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Ben Horowitz on 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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36,753 次观看 • 4 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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Marc Andreessen on product-market fit. “You don’t have a business until you have a product that a lot of people want.” “You can tell because the market’s pulling the product.” “Until you have that, time spent building the business around the product is pointless.” “Best case it’s gonna be a zombie.” “When you have product-market fit, then you build a company around it.” Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with Business Insider in 2009:
0:49

Marc Andreessen on product-market fit. “You don’t have a business until you have a product that a lot of people want.” “You can tell because the market’s pulling the product.” “Until you have that, time spent building the business around the product is pointless.” “Best case it’s gonna be a zombie.” “When you have product-market fit, then you build a company around it.” Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with Business Insider in 2009:

a16z

178,028 次观看 • 7 个月前

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”
2:43

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Startup Archive

17,333 次观看 • 5 个月前

Elon Musk: If you are creating a company or joining a company the most important thing is to attract great people "If you are creating a company or joining a company the most important thing is to attract great people, so either be with or join a group that's amazing that you really respect, or if you have building a company you have to gather great people I mean all the company is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service and so depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is, and the degree to which they're focused, cohesively, and in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company Do everything you can to gather great people, if you are creating a company"
0:30

Elon Musk: If you are creating a company or joining a company the most important thing is to attract great people "If you are creating a company or joining a company the most important thing is to attract great people, so either be with or join a group that's amazing that you really respect, or if you have building a company you have to gather great people I mean all the company is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service and so depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is, and the degree to which they're focused, cohesively, and in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company Do everything you can to gather great people, if you are creating a company"

SMX 🇺🇸

12,251 次观看 • 4 个月前

Benchmark founder Andy Rachleff on what most founders get wrong about product/market fit “When you’re starting a company, you need to develop a value hypothesis and then a growth hypothesis. The value hypothesis consists of the what, the who, and the how. What are you going to build? For whom is it relevant? And what’s the business model? That’s the how.” Andy believes the core of product market fit is proving the value hypothesis. And the mistake most founders make is iterating on the “what” variable, which he defines as the inflection point in technology you’re building on: “Great technology companies are created by virtue of an entrepreneur recognizing an inflection point in technology that allows them to build a new product.” When Andy was building Wealthfront, this inflection point was brokerage APIs and ETFs. It’s only once you’ve identified an inflection point in technology (the “what”), Andy argues, that you should begin to focus on the “who” (e.g. what’s the market?) and the “how” (e.g. what’s the business model?). “You don’t start with a market and look for problems to which you can find a solution because that’s consensus, leads to mundane outcomes, and certainly doesn’t support venture capital. The great returns in venture capital have all come from people who have tried to do something non-consensus.” The other product/market fit mistake Andy often sees founders make is spending too much money on advertising: “The way that you really know you’ve found [product/market fit] is if you have exponential organic growth - if you have word of mouth. People only recommend things that they love… I’ve seen many entrepreneurs fall in love with the growth they’ve gotten from their advertising and not realized they’re not getting word of mouth.” Video source: Fintech Nexus (2018)
1:39

Benchmark founder Andy Rachleff on what most founders get wrong about product/market fit “When you’re starting a company, you need to develop a value hypothesis and then a growth hypothesis. The value hypothesis consists of the what, the who, and the how. What are you going to build? For whom is it relevant? And what’s the business model? That’s the how.” Andy believes the core of product market fit is proving the value hypothesis. And the mistake most founders make is iterating on the “what” variable, which he defines as the inflection point in technology you’re building on: “Great technology companies are created by virtue of an entrepreneur recognizing an inflection point in technology that allows them to build a new product.” When Andy was building Wealthfront, this inflection point was brokerage APIs and ETFs. It’s only once you’ve identified an inflection point in technology (the “what”), Andy argues, that you should begin to focus on the “who” (e.g. what’s the market?) and the “how” (e.g. what’s the business model?). “You don’t start with a market and look for problems to which you can find a solution because that’s consensus, leads to mundane outcomes, and certainly doesn’t support venture capital. The great returns in venture capital have all come from people who have tried to do something non-consensus.” The other product/market fit mistake Andy often sees founders make is spending too much money on advertising: “The way that you really know you’ve found [product/market fit] is if you have exponential organic growth - if you have word of mouth. People only recommend things that they love… I’ve seen many entrepreneurs fall in love with the growth they’ve gotten from their advertising and not realized they’re not getting word of mouth.” Video source: Fintech Nexus (2018)

Startup Archive

16,595 次观看 • 1 年前

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."
2:15

Marc Andreessen explains the 3 Necessities for Start-up Success: "The general criteria for a successful high-tech startup, in my view, you see different sort of rules of thumb from different people. But the three big things you always come back to are, is there a big market? And by the way, that comes in two parts. Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and sort of displace incumbents or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big? So big market. Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to basically justify having a new company? And that's really important. And the way I always think about that is, is there a 10X change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10X faster or 10X cheaper or 10X better? And if it's not 10X, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs, we really have to ask ourselves like, is it really worth doing? Because it's really hard. I mean, it's really hard to start new companies. new companies generally shouldn't exist. Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. And so for a new company to exist, it not only has to like come in and go into business and bring a product to market, but it has to bring a product to market that's so much better than what already exists that it punches through the sort of status quo. And most customers in most markets are pretty happy buying from the current suppliers and so there has to be a real kind of edge on the thing and we look for that in either a technology change, usually a technology change or an economic change. which are often the same thing. And then the third is team. Is the team outstanding? And if you think about this as an entrepreneur, it becomes a question of the founding team. Some companies are solo founders and they can work, but generally most of us, like myself, we're human beings, we're mortal. You want to have a founding team of complementary skill sets. And so you want to have at least one super strong technologist, quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist and then it often helps to have somebody who's like a product or who's a market or sales person or has a sort of really good understanding of business on the team, certainly helps a lot. And so we sort of look at market, product, and team. And the reality is you need all three. I would say, interestingly, if you're going to compromise as an investor, if we're going to compromise on one of those, it would actually be the product. And the reason I say that is because a great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution than a poor market. Because the problem with a poor market, a small market, is even if you do a great job on the product, there just aren't that many customers. It's hard to ever get big."

Founder Mode

39,005 次观看 • 6 个月前

Mark Zuckerberg on the importance of engineers if you’re building a technology company “We never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that.” Mark believes many companies define themselves too narrowly: “It’s one of the things I observed as soon as I came out to [Silicon] Valley. All these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The CEO wasn’t technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it… And it’s like alright, if that’s your team, then you’re not a technology company.” He believes there’s a balance: “You don’t want everyone to be an engineer because there’s other things that matter too. But if you don’t have a high enough share of the company as engineers, then you’re not a technology company.” This makes sense when you view it in the context of Mark’s strategy for Meta: “I define our strategy as: If we can learn faster than every other company, we’re going to win. We’re going to build a better product than everyone else because we’re going to get it out first, we’re going to have a good feedback loop, and we’re going to learn what people like better than other people.” He concludes: “I think that’s basically the formula. Be a technology company. Build a good foundation. Learn from what other people are focused on in the world. And iterate as quickly as you can.” Video source: Acquired Podcast (2024)
1:18

Mark Zuckerberg on the importance of engineers if you’re building a technology company “We never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that.” Mark believes many companies define themselves too narrowly: “It’s one of the things I observed as soon as I came out to [Silicon] Valley. All these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The CEO wasn’t technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it… And it’s like alright, if that’s your team, then you’re not a technology company.” He believes there’s a balance: “You don’t want everyone to be an engineer because there’s other things that matter too. But if you don’t have a high enough share of the company as engineers, then you’re not a technology company.” This makes sense when you view it in the context of Mark’s strategy for Meta: “I define our strategy as: If we can learn faster than every other company, we’re going to win. We’re going to build a better product than everyone else because we’re going to get it out first, we’re going to have a good feedback loop, and we’re going to learn what people like better than other people.” He concludes: “I think that’s basically the formula. Be a technology company. Build a good foundation. Learn from what other people are focused on in the world. And iterate as quickly as you can.” Video source: Acquired Podcast (2024)

Startup Archive

44,115 次观看 • 8 个月前

If you invest $1,000 in a stock, you can lose $1,000. But if you’re right, you can make $5,000, $10,000, or $20,000. In the stock market, you don’t need to be right all the time to win. What matters is this: when you find a solid company, don’t panic sell when the stock crashes. If possible, buy more — and most importantly, don’t sell. Selling great companies too early is a terrible mistake. 90% of success in the stock market is patience and the ability to not panic. Most of the time, you don’t need to do anything. Just wait
0:25

If you invest $1,000 in a stock, you can lose $1,000. But if you’re right, you can make $5,000, $10,000, or $20,000. In the stock market, you don’t need to be right all the time to win. What matters is this: when you find a solid company, don’t panic sell when the stock crashes. If possible, buy more — and most importantly, don’t sell. Selling great companies too early is a terrible mistake. 90% of success in the stock market is patience and the ability to not panic. Most of the time, you don’t need to do anything. Just wait

Daniel

365,199 次观看 • 4 个月前

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said this 22 years ago: “I don’t need to change the world overnight. I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight. I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball, OK? If you could just play well enough to get another game, you could be there for a long time. Most companies just need to realize that, in fact, this is a long road and that you can’t build that perfect product. So once you do that, then you keep the project’s scope confined. You keep the project now simple. You have a long-term vision, but your product definition is rather simple. You execute flawlessly on that because your people now can execute flawlessly on a simple plan, and you come back and do it again.”
1:31

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said this 22 years ago: “I don’t need to change the world overnight. I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight. I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball, OK? If you could just play well enough to get another game, you could be there for a long time. Most companies just need to realize that, in fact, this is a long road and that you can’t build that perfect product. So once you do that, then you keep the project’s scope confined. You keep the project now simple. You have a long-term vision, but your product definition is rather simple. You execute flawlessly on that because your people now can execute flawlessly on a simple plan, and you come back and do it again.”

Nic Cruz Patane

375,178 次观看 • 7 个月前

Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”
2:44

Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”

Startup Archive

36,050 次观看 • 1 年前

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 次观看 • 2 年前

Sequoia founder Don Valentine: “The art of storytelling is incredibly important” “The art of storytelling is incredibly important. And many—maybe even most of the entrepreneurs who come to talk to us can’t tell the story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories.” The founder of Sequoia founder explains that the story is how you explain what you want to do, how long it’s going to take, who the competition is, and how much money you need. a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz shared a similar view in a 2014 Forbes interview: “Storytelling is the most underrated skill… Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy.” He continues: “The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we’re doing and why is it important?… You can have a great product, but a compelling story puts the company into motion. If you don’t have a great story it’s hard to get people motivated to join you, to work on the product, and to get people to invest in the product.” This is the job of the founder and CEO: “The CEO must be the keeper of the story. The CEO is responsible for getting the story right, that it’s up to date, compelling, and can move the hearts of men and women. That’s the fundamental responsibility of the chief executive… The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better you make the strategy better.” Video source: Stanford Graduate School of Business (2010)
0:52

Sequoia founder Don Valentine: “The art of storytelling is incredibly important” “The art of storytelling is incredibly important. And many—maybe even most of the entrepreneurs who come to talk to us can’t tell the story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories.” The founder of Sequoia founder explains that the story is how you explain what you want to do, how long it’s going to take, who the competition is, and how much money you need. a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz shared a similar view in a 2014 Forbes interview: “Storytelling is the most underrated skill… Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy.” He continues: “The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we’re doing and why is it important?… You can have a great product, but a compelling story puts the company into motion. If you don’t have a great story it’s hard to get people motivated to join you, to work on the product, and to get people to invest in the product.” This is the job of the founder and CEO: “The CEO must be the keeper of the story. The CEO is responsible for getting the story right, that it’s up to date, compelling, and can move the hearts of men and women. That’s the fundamental responsibility of the chief executive… The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better you make the strategy better.” Video source: Stanford Graduate School of Business (2010)

Startup Archive

258,562 次观看 • 1 年前

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 次观看 • 2 年前

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 次观看 • 2 个月前

Jensen Huang: I don’t need to change the world overnight “Having a simple idea that you can execute perfectly is sometimes better than having a grandiose idea that your company can’t execute on.” Jensen reflects on how he’s constantly bombarded with ideas and feature requests from customers and engineers at Nvidia. But he believes it’s prudent to keep things simple. As he puts it: “I don’t need to change the world overnight; I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight; I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball… Most companies need to realize that it is a long road and you can’t build that perfect product [overnight].” He continues: “Once you do that and keep the project’s scope confined — you have a long-term vision but your product definition is rather simple — your people can now execute flawlessly on a simple plan. Then you come back and do it again.” Source: Stanford University (Jan 2003)
1:31

Jensen Huang: I don’t need to change the world overnight “Having a simple idea that you can execute perfectly is sometimes better than having a grandiose idea that your company can’t execute on.” Jensen reflects on how he’s constantly bombarded with ideas and feature requests from customers and engineers at Nvidia. But he believes it’s prudent to keep things simple. As he puts it: “I don’t need to change the world overnight; I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight; I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball… Most companies need to realize that it is a long road and you can’t build that perfect product [overnight].” He continues: “Once you do that and keep the project’s scope confined — you have a long-term vision but your product definition is rather simple — your people can now execute flawlessly on a simple plan. Then you come back and do it again.” Source: Stanford University (Jan 2003)

Startup Archive

16,442 次观看 • 15 天前

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 次观看 • 6 个月前

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

17,330 次观看 • 4 个月前

"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 次观看 • 6 个月前

.Michael Dell 🇺🇸 on what a startup has to do: “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 existing 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.” — Peter Thiel has a great line on this in his book Zero to One: “This is what startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”
1:23

.Michael Dell 🇺🇸 on what a startup has to do: “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 existing 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.” — Peter Thiel has a great line on this in his book Zero to One: “This is what startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.”

David Senra

26,343 次观看 • 7 天前

“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 次观看 • 4 个月前