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Q: Should startup founders be able to code? In the clip below, Naval Ravikant gives 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 that... anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” He continues: “If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages.” Of course there are some examples of non-technical founding teams building terrific companies (e.g. Craigslist). But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. As Sam Altman puts it in a separate interview: “For a very long time, the classic co-founding team was one very strong business person and one very strong tech person… now it has shifted towards two really strong tech people. That works a lot of the time and may be better overall.” And I think the reason for this—as Naval points out—is that when you can build the product yourself, your iteration cycles become so much faster. Another quote from Sam Altman in a previous Startup Archive Answer on the importance of fast iteration cycles: “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.”show more

Michael McGuiness

13,787 subscribers

509,926 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren •via X (Twitter)

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11 Kommentare

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

Join 3,500+ readers and get tactical advice from the world's best founders and investors delivered directly to your inbox here:

Profilbild von farsi

farsivor 2 Jahren

Especially if you don't want to be Zucc'd out of your idea.

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

Haha yes the Social Network shows exactly what could happen if you outsource development to an ambitious coder at Harvard

Profilbild von Luke V

Luke Vvor 2 Jahren

Reading this as a non-technical founder

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

😂

Profilbild von Yong-Soo Chung

Yong-Soo Chungvor 2 Jahren

It’s the faster iteration cycles hands down. You learn quicker, build faster, and multiply your chances of success.

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

💯

Profilbild von ludvig hambraeus 🇺🇸

ludvig hambraeus 🇺🇸vor 2 Jahren

sure. Super handy if you’re building an app or tech product - less so if you’re into organic salmon farming.

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

agree, totally depends on the product & company you're building

Profilbild von Nat Berman

Nat Bermanvor 2 Jahren

I think you should always know how to do the things you outsource. That way you know what to look for.

Profilbild von Mike McGuiness

Mike McGuinessvor 2 Jahren

Yes or only outsource things that are non-core parts of your business (e.g. finance & accounting)

Ähnliche Videos

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 that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” He continues: “If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages.” Video source: Forbes (2011)

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 that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” He continues: “If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages.” Video source: Forbes (2011)

Startup Archive

30,376 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Sam Altman: “Build the fastest-iterating company the world has ever seen” “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get that 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 the fastest iterating company the world has ever seen.” Source: Stanford Online

Sam Altman: “Build the fastest-iterating company the world has ever seen” “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get that 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 the fastest iterating company the world has ever seen.” Source: Stanford Online

Startup Archive

266,607 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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

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

Startup Archive

407,653 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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

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

Michael McGuiness

500,017 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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.”

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 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Sam Altman: “One of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time” “I don’t think you can beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. My new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. And I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try to go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth.” Sam continues: “And so I think that when you’re thinking about a startup, it’s really worthwhile to think about something you’re willing to make a very long-term commitment to because that is where the current void in the market is. You get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people… The best companies just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves. But they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you’re going to be one of those companies, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you… It is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long term by doing this company really well than a bunch of short term things along the way.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Sam Altman: “One of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time” “I don’t think you can beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. My new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. And I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try to go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth.” Sam continues: “And so I think that when you’re thinking about a startup, it’s really worthwhile to think about something you’re willing to make a very long-term commitment to because that is where the current void in the market is. You get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people… The best companies just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves. But they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you’re going to be one of those companies, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you… It is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long term by doing this company really well than a bunch of short term things along the way.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

