and it’s really important in leadership. Integrity, honesty, and so forth - everybody has them in certain situations. But that’s not the question. The question is if it’s going to cost you your company, do you have your integrity? If it’s going to cost you your job, are you honest? If it’s going to completely embarrass you in front of everybody, do you have it then? The only way you have it then is if you have courage.” Ben continues: “Courage ends up being the foundation for a lot of what we need in an entrepreneur. I always say you need two things. You need great intelligence and great courage. And I always found as an entrepreneur my courage was tested far more than my intelligence. And I think that’s pretty universal.” Video source: Kevin Rose (2012)
0:51

Ben Horowitz explains why courage is the most important trait for startup founders “Does the founder have the courage to build the company?… Aristotle said courage is the first virtue, and it’s really important in leadership. Integrity, honesty, and so forth - everybody has them in certain situations. But that’s not the question. The question is if it’s going to cost you your company, do you have your integrity? If it’s going to cost you your job, are you honest? If it’s going to completely embarrass you in front of everybody, do you have it then? The only way you have it then is if you have courage.” Ben continues: “Courage ends up being the foundation for a lot of what we need in an entrepreneur. I always say you need two things. You need great intelligence and great courage. And I always found as an entrepreneur my courage was tested far more than my intelligence. And I think that’s pretty universal.” Video source: Kevin Rose (2012)

Startup Archive

70,720 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Peter Thiel on how to build the next billion-dollar startup: "Every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking site. The next Bill Gates won't start an operating system. The next Elon Musk won't start a Tesla electric car company." Peter's entire thesis rejects the idea of formulas in business. As he puts it: "Science starts with things that are experimentally repeatable, but great businesses are zero to one; they're always one-of-a-kind. There is always this anti-formulaic quality." So what's the one theme he keeps coming back to? "This need for differentiation. What are you doing that nobody else is doing? What ideas do you have that nobody else has? What great business are you working on that no one else is working on?" He continues: "If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly where you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing. There really are only two kinds of businesses in this world: businesses that are in crazy competition and one-of-a-kind businesses that are monopolies." On why you shouldn't just iterate your way to success: "The core thing is to have a great product, and then you can always improve and iterate on that. If you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a great product, that rarely works." His advice? Think 5 to 10 years ahead: "Why will this be a really valuable business in 5 to 10 years? How's the competitive landscape going to develop? These are hard questions to answer, but the great entrepreneurs I know always have some perspective on it. When I was playing chess, one of the early lessons I learned was, a bad plan is still always better than no plan at all." On what makes work meaningful: "It's great to be working on problems where if you weren't working on them, nobody else would do them. If we weren't doing this, this problem would absolutely not be tackled. That's what's meaningful. Whereas when you're competing, you're already, by definition, number two at least in a category." Build something only you can build.
16:33

Peter Thiel on how to build the next billion-dollar startup: "Every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking site. The next Bill Gates won't start an operating system. The next Elon Musk won't start a Tesla electric car company." Peter's entire thesis rejects the idea of formulas in business. As he puts it: "Science starts with things that are experimentally repeatable, but great businesses are zero to one; they're always one-of-a-kind. There is always this anti-formulaic quality." So what's the one theme he keeps coming back to? "This need for differentiation. What are you doing that nobody else is doing? What ideas do you have that nobody else has? What great business are you working on that no one else is working on?" He continues: "If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly where you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing. There really are only two kinds of businesses in this world: businesses that are in crazy competition and one-of-a-kind businesses that are monopolies." On why you shouldn't just iterate your way to success: "The core thing is to have a great product, and then you can always improve and iterate on that. If you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a great product, that rarely works." His advice? Think 5 to 10 years ahead: "Why will this be a really valuable business in 5 to 10 years? How's the competitive landscape going to develop? These are hard questions to answer, but the great entrepreneurs I know always have some perspective on it. When I was playing chess, one of the early lessons I learned was, a bad plan is still always better than no plan at all." On what makes work meaningful: "It's great to be working on problems where if you weren't working on them, nobody else would do them. If we weren't doing this, this problem would absolutely not be tackled. That's what's meaningful. Whereas when you're competing, you're already, by definition, number two at least in a category." Build something only you can build.

Jaynit

77,758 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

“When you're creating a new business with new technology and new business model there’s no playbook. There’s no book you can read that says here’s how you do it. And if you hire the people from the adjacent industry companies and ask them to go do it, they're just going to do it the way they were doing it before. That’s not going to work. So you need a lot of creativity. You need to intuit your way to the answer by experimenting. You come up with a theory and you try it. Did it work? Great. Let’s do 2x that. Let’s do 10x that. Let’s do 100x that. You keep experimenting until you find the answer. — Michael Dell 🇺🇸
1:22

“When you're creating a new business with new technology and new business model there’s no playbook. There’s no book you can read that says here’s how you do it. And if you hire the people from the adjacent industry companies and ask them to go do it, they're just going to do it the way they were doing it before. That’s not going to work. So you need a lot of creativity. You need to intuit your way to the answer by experimenting. You come up with a theory and you try it. Did it work? Great. Let’s do 2x that. Let’s do 10x that. Let’s do 100x that. You keep experimenting until you find the answer. — Michael Dell 🇺🇸

David Senra

24,743 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Sam Altman: “The best founders are generalists all the way through” Sam continues: “Maybe you’re a specialist in a particular technology that you develop… But when you transition from building a product to building a company, you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)
0:21

Sam Altman: “The best founders are generalists all the way through” Sam continues: “Maybe you’re a specialist in a particular technology that you develop… But when you transition from building a product to building a company, you have to specialize in generalization starting that day and never look back.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)

Startup Archive

62,026 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten