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Naval Ravikant explains why startup founders should be able to code Naval Ravikant gave the following advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume...

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30,376 次观看 • 1 年前 •via X (Twitter)

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Box CEO Aaron Levie’s 5 lessons for startup founders Lesson 1: Do something that wasn’t possible 3 years ago. “If you’re looking at a business opportunity that you could have done 5 or 10 years ago, it might be too late, or it might not be different enough to make a lot of people care. And that’s ultimately what it takes to scale. So look for new technologies that are enabling your solution. Box wasn’t possible in 2000. The enabling technology was cheaper storage, better browsers, more connected devices, faster internet.” Lesson 2: Do something you’re extremely passionate about. “Startups are very hard. There’s a lot of bad news that happens every single day. Bad things in the competitive space. Bad things with hiring. And you have to be able to push through. So you have to do something that’s actually really exciting, and that you’re going to be inspired about.” Lesson 3: Don’t compromise. “One of the coolest things about starting your own company is you get to make a lot of decisions. You don’t actually have to compromise or sacrifice on a lot of things. You don’t have to sacrifice on who you work with. You don’t have to compromise on how you’re going to do your marketing or how you’re going to build your technology… Ultimately, this is all in your control. you get to make these decisions and it’s a really exciting opportunity when you do.” Lesson 4: If you feel comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right. “There’s a lot of hard decisions that go into business. Who you’re going to work with, how you’re going to compete, what’s the right strategy? Are you going to raise money? Are you going to leave school? You’re going to have to go well beyond your comfort zone.” Lesson 5: Don’t write your obituary too early. “This is a mistake we’ve made a handful of times. We’ve been extremely competitive with Google, Microsoft, EMC, and these other large companies who normally we shouldn’t be afraid of. The venture capitalists are often afraid of these guys, but don’t write yourself off. Make sure that you keep on pushing. Make sure that you’re optimizing the right dimensions and areas you can beat [your competitors] in. That’s really important why we still have the company today.” Source: Stanford (Jan 2011)
2:15

Box CEO Aaron Levie’s 5 lessons for startup founders Lesson 1: Do something that wasn’t possible 3 years ago. “If you’re looking at a business opportunity that you could have done 5 or 10 years ago, it might be too late, or it might not be different enough to make a lot of people care. And that’s ultimately what it takes to scale. So look for new technologies that are enabling your solution. Box wasn’t possible in 2000. The enabling technology was cheaper storage, better browsers, more connected devices, faster internet.” Lesson 2: Do something you’re extremely passionate about. “Startups are very hard. There’s a lot of bad news that happens every single day. Bad things in the competitive space. Bad things with hiring. And you have to be able to push through. So you have to do something that’s actually really exciting, and that you’re going to be inspired about.” Lesson 3: Don’t compromise. “One of the coolest things about starting your own company is you get to make a lot of decisions. You don’t actually have to compromise or sacrifice on a lot of things. You don’t have to sacrifice on who you work with. You don’t have to compromise on how you’re going to do your marketing or how you’re going to build your technology… Ultimately, this is all in your control. you get to make these decisions and it’s a really exciting opportunity when you do.” Lesson 4: If you feel comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right. “There’s a lot of hard decisions that go into business. Who you’re going to work with, how you’re going to compete, what’s the right strategy? Are you going to raise money? Are you going to leave school? You’re going to have to go well beyond your comfort zone.” Lesson 5: Don’t write your obituary too early. “This is a mistake we’ve made a handful of times. We’ve been extremely competitive with Google, Microsoft, EMC, and these other large companies who normally we shouldn’t be afraid of. The venture capitalists are often afraid of these guys, but don’t write yourself off. Make sure that you keep on pushing. Make sure that you’re optimizing the right dimensions and areas you can beat [your competitors] in. That’s really important why we still have the company today.” Source: Stanford (Jan 2011)

Startup Archive

12,309 次观看 • 25 天前

Jack Dorsey’s advice to startup founders: edit the team and really focus on analytics Jack shares that one of his biggest mistakes at Twitter was not editing the team: “I think for all startups it’s really easy to consider any hire as [part of the team for] the length of the entire company… [But] I think leaders of companies have to consider themselves editors, and you have to edit the team. You constantly have to make sure that you have the best people in, and if there’s any negative attribute within the team, you have to part ways.” Jack’s other piece of advice for entrepreneurs or anyone starting a project is to really focus on analytics: “Really focus on how people are using the system… You need to have an understanding of the momentum of what you’re doing and where you’re going. And you can only do that with data.” Data should inform everything from product decisions to communication with your customers to hiring and editing the team. Video source: Kevin Rose (2010)
1:40

Jack Dorsey’s advice to startup founders: edit the team and really focus on analytics Jack shares that one of his biggest mistakes at Twitter was not editing the team: “I think for all startups it’s really easy to consider any hire as [part of the team for] the length of the entire company… [But] I think leaders of companies have to consider themselves editors, and you have to edit the team. You constantly have to make sure that you have the best people in, and if there’s any negative attribute within the team, you have to part ways.” Jack’s other piece of advice for entrepreneurs or anyone starting a project is to really focus on analytics: “Really focus on how people are using the system… You need to have an understanding of the momentum of what you’re doing and where you’re going. And you can only do that with data.” Data should inform everything from product decisions to communication with your customers to hiring and editing the team. Video source: Kevin Rose (2010)

Startup Archive

16,442 次观看 • 5 个月前

Vinod Khosla on the two most important things to get right when building a company The first thing for a startup to get right is make sure they’re inventing something radically different: “If you’re extrapolating the past to predict the future, the big companies do that very well. Intel knows how to go from a 15nm process to 10 to 7 to 5… Entrepreneurs fundamentally have to invent the future they want in a very different way, and you have to have conviction.” For this reason, Khosla Ventures tends not to invest in startups that are trying to do something “slightly better” (e.g. slightly lower cost, slightly more efficient, etc.) because the risk is too high. As Vinod explains: “If you’re fundamentally reinventing something and changing the assumptions, then you have a lot more time to get it right so there’s a lot more iterations you can do.” Which brings Vinod back to the second thing every founder has to get right: build the right team. “If you get the right team — it doesn’t even matter if you get the spec right — it will iterate to the right answer, and almost all good startups do that. This is why the team is more important than the market you pick.” However, you must make sure to foster a culture of debate and disagreeing: “If there’s a single founder and you’re dictating terms, you’re not going to evolve… You have to set up a culture so that it doesn’t matter if you’re senior or junior — you speak up if you have a concern or an idea. You’ll detect problems much earlier, and as a group you can evolve your direction.” Vinod points out that this is one of the reasons Andy Grove started the casual, dress-down culture of Silicon Valley in the 70s: “He wanted an engineer — whether they were junior or senior or a VP — to speak up and not be intimidated that the executives were all wearing ties and coats.” Source: South Park Commons (Apr 2025)
2:26

Vinod Khosla on the two most important things to get right when building a company The first thing for a startup to get right is make sure they’re inventing something radically different: “If you’re extrapolating the past to predict the future, the big companies do that very well. Intel knows how to go from a 15nm process to 10 to 7 to 5… Entrepreneurs fundamentally have to invent the future they want in a very different way, and you have to have conviction.” For this reason, Khosla Ventures tends not to invest in startups that are trying to do something “slightly better” (e.g. slightly lower cost, slightly more efficient, etc.) because the risk is too high. As Vinod explains: “If you’re fundamentally reinventing something and changing the assumptions, then you have a lot more time to get it right so there’s a lot more iterations you can do.” Which brings Vinod back to the second thing every founder has to get right: build the right team. “If you get the right team — it doesn’t even matter if you get the spec right — it will iterate to the right answer, and almost all good startups do that. This is why the team is more important than the market you pick.” However, you must make sure to foster a culture of debate and disagreeing: “If there’s a single founder and you’re dictating terms, you’re not going to evolve… You have to set up a culture so that it doesn’t matter if you’re senior or junior — you speak up if you have a concern or an idea. You’ll detect problems much earlier, and as a group you can evolve your direction.” Vinod points out that this is one of the reasons Andy Grove started the casual, dress-down culture of Silicon Valley in the 70s: “He wanted an engineer — whether they were junior or senior or a VP — to speak up and not be intimidated that the executives were all wearing ties and coats.” Source: South Park Commons (Apr 2025)

Startup Archive

20,015 次观看 • 2 个月前

Mark Cuban says anyone can become a millionaire by following these 4 rules #1: “Find something you can be good at and then be great at it” #2: “You have to know how to sell. Whatever it is you’re good at, somebody’s gonna need that service, someone’s gonna need that product” “Whatever it is that you’re creating but you have to be able to sell because you don’t wanna be in a position where you’re dependent on other people” #3: “Be curious and always be learning because one thing that’s certain about business is that it changes every single day” #4: “When you have that knowledge and you have that ability to sell, when you know that when you walk into a room, you know your stuff better than anybody else in the room, that’s when it’s time to start a company” “Then you can start to control your own destiny”
0:43

Mark Cuban says anyone can become a millionaire by following these 4 rules #1: “Find something you can be good at and then be great at it” #2: “You have to know how to sell. Whatever it is you’re good at, somebody’s gonna need that service, someone’s gonna need that product” “Whatever it is that you’re creating but you have to be able to sell because you don’t wanna be in a position where you’re dependent on other people” #3: “Be curious and always be learning because one thing that’s certain about business is that it changes every single day” #4: “When you have that knowledge and you have that ability to sell, when you know that when you walk into a room, you know your stuff better than anybody else in the room, that’s when it’s time to start a company” “Then you can start to control your own destiny”

Jack

82,641 次观看 • 3 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

Elon Musk explains why the CEO must work on the “most pernicious and painful problems” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Video source: Khan Academy
0:59

Elon Musk explains why the CEO must work on the “most pernicious and painful problems” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Video source: Khan Academy

Startup Archive

41,111 次观看 • 1 年前

Jessica Livingston on investing in Stripe when the Collison Brothers were teenagers Jessica reflects on a 19-year old Patrick Collison telling her and the other co-founders of Y Combinator that he wanted to take on the financial industry with his younger brother John. “We were like, ‘Do you realize how hard this is? And you don’t have connections.’ But they were intrepid. They were like, ‘Well, we don’t have connections, but we’ll find connections.’” She recalls their determination and focus: “You think the head of a bank is going to take a 19-year old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.” Determination, Jessica argues, is “by far the most important quality. More than intelligence. More than previous success in school.” When she co-founded Y Combinator, the hypothesis was that they’d just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard and they’d turn out to be great startup founders. But that turned out to not be true. “Determination is the most important thing. Understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important.” Jessica also believes being flexible minded is very important: “You have this idea, you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. You have to be able to say, ‘Okay, I thought I was going to do this, but let’s try this, even though I have a lot of energy vested in this, let’s try this direction. You really have to be open minded.” And then you have to be convincing and a good leader: “You are going to be convincing employees to join you. You’re going to be convincing investors to invest in you. When you get to the point where you’re doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Your whole world is convincing people, and so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)
3:05

Jessica Livingston on investing in Stripe when the Collison Brothers were teenagers Jessica reflects on a 19-year old Patrick Collison telling her and the other co-founders of Y Combinator that he wanted to take on the financial industry with his younger brother John. “We were like, ‘Do you realize how hard this is? And you don’t have connections.’ But they were intrepid. They were like, ‘Well, we don’t have connections, but we’ll find connections.’” She recalls their determination and focus: “You think the head of a bank is going to take a 19-year old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.” Determination, Jessica argues, is “by far the most important quality. More than intelligence. More than previous success in school.” When she co-founded Y Combinator, the hypothesis was that they’d just fund all the best hackers from MIT and Harvard and they’d turn out to be great startup founders. But that turned out to not be true. “Determination is the most important thing. Understanding your users and building a product with a great user experience is second most important.” Jessica also believes being flexible minded is very important: “You have this idea, you test it out, and it doesn’t always work the first time. You have to be able to say, ‘Okay, I thought I was going to do this, but let’s try this, even though I have a lot of energy vested in this, let’s try this direction. You really have to be open minded.” And then you have to be convincing and a good leader: “You are going to be convincing employees to join you. You’re going to be convincing investors to invest in you. When you get to the point where you’re doing deals with bigger companies, you have to convince them. Your whole world is convincing people, and so you have to be able to communicate your idea and convince people why they should care about you more than any of the other hundreds of startups out there.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

163,511 次观看 • 1 年前

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company “It can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.” Ben Silbermann describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning of building Pinterest: “In March 2010, we launched Pinterest and were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t started building Pinterest in November 2009. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t left my job to start a company in May 2008.” A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon, but Ben disagrees: “The part of the analogy that’s right is that it’s long. But it’s actually really different. When I think about my experience, it’s more like going on a roadtrip in a car that doesn’t have very good headlights and you don’t have much gas and you think you’re going to Toledo, but you find out you’re supposed to be in Miami and if you really have to buy gas you might have to buy gas from someone who might just kick you out of your own driver’s seat.” He continues: “That uncertainty and the fact that every single day you’re dealing with a lot of choices and you don’t have perfect information is the lesson for me that was hardest to learn and continues to be a real challenge in doing a startup today.” Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2012)
1:09

The founder of Pinterest on what surprised him the most when starting a company “It can take a really, really long time to build things that are worthwhile.” Ben Silbermann describes just how demoralizing things were in the beginning of building Pinterest: “In March 2010, we launched Pinterest and were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t started building Pinterest in November 2009. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t left my job to start a company in May 2008.” A lot of people will compare startups to running a marathon, but Ben disagrees: “The part of the analogy that’s right is that it’s long. But it’s actually really different. When I think about my experience, it’s more like going on a roadtrip in a car that doesn’t have very good headlights and you don’t have much gas and you think you’re going to Toledo, but you find out you’re supposed to be in Miami and if you really have to buy gas you might have to buy gas from someone who might just kick you out of your own driver’s seat.” He continues: “That uncertainty and the fact that every single day you’re dealing with a lot of choices and you don’t have perfect information is the lesson for me that was hardest to learn and continues to be a real challenge in doing a startup today.” Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2012)

Startup Archive

15,088 次观看 • 12 天前

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

407,717 次观看 • 2 年前

Qullamaggie on To Make a Lot of Money, You Need to be in the Best Stocks “LVGO and FSLY are the two best stocks right now. I’m long those; this is why you focus on momentum leaders. You’re not going to get any big moves in this. Random stocks like ZNGA—someone mentioned it yesterday— and this GLUE and stuff like that. These are some random stocks that are just having breakouts. You need to focus on the momentum leaders that you really need to be in. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to be in the best stocks. You can’t trade these random pieces of sh*t stocks that you guys trade, or a lot of you, I know.”
0:34

Qullamaggie on To Make a Lot of Money, You Need to be in the Best Stocks “LVGO and FSLY are the two best stocks right now. I’m long those; this is why you focus on momentum leaders. You’re not going to get any big moves in this. Random stocks like ZNGA—someone mentioned it yesterday— and this GLUE and stuff like that. These are some random stocks that are just having breakouts. You need to focus on the momentum leaders that you really need to be in. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to be in the best stocks. You can’t trade these random pieces of sh*t stocks that you guys trade, or a lot of you, I know.”

Lone

15,828 次观看 • 7 个月前

Paul Graham’s advice for future startup founders: “Just learn” “If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good.” As Paul Graham explains, the way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back: “Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.” You do this by: 1. Learning a lot about things that matter 2. Working on problems that interest you 3. With people you like and respect (this is incidentally how you get co-founders at the same time as the idea) “The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search. And he became an expert on search because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive.” PG continues: “At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is the ultimate advice for young, would-be startup founders reduced to two words: Just learn.” Video source: Y Combinator (2017)
2:12

Paul Graham’s advice for future startup founders: “Just learn” “If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good.” As Paul Graham explains, the way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back: “Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.” You do this by: 1. Learning a lot about things that matter 2. Working on problems that interest you 3. With people you like and respect (this is incidentally how you get co-founders at the same time as the idea) “The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search. And he became an expert on search because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive.” PG continues: “At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is the ultimate advice for young, would-be startup founders reduced to two words: Just learn.” Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Startup Archive

51,157 次观看 • 6 个月前

Elon Musk on building a company: “There are periods where it’s just awful” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Source: Khan Academy (Apr 2013)
1:52

Elon Musk on building a company: “There are periods where it’s just awful” “A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.” Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” “The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.” Source: Khan Academy (Apr 2013)

Startup Archive

74,661 次观看 • 1 个月前

Jensen Huang: “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company“ “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company. Because starting a company has a very low probability of success. And so if that is your reason for doing it, you will likely regret the experience… You should build a company because you believe in your idea, you’re passionate about it, and you want to build something great… You have to have a perspective that’s unique and that you feel really strongly about, so you’re willing to persevere almost any challenge to make it happen.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)
1:10

Jensen Huang: “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company“ “Money is the only singular reason not to start a company. Because starting a company has a very low probability of success. And so if that is your reason for doing it, you will likely regret the experience… You should build a company because you believe in your idea, you’re passionate about it, and you want to build something great… You have to have a perspective that’s unique and that you feel really strongly about, so you’re willing to persevere almost any challenge to make it happen.” Video source: Stanford Online (2011)

Startup Archive

132,365 次观看 • 11 个月前

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.”
2:43

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup Marc says founders have two tools at their disposal to win new hires: 1) Stock options, and 2) vision. He explains: “The best entrepreneurs are really good at selling people on their company precisely because they can explain how the world is going to look in a way that is so compelling.” Marc points to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” as the epitome of this: “If you get within 10 feet of Steve Jobs, whatever he says in the next 20 minutes, you’re going to walk out of there believing. He can say that the sky is purple, and you’re like yep that makes total sense . . . The best entrepreneurs all tend to have that in common and tend to be really good at that. It’s essentially sales — selling to employees. It’s an incredibly valuable skill to be able to do that. That plus stock options.” The other thing Marc has observed about hiring over the years is that right employees have to self-select into your company, even though that can be incredibly frustrating at times: “If you hired all the people you interviewed, it would turn out that 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them you probably shouldn’t have hired anyway. So what the best companies do is they provide a very stark idea of what the company is and what is it isn’t: ‘We are a company where people are expected to work 18 hour days and if you don’t like that, don’t come here’ or ‘We are a company where people expect to go home at 5pm every day and if you think that’ll be frustrating’ — whatever it is.” Marc gives the humorous example of Asana where it was a requirement that the whole company did yoga together: “If you like yoga, this is the company for you. If you don’t like yoga, don’t go there. You’re going to be asked to put your feet in positions that you’re completely uncomfortable with.” He continues: “I think the very best companies tend to be polarizing. So if in your hiring process, you’re turning people off as much as you’re turning them on because they’re deciding ‘this is clearly not the right fit for me,’ I think that’s a good thing.”

Startup Archive

69,518 次观看 • 6 个月前

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)
0:55

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

70,007 次观看 • 1 年前

Steve Jobs on what separates the successful founders from unsuccessful ones Steve is asked what the factors of success and common pitfalls are for young entrepreneurs. He responds: “I get asked this a lot, and I have a pretty standard answer. A lot of people come to me and say, ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’ And I go, ‘Oh, that’s great, what’s your idea?’ And they say they don’t have one yet. And I say I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about, because it’s a lot of work.” Steve continues: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing, and there are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough, and it consumes your life. I mean, if you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough because it’s pretty much an 18-hour-a-day job, 7 days a week for a while. So unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.” He concludes: “You’ve got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about. Otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that’s half the battle right there.”
1:23

Steve Jobs on what separates the successful founders from unsuccessful ones Steve is asked what the factors of success and common pitfalls are for young entrepreneurs. He responds: “I get asked this a lot, and I have a pretty standard answer. A lot of people come to me and say, ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’ And I go, ‘Oh, that’s great, what’s your idea?’ And they say they don’t have one yet. And I say I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about, because it’s a lot of work.” Steve continues: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing, and there are such rough moments in time that most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough, and it consumes your life. I mean, if you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough because it’s pretty much an 18-hour-a-day job, 7 days a week for a while. So unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.” He concludes: “You’ve got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about. Otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. And I think that’s half the battle right there.”

Startup Archive

80,791 次观看 • 9 个月前

. Naval: I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a scientist. If you are naturally curious and you’re rigorous and you discover new things, you’re a scientist. One of my Twitter quips was, “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life,” and that triggers a lot of people. But how else do you know? How else do you know if you’re smart? If you’re not getting what you want out of life, how smart are you really? You might have had bad luck once upon a time, but consistently, every time? I doubt it. And there’s two parts to that. One is actually testing yourself against the world to see if you get what you want. And the other is wanting the right things in the first place. You know, I wish I was 20 years old and had wings. Umm, not gonna happen. So you gotta wish for the right things too.
0:38

. Naval: I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a scientist. If you are naturally curious and you’re rigorous and you discover new things, you’re a scientist. One of my Twitter quips was, “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life,” and that triggers a lot of people. But how else do you know? How else do you know if you’re smart? If you’re not getting what you want out of life, how smart are you really? You might have had bad luck once upon a time, but consistently, every time? I doubt it. And there’s two parts to that. One is actually testing yourself against the world to see if you get what you want. And the other is wanting the right things in the first place. You know, I wish I was 20 years old and had wings. Umm, not gonna happen. So you gotta wish for the right things too.

Arjun Khemani

186,516 次观看 • 2 年前