49,283 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Naval Ravikant: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life" "There are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. The second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a 6'8" basketball player and I'm not going to get that. That's wanting something you can't get. But there's also wanting something that's a booby prize, prizes that are just not worth having, or that create their own problems." Naval explains how people end up in places they never meant to be: "If you're not careful, you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one you didn't even mean to get to. Usually people end up there because they're going on autopilot with societal expectations. Or out of guilt. Or out of mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people. Go to law school, go to med school, go to business school. Or it might be what your parents expect. Guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head so you'll be a good little monkey." He shares a problem most people have: "We run on these four-year cycles. You join a startup, you vest over four years. College is four years. High school is four years. You go to law school, that's a 5-year cycle. You become a lawyer, that's a 40-year cycle. These are very long cycles. But the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. We spend one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years." Naval's rule: "If you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Really thinking it through. 25% of the time." He explains the Secretary Theorem: "It turns out the optimal time to search is about a third. By a third of the way through, you've seen enough to know what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough. But here's the key: it's not time-based. It's iteration-based. You need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly. If you look at failed relationships, the biggest regret is usually staying after you knew it was over." Naval reframes the 10,000 hour rule: "Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours to mastery. I'd say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. Iteration is not repetition. Repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with learning and doing another version. That's error correction. If you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert." On pessimism vs. optimism: "You want to be skeptical about specific things, every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. If something fails, it was a learning experience. It was an iteration. As long as you learned something, it's a win. You don't want to jump into the first thing. But once you find the match, you have to be willing to go all in. Move your chips to the center of the table." He concludes: "Most people are stuck in this gray bit. 'I'm half in, but I don't really know.' That doesn't work. It's a barbell strategy, black or white. Explore quickly, cut losses fast. Then when you find the right thing, compound into it."

Naval Ravikant: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life" "There are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. The second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a 6'8" basketball player and I'm not going to get that. That's wanting something you can't get. But there's also wanting something that's a booby prize, prizes that are just not worth having, or that create their own problems." Naval explains how people end up in places they never meant to be: "If you're not careful, you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one you didn't even mean to get to. Usually people end up there because they're going on autopilot with societal expectations. Or out of guilt. Or out of mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people. Go to law school, go to med school, go to business school. Or it might be what your parents expect. Guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head so you'll be a good little monkey." He shares a problem most people have: "We run on these four-year cycles. You join a startup, you vest over four years. College is four years. High school is four years. You go to law school, that's a 5-year cycle. You become a lawyer, that's a 40-year cycle. These are very long cycles. But the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. We spend one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years." Naval's rule: "If you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Really thinking it through. 25% of the time." He explains the Secretary Theorem: "It turns out the optimal time to search is about a third. By a third of the way through, you've seen enough to know what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough. But here's the key: it's not time-based. It's iteration-based. You need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly. If you look at failed relationships, the biggest regret is usually staying after you knew it was over." Naval reframes the 10,000 hour rule: "Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours to mastery. I'd say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. Iteration is not repetition. Repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with learning and doing another version. That's error correction. If you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert." On pessimism vs. optimism: "You want to be skeptical about specific things, every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. If something fails, it was a learning experience. It was an iteration. As long as you learned something, it's a win. You don't want to jump into the first thing. But once you find the match, you have to be willing to go all in. Move your chips to the center of the table." He concludes: "Most people are stuck in this gray bit. 'I'm half in, but I don't really know.' That doesn't work. It's a barbell strategy, black or white. Explore quickly, cut losses fast. Then when you find the right thing, compound into it."

Jaynit

74,220 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

Startup Archive

565,774 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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."

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 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

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.”

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 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.

Michael McGuiness

890,425 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: 1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” 2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” 3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” 4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Startup Archive

57,689 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Naval Ravikant on why it's 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that: one is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place." Naval believes most people are proceeding unconsciously through life. As he puts it: "If you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. Usually, people end up there because they are going on autopilot with societal expectations or people's expectations. Out of guilt or mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people." On how little time we spend deciding: "We run on these four-year cycles. You go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. College you go for four years, high school you go for four years. These are very long cycles, the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short." He continues: "We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. People decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through." His rule: "I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like really thinking it. 25% of the time." On the secretary theorem: "The optimal time to search is somewhere around a third of the way through. You take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. By the time you've got about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough." But here's the catch: "It's actually not time-based; it's not based on one-third of the time, it's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. You need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly." On failed relationships: "If you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on." His reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours: "I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. Iteration is not repetition—repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. That's error correction." On modern society: "Modern society is far more forgiving of failure. Once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter." His approach: "You want to be skeptical about specific things—every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. You want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in." On labels: "Labels like pessimist, optimist, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Don't define yourself by trauma or PTSD because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it." Spend a year deciding. Take 10,000 iterations. Then go all in.

Naval Ravikant on why it's 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that: one is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place." Naval believes most people are proceeding unconsciously through life. As he puts it: "If you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. Usually, people end up there because they are going on autopilot with societal expectations or people's expectations. Out of guilt or mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people." On how little time we spend deciding: "We run on these four-year cycles. You go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. College you go for four years, high school you go for four years. These are very long cycles, the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short." He continues: "We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. People decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through." His rule: "I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like really thinking it. 25% of the time." On the secretary theorem: "The optimal time to search is somewhere around a third of the way through. You take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. By the time you've got about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough." But here's the catch: "It's actually not time-based; it's not based on one-third of the time, it's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. You need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly." On failed relationships: "If you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on." His reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours: "I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. Iteration is not repetition—repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. That's error correction." On modern society: "Modern society is far more forgiving of failure. Once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter." His approach: "You want to be skeptical about specific things—every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. You want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in." On labels: "Labels like pessimist, optimist, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Don't define yourself by trauma or PTSD because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it." Spend a year deciding. Take 10,000 iterations. Then go all in.

Jaynit

68,707 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

From Eric Vishria on how the top AI founders are building products completely opposite of the SaaS era: "One of the things that is really different in the AI world versus the SaaS world, is that in the SaaS world, over and over again, you had people who really understood the customer. And the problem. And then they understood a domain. They understood what the technology was more or less capable of. But it wasn't a real question of if you could build something or not. For example, take Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. CRM existed before Salesforce. HR management existed before Workday. Same thing with ServiceNow. So in every case, Salesforce followed Siebel. Workday followed Peoplesoft. ServiceNow followed Peregrine and Remedy, and others. So they were just kind of, cloud SaaS versions of the prior generation product. They just understood the customers. They understood the problem. And they were just like, here's a better version. And that evolved a little bit over time in SaaS land. But that's what it is. And so product development in that way was done by people who really understood the customer and the problems. And then just took advantage of the next wave. And this is almost diametrically opposite of product development in the AI era. When I look at the teams that are having the most success today, they have intimate knowledge of the models. They are right on the frontier of understanding which models are better at what, and why, and when. And what they're going to be good at and what they're not going to be good at. And what they're spending their time on, is figuring out how do I apply this capability of this model to this domain or to this user. So they're actually working inside out or technology out, versus customer problem in. And of course, they understand the customer problem. And a lot of times they have firsthand knowledge of it. But they're really close to the metal and capability, and they're applying it. And I think this is a really different way to develop products than in SaaS. I started my career as a product manager a long time ago, and it's almost the complete opposite of everything you learned. "Listen to the customer, understand it, then bring it back to the engineering and product teams." If you did that right now, ask a bunch of customers what they want out of AI, and you brought it back, for the most part, it may not be possible today with today's technology. Whereas the teams that are winning right now really understand the technology and are applying it out. And so I think this reversal matters. I think it's a big difference in terms of how companies are getting built. And maybe even the types of entrepreneurs that will be successful. I'm not sure. You're seeing some real change there. Look at the Bret Taylor's at Sierra. That's a super, super technical founder who really gets it. Brett and Clay really get it. You look at Michael and his co-founders at Cursor. They're super technical founders and they get it. They all really understand what these things can and can't do. And that's a pretty different dynamic relative to the way the best SaaS companies got built." Link in bio for the full conversation going deep on the current class of startups going from zero to $100m+ in ARR within 12 months.

From Eric Vishria on how the top AI founders are building products completely opposite of the SaaS era: "One of the things that is really different in the AI world versus the SaaS world, is that in the SaaS world, over and over again, you had people who really understood the customer. And the problem. And then they understood a domain. They understood what the technology was more or less capable of. But it wasn't a real question of if you could build something or not. For example, take Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. CRM existed before Salesforce. HR management existed before Workday. Same thing with ServiceNow. So in every case, Salesforce followed Siebel. Workday followed Peoplesoft. ServiceNow followed Peregrine and Remedy, and others. So they were just kind of, cloud SaaS versions of the prior generation product. They just understood the customers. They understood the problem. And they were just like, here's a better version. And that evolved a little bit over time in SaaS land. But that's what it is. And so product development in that way was done by people who really understood the customer and the problems. And then just took advantage of the next wave. And this is almost diametrically opposite of product development in the AI era. When I look at the teams that are having the most success today, they have intimate knowledge of the models. They are right on the frontier of understanding which models are better at what, and why, and when. And what they're going to be good at and what they're not going to be good at. And what they're spending their time on, is figuring out how do I apply this capability of this model to this domain or to this user. So they're actually working inside out or technology out, versus customer problem in. And of course, they understand the customer problem. And a lot of times they have firsthand knowledge of it. But they're really close to the metal and capability, and they're applying it. And I think this is a really different way to develop products than in SaaS. I started my career as a product manager a long time ago, and it's almost the complete opposite of everything you learned. "Listen to the customer, understand it, then bring it back to the engineering and product teams." If you did that right now, ask a bunch of customers what they want out of AI, and you brought it back, for the most part, it may not be possible today with today's technology. Whereas the teams that are winning right now really understand the technology and are applying it out. And so I think this reversal matters. I think it's a big difference in terms of how companies are getting built. And maybe even the types of entrepreneurs that will be successful. I'm not sure. You're seeing some real change there. Look at the Bret Taylor's at Sierra. That's a super, super technical founder who really gets it. Brett and Clay really get it. You look at Michael and his co-founders at Cursor. They're super technical founders and they get it. They all really understand what these things can and can't do. And that's a pretty different dynamic relative to the way the best SaaS companies got built." Link in bio for the full conversation going deep on the current class of startups going from zero to $100m+ in ARR within 12 months.

The Peel

209,752 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

“What did you think of Lando being booed at race because people and I've seen it online as well say he doesn't deserve the title because McLaren favored him over his teammate. Do you think that's total nonsense?” Jacques Villeneuve: “That's a little bit ridiculous. When there was some booing in some races, that was embarrassing. You should never boo a driver that's clean, doesn't do anything dirty, on track is respectful, and on top of it is super fast. What's wrong with people? That was embarrassing. And, had it been that Piastri was a second a lap faster than him and somehow Lando was winning because a lot of things were happening, his car breaking down every time, then you could start thinking, okay, that's really not cool. That's not fair. But that wasn't the case. And in the second half, Norris has been faster right at the beginning as well, last year as well. So there's this whole middle of the season where Piastri was driving a lot better than Norris and was getting the points. Norris had an engine blowing up, not Piastri. And so those fans, they don't look at that either. You have to look at the whole picture, at the whole season. And suddenly if your favorite is starting to go backwards, you just got to bite the bullet and accept it. Your favorite is just going backwards. That doesn't mean that the other one is treated better or the other one is undeserving just because the one you're a fan of is not winning right now. That’s really wrong. If you're a fan of the sport, then you have to be a fan of the sport and understand when your driver is maybe not cutting it at this point in time, even though he was before and he will in the future again. It's all a question of timing. But that's the price we have to pay now with social media and how big F1 has become. It's very passionate. The people are passionate and once, you know, fans come from fanatism, you stop thinking, when you get in that mindset and it happens to all of us. You want something so much that you get attached and you cannot - it's hard to start seeing reality. So you will try to mold the reality to your thought process and if your champion is not winning then it cannot be his fault. It has to be something from the outside. It has to be the team destroying his chance or not favoring and so on and so on and so on. But there's nothing concrete behind those comments. It's pure fandom and it'll always be like this. And ultimately it's not a bad thing. You know drivers at that - sportsman at that level have to grow a thick skin. If not, you don't deserve to be there. You just have to have a thick skin because they're all very happy to get the compliments. They love it when it's just positive, but it gets balanced out with negatives and you need to be able to take and accept the negatives as well. It goes both ways. You cannot have the good. You just have to be a thick skin and know that it's part and parcels of what's going on. And in one month, it will be forgotten and maybe everything will change and it be the other driver that suddenly will be criticized and so on. So, it's just that's just the way it is.”

“What did you think of Lando being booed at race because people and I've seen it online as well say he doesn't deserve the title because McLaren favored him over his teammate. Do you think that's total nonsense?” Jacques Villeneuve: “That's a little bit ridiculous. When there was some booing in some races, that was embarrassing. You should never boo a driver that's clean, doesn't do anything dirty, on track is respectful, and on top of it is super fast. What's wrong with people? That was embarrassing. And, had it been that Piastri was a second a lap faster than him and somehow Lando was winning because a lot of things were happening, his car breaking down every time, then you could start thinking, okay, that's really not cool. That's not fair. But that wasn't the case. And in the second half, Norris has been faster right at the beginning as well, last year as well. So there's this whole middle of the season where Piastri was driving a lot better than Norris and was getting the points. Norris had an engine blowing up, not Piastri. And so those fans, they don't look at that either. You have to look at the whole picture, at the whole season. And suddenly if your favorite is starting to go backwards, you just got to bite the bullet and accept it. Your favorite is just going backwards. That doesn't mean that the other one is treated better or the other one is undeserving just because the one you're a fan of is not winning right now. That’s really wrong. If you're a fan of the sport, then you have to be a fan of the sport and understand when your driver is maybe not cutting it at this point in time, even though he was before and he will in the future again. It's all a question of timing. But that's the price we have to pay now with social media and how big F1 has become. It's very passionate. The people are passionate and once, you know, fans come from fanatism, you stop thinking, when you get in that mindset and it happens to all of us. You want something so much that you get attached and you cannot - it's hard to start seeing reality. So you will try to mold the reality to your thought process and if your champion is not winning then it cannot be his fault. It has to be something from the outside. It has to be the team destroying his chance or not favoring and so on and so on and so on. But there's nothing concrete behind those comments. It's pure fandom and it'll always be like this. And ultimately it's not a bad thing. You know drivers at that - sportsman at that level have to grow a thick skin. If not, you don't deserve to be there. You just have to have a thick skin because they're all very happy to get the compliments. They love it when it's just positive, but it gets balanced out with negatives and you need to be able to take and accept the negatives as well. It goes both ways. You cannot have the good. You just have to be a thick skin and know that it's part and parcels of what's going on. And in one month, it will be forgotten and maybe everything will change and it be the other driver that suddenly will be criticized and so on. So, it's just that's just the way it is.”

naenia ¹ ⁶³

29,833 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Naval Ravikant: “You only have to be right once” In the clip below, Naval reflects on how it took 13 years after starting his first startup when he was 23 before founding AngelList. “Entrepreneurial ventures fail all the time. Most of my companies failed. I actually started seven companies, and I’ve launched about 40 or 50 projects over my career. And AngelList is the first one that I would truly say is product, market, entrepreneur fit for me that might succeed down the road.” He tells the audience: “It’s a low hit rate over your career, but you only have to be right once… So just keep trying, just keep iterating… a lot of it is market timing and you learn a lot of lessons.” In his essay How To Be Successful, Sam Altman writes: “’I will fail many times, and I will be really right once’ is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.”

Naval Ravikant: “You only have to be right once” In the clip below, Naval reflects on how it took 13 years after starting his first startup when he was 23 before founding AngelList. “Entrepreneurial ventures fail all the time. Most of my companies failed. I actually started seven companies, and I’ve launched about 40 or 50 projects over my career. And AngelList is the first one that I would truly say is product, market, entrepreneur fit for me that might succeed down the road.” He tells the audience: “It’s a low hit rate over your career, but you only have to be right once… So just keep trying, just keep iterating… a lot of it is market timing and you learn a lot of lessons.” In his essay How To Be Successful, Sam Altman writes: “’I will fail many times, and I will be really right once’ is the entrepreneurs’ way. You have to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky.”

Startup Archive

85,454 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

Startup Archive

26,337 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen

Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas As the former CEO of Y Combinator puts it in the clip below: “There’s a common misconception that your idea has to be great to start a company, and the first thing I want to do is destroy that misconception.” Michael was one of the cofounders of JustinTV, which later become Twitch and sold to Amazon for almost $1B. Their original idea was to create an online reality TV show—very different from where Twitch eventually ended up. Rather than falling for the trap of thinking that your initial startup idea has to be great, Michael advises founders to start with a problem: “Starting with ideas is tricky because people immediately want to grade your idea. It’s a lot easier to start with a problem and think about how you grade a problem.” Ideally the problem you set out to solve is one you've experienced personally or have some sort of connection to. You should ask yourself: “why am I uniquely qualified to work on this problem?” Is there some unique angle or approach you're taking to the problem that you understand but you don't believe others understand? Peter Thiel argues that “great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see." After identifying a problem, you’ll want to start thinking about your MVP. What's the first solution you're going to build and release to see if you can help your initial users solve this problem? But don’t fall in love with your MVP. As Michael puts it: “A lot of people fall in love with their product and are not in love with their problem or their customer. I advise the opposite. Be in love with your problem. Be in love with your customer. And treat your product in a way that can change, develop, and improve.” And once you have an MVP, you should have a strong opinion about who your initial customer is and handpick all of your initial users. The goal with an MVP is not to see how many people want to use your product. It's to see if your solution actually solves the problem for your initial target customers. “The best startups very heavily filter the people who are able to use the initial product and make sure that they’re the right type of initial customer.”

Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas As the former CEO of Y Combinator puts it in the clip below: “There’s a common misconception that your idea has to be great to start a company, and the first thing I want to do is destroy that misconception.” Michael was one of the cofounders of JustinTV, which later become Twitch and sold to Amazon for almost $1B. Their original idea was to create an online reality TV show—very different from where Twitch eventually ended up. Rather than falling for the trap of thinking that your initial startup idea has to be great, Michael advises founders to start with a problem: “Starting with ideas is tricky because people immediately want to grade your idea. It’s a lot easier to start with a problem and think about how you grade a problem.” Ideally the problem you set out to solve is one you've experienced personally or have some sort of connection to. You should ask yourself: “why am I uniquely qualified to work on this problem?” Is there some unique angle or approach you're taking to the problem that you understand but you don't believe others understand? Peter Thiel argues that “great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see." After identifying a problem, you’ll want to start thinking about your MVP. What's the first solution you're going to build and release to see if you can help your initial users solve this problem? But don’t fall in love with your MVP. As Michael puts it: “A lot of people fall in love with their product and are not in love with their problem or their customer. I advise the opposite. Be in love with your problem. Be in love with your customer. And treat your product in a way that can change, develop, and improve.” And once you have an MVP, you should have a strong opinion about who your initial customer is and handpick all of your initial users. The goal with an MVP is not to see how many people want to use your product. It's to see if your solution actually solves the problem for your initial target customers. “The best startups very heavily filter the people who are able to use the initial product and make sure that they’re the right type of initial customer.”

Startup Archive

101,023 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren