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Sam Altman: “Copycat startups rarely work” “People worry about copycat startups a lot, and I don’t think you need to.” Sam explains that Y Combinator did a study on copycat startups and found that there are very few copycat startups that actually go on to be successful. “The copycats... show more

Startup Archive

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30,053 次观看 • 4 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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Is OpenAI going to outcompete AI startups? "I feel like Sam Altman has talked about this a bunch. It's not enough to drop AI in your business. You have to actually build a business. I don't think OpenAI is necessarily out to get all the startups. I actually think that on the API side, they very much hope that a lot of them do really, really well." Garry Tan on Y Combinator's Lightcone Podcast

Is OpenAI going to outcompete AI startups? "I feel like Sam Altman has talked about this a bunch. It's not enough to drop AI in your business. You have to actually build a business. I don't think OpenAI is necessarily out to get all the startups. I actually think that on the API side, they very much hope that a lot of them do really, really well." Garry Tan on Y Combinator's Lightcone Podcast

Overlap: Business & Tech

75,193 次观看 • 1 年前

Sam Altman on what startups get wrong about culture A lot of startups think they have a great culture because there’s free food, everyone does yoga together, and everyone’s super nice to each other. But as Sam explains: “The culture that matters to the best people is one where they can just come and be really productive and be around other great people. If you have a culture which looks good on the surface but somehow rejects super talented people… I think that can be a real problem.” In this interview from 2017, Sam warns that it’s very easy to get entitled employees: “Everyone wants to work exactly how they want. They want to be really rich right now. If the company is not going to get liquid next year, they’re going to go somewhere else.” It may sound crazy to expect employees to join a company and stay there for 5-10 years, but at the best companies, that’s what happens. Sam urges founders to ask themselves: “What do we have to do to get the best people to stay at our company for 5-10 years?” Then go make that your culture. “One of the things that is included in that is wild success for the company and a mission that people care about,” Sam argues. “You need to create an environment where really great people will want to come, work with each other, and not have to deal with the crap that they do at most companies.” Culture isn’t benefits. Culture is how you hold each other accountable to the mission and help your team do the best work of their lives. Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Sam Altman on what startups get wrong about culture A lot of startups think they have a great culture because there’s free food, everyone does yoga together, and everyone’s super nice to each other. But as Sam explains: “The culture that matters to the best people is one where they can just come and be really productive and be around other great people. If you have a culture which looks good on the surface but somehow rejects super talented people… I think that can be a real problem.” In this interview from 2017, Sam warns that it’s very easy to get entitled employees: “Everyone wants to work exactly how they want. They want to be really rich right now. If the company is not going to get liquid next year, they’re going to go somewhere else.” It may sound crazy to expect employees to join a company and stay there for 5-10 years, but at the best companies, that’s what happens. Sam urges founders to ask themselves: “What do we have to do to get the best people to stay at our company for 5-10 years?” Then go make that your culture. “One of the things that is included in that is wild success for the company and a mission that people care about,” Sam argues. “You need to create an environment where really great people will want to come, work with each other, and not have to deal with the crap that they do at most companies.” Culture isn’t benefits. Culture is how you hold each other accountable to the mission and help your team do the best work of their lives. Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Startup Archive

17,790 次观看 • 4 个月前

Sam Altman: “Most people give up on things way too early” “Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something, there’s no perfect answer to that. It’s really challenging to even get that approximately correct. But I think most people give up on things way too early.” Sam continues: “The mistake that most people make — particularly young entrepreneurs — is they try something, it does not immediately work, and after seven weeks, they say, ‘I tried this thing and it’s just not meant to be.’… The satirical version of this are people who are 23 and have started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before it could ever possibly be successful. These things are really hard. They take a really long time. There are a lot of critics. There are a lot of people who say: your thing sucks; it’s going to fail; it’s really stupid.” There’s also what Y Combinator calls “The Trough of Sorrow” where, as Sam describes, “no one even decides to say it sucks because no one cares at all. And that is at least as demotivating.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work. Sam explains: “Most of the founders that I have spent a lot of time with that have gone on to be super successful spent a very long time on their idea when a lot of other people would have given up. Either people said it sucks, or people said nothing about it at all. And a framework that I have for when to give up versus when to keep working is that it should be an internal, rather than an external, decision. If people aren’t using it or people are saying it’s bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to that — they might be right. But the best entrepreneurs I know make an internal decision about when to give up or when to keep working on something. It’s basically: when you have run out of ideas, and something is not working, then it is a good time to stop.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Sam Altman: “Most people give up on things way too early” “Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something, there’s no perfect answer to that. It’s really challenging to even get that approximately correct. But I think most people give up on things way too early.” Sam continues: “The mistake that most people make — particularly young entrepreneurs — is they try something, it does not immediately work, and after seven weeks, they say, ‘I tried this thing and it’s just not meant to be.’… The satirical version of this are people who are 23 and have started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before it could ever possibly be successful. These things are really hard. They take a really long time. There are a lot of critics. There are a lot of people who say: your thing sucks; it’s going to fail; it’s really stupid.” There’s also what Y Combinator calls “The Trough of Sorrow” where, as Sam describes, “no one even decides to say it sucks because no one cares at all. And that is at least as demotivating.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work. Sam explains: “Most of the founders that I have spent a lot of time with that have gone on to be super successful spent a very long time on their idea when a lot of other people would have given up. Either people said it sucks, or people said nothing about it at all. And a framework that I have for when to give up versus when to keep working is that it should be an internal, rather than an external, decision. If people aren’t using it or people are saying it’s bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to that — they might be right. But the best entrepreneurs I know make an internal decision about when to give up or when to keep working on something. It’s basically: when you have run out of ideas, and something is not working, then it is a good time to stop.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

31,721 次观看 • 1 年前

Paul Graham explains why startups shouldn’t stress over competitors “What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders.” Y Combinator has seen over 5000 companies. Very few of them were killed by competitors. “I tell startups that basically you have the same protection against competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft when flying through clouds — space is large.” When startups freak out about a new competitor, PG advises them: “It’s sort of like if you’re running the hundred meters and suddenly a lane appears with another runner in it. What should you do? Run as fast as you can, just like you presumably were.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Paul Graham explains why startups shouldn’t stress over competitors “What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders.” Y Combinator has seen over 5000 companies. Very few of them were killed by competitors. “I tell startups that basically you have the same protection against competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft when flying through clouds — space is large.” When startups freak out about a new competitor, PG advises them: “It’s sort of like if you’re running the hundred meters and suddenly a lane appears with another runner in it. What should you do? Run as fast as you can, just like you presumably were.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

27,802 次观看 • 1 年前

Sam Altman: A long-term commitment is the only arbitrage opportunity left in startups “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.” Video Source: Stanford Online

Sam Altman: A long-term commitment is the only arbitrage opportunity left in startups “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.” Video Source: Stanford Online

Startup Archive

131,168 次观看 • 1 年前

Marc Andreessen on why startups need to scale to have impact: “Startups are where a lot of the innovation happens.” “The thing that startups can’t do until they become big companies is have a big impact on the world.” “You have to get big to have a big impact.” “Otherwise the opportunity to make an impact with what you’ve invented... is going to be cut off and somebody else is going to step in and do it.” Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 at Fortune Brainstorm 2009:

Marc Andreessen on why startups need to scale to have impact: “Startups are where a lot of the innovation happens.” “The thing that startups can’t do until they become big companies is have a big impact on the world.” “You have to get big to have a big impact.” “Otherwise the opportunity to make an impact with what you’ve invented... is going to be cut off and somebody else is going to step in and do it.” Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 at Fortune Brainstorm 2009:

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🚨 ELON: STARTING A COMPANY IS BRUTAL “A lot of times, people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s not. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right because you’re only spending your time on things that are going wrong. A friend says ‘Starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.’ Most startups fail—90%, arguably 99%, of startups fail. That’s the ‘staring into the abyss’ part. The ‘eating glass’ part is that you will work on the problems the company needs you to solve, not the problems you want to work on.” Source: Historic Vids

Mario Nawfal

491,299 次观看 • 2 年前

Balaji Srinivasan on what he looks for in the founders he backs “You’re really looking for people who are very fast, very resourceful, very positive… And obviously high intelligence, work ethic, all that type of stuff, but I think the positivity thing [is really important].” As Balaji explains, startups are so hard and you need to be positive and resilient. “Lots of people will break if you put enough pressure on them and you don’t really know who has titanium adamantium skeletons until that pressure actually arrives.” He continues: “As a VC, an investor, or an angel, what you really want to do is throw coins into a hot air balloon in the sense that you want to back somebody who has independent lift and who’s going to take off on their own… The money is a help but it’s not even necessary for you to do it. They would be able to do it even with you. That’s a person who, as an investor, you want to bet on typically.” Video source: Startup Grind (2017)

Balaji Srinivasan on what he looks for in the founders he backs “You’re really looking for people who are very fast, very resourceful, very positive… And obviously high intelligence, work ethic, all that type of stuff, but I think the positivity thing [is really important].” As Balaji explains, startups are so hard and you need to be positive and resilient. “Lots of people will break if you put enough pressure on them and you don’t really know who has titanium adamantium skeletons until that pressure actually arrives.” He continues: “As a VC, an investor, or an angel, what you really want to do is throw coins into a hot air balloon in the sense that you want to back somebody who has independent lift and who’s going to take off on their own… The money is a help but it’s not even necessary for you to do it. They would be able to do it even with you. That’s a person who, as an investor, you want to bet on typically.” Video source: Startup Grind (2017)

Startup Archive

11,541 次观看 • 1 年前

There are startups burning $10M a year and have no way to raise a new round that can use AI to become profitable and grow @ 50%/yr compounding. Art Agrawal did exactly this at Jerry and I expect it to save a lot of startups. AI is changing all startups not just new ones.

There are startups burning $10M a year and have no way to raise a new round that can use AI to become profitable and grow @ 50%/yr compounding. Art Agrawal did exactly this at Jerry and I expect it to save a lot of startups. AI is changing all startups not just new ones.

Garry Tan

186,195 次观看 • 1 年前

Palmer Luckey: “It doesn’t take that much bravery when you’re young to start a company” “Everyone talks about how scary it is to start a company, but it really depends on where you are in your life. If you are someone with a family and with kids and with a stable job, then that totally makes sense. What I don’t buy - and I always push back on - is this idea that starting a company as a recent college graduate or someone taking a break from college is some kind of crazy, incredible sacrifice…. You don’t have a family to take care of. You don’t have a mortgage. You don’t have a career. You have nothing.” Palmer continues: “I guess dropping out of school, maybe. But if you can get your head past that, then it’s actually pretty easy. Usually what I tell people is - if you’re going to start a company, realize the stakes are lower when you’re young than they will ever be… I don’t think it takes that much bravery when you’re young to start a company. And I think more people should do that and recognize that really they’re a coward for not … You have nowhere to go but up and nothing to waste but time.” Video source: Internet Marketing (2021)

Palmer Luckey: “It doesn’t take that much bravery when you’re young to start a company” “Everyone talks about how scary it is to start a company, but it really depends on where you are in your life. If you are someone with a family and with kids and with a stable job, then that totally makes sense. What I don’t buy - and I always push back on - is this idea that starting a company as a recent college graduate or someone taking a break from college is some kind of crazy, incredible sacrifice…. You don’t have a family to take care of. You don’t have a mortgage. You don’t have a career. You have nothing.” Palmer continues: “I guess dropping out of school, maybe. But if you can get your head past that, then it’s actually pretty easy. Usually what I tell people is - if you’re going to start a company, realize the stakes are lower when you’re young than they will ever be… I don’t think it takes that much bravery when you’re young to start a company. And I think more people should do that and recognize that really they’re a coward for not … You have nowhere to go but up and nothing to waste but time.” Video source: Internet Marketing (2021)

Startup Archive

119,063 次观看 • 9 个月前

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

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

Startup Archive

41,088 次观看 • 1 年前

The fact that the universe doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean that other humans don’t care about you, or that we don’t have to care about other humans. That is, there is a purpose, there is a meaning: that is, to make people as well off as possible, to increase flourishing, to increase knowledge and life and health and freedom and safety. These are really, really meaningful. At least, I think they are. I don’t see anything wrong with them. I don’t think that that should leave you empty. And the fact that we live in a cold universe—that is, the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the behavior of viruses and bacteria and parasites and fungi—they don’t care about you. I’m sorry, they don’t care about you. And the sooner you realize that, the more you’ll be able to attend to the things that really do matter. Human Progress

The fact that the universe doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean that other humans don’t care about you, or that we don’t have to care about other humans. That is, there is a purpose, there is a meaning: that is, to make people as well off as possible, to increase flourishing, to increase knowledge and life and health and freedom and safety. These are really, really meaningful. At least, I think they are. I don’t see anything wrong with them. I don’t think that that should leave you empty. And the fact that we live in a cold universe—that is, the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the behavior of viruses and bacteria and parasites and fungi—they don’t care about you. I’m sorry, they don’t care about you. And the sooner you realize that, the more you’ll be able to attend to the things that really do matter. Human Progress

Steven Pinker

70,883 次观看 • 3 个月前

CopyCat is the AI RPA. Companies, from enterprises to startups, are saving thousands of hours building browser agents to automate gov sites, legacy portals, and dashboards, where APIs can’t. Congrats on the launch, Graham Sabin, zyad & Abhi Balijepalli!

CopyCat is the AI RPA. Companies, from enterprises to startups, are saving thousands of hours building browser agents to automate gov sites, legacy portals, and dashboards, where APIs can’t. Congrats on the launch, Graham Sabin, zyad & Abhi Balijepalli!

Y Combinator

24,933 次观看 • 11 个月前

Sam Altman on the biggest mistake startup CEOs make when scaling a company “When you’re a Seed or Series A company, you spend a huge amount of effort recruiting, but almost no effort retaining talent — and that is [the right strategy] at the beginning. But if you don’t shift to viewing retaining talent as much of your job as recruiting talent, you eventually have some level of a disaster on your hands.” Sam recalls Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Y Combinator and saying he only hires people he’d report to if the roles were reversed. Sam reflects on this: “If you’re hiring people that are that good — which you should be doing — they have as many opportunities as you do… And so if you don’t make the role good enough that you yourself would stay in it, then you have a hard time retaining your best people for a long period of time.” Sam gives three pieces of tactical advice for CEOs who want to retain their best people: 1. Spend one-on-one time with your best people “The thing that your best 5-10 people crave the most is time with you, the CEO. And that is something that as people get busier, they spend less and less time on. Some of the best CEOs in our portfolio, every month they will take out for a one-on-one dinner or drinks or something each of their best 10 people. This is a huge time commitment. If you think about it, you only get 30 dinner slots in a month. It’s a really big thing to do. But I think it actually works because that is the thing these people really crave… They want you to ask them what you think they should be doing and listen to them and have a personal connection. That’s super important.” 2. Continually give them more responsibility “I think if you stop giving people more responsibility, they will eventually leave. If they get to take on new tasks every year or additional tasks every year, they’re happier.” 3. Proactively re-up their compensation “I think most founders are very bad about proactively re-upping — to the level that they should — their top 5-10 lieutenants.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2016)

Sam Altman on the biggest mistake startup CEOs make when scaling a company “When you’re a Seed or Series A company, you spend a huge amount of effort recruiting, but almost no effort retaining talent — and that is [the right strategy] at the beginning. But if you don’t shift to viewing retaining talent as much of your job as recruiting talent, you eventually have some level of a disaster on your hands.” Sam recalls Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Y Combinator and saying he only hires people he’d report to if the roles were reversed. Sam reflects on this: “If you’re hiring people that are that good — which you should be doing — they have as many opportunities as you do… And so if you don’t make the role good enough that you yourself would stay in it, then you have a hard time retaining your best people for a long period of time.” Sam gives three pieces of tactical advice for CEOs who want to retain their best people: 1. Spend one-on-one time with your best people “The thing that your best 5-10 people crave the most is time with you, the CEO. And that is something that as people get busier, they spend less and less time on. Some of the best CEOs in our portfolio, every month they will take out for a one-on-one dinner or drinks or something each of their best 10 people. This is a huge time commitment. If you think about it, you only get 30 dinner slots in a month. It’s a really big thing to do. But I think it actually works because that is the thing these people really crave… They want you to ask them what you think they should be doing and listen to them and have a personal connection. That’s super important.” 2. Continually give them more responsibility “I think if you stop giving people more responsibility, they will eventually leave. If they get to take on new tasks every year or additional tasks every year, they’re happier.” 3. Proactively re-up their compensation “I think most founders are very bad about proactively re-upping — to the level that they should — their top 5-10 lieutenants.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2016)

Startup Archive

63,966 次观看 • 1 年前

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

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

Startup Archive

407,653 次观看 • 2 年前

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 次观看 • 2 年前

Sam Altman on the importance of momentum and why burnout doesn’t come from working too hard “I was told, and I thought for a long time, that you get burned out from working too hard. At least in my own experience, what I’ve found is that burnout actually comes from failing and things not working.” Sam continues: “Momentum is really energizing. The lack of momentum is super draining. And I find that I have infinite energy to work on things that I find interesting and that are working, and almost none to work on things that I either don’t find interesting or aren’t working.” He offers the following advice to startup founders: “I think you see a lot of founders try something and fail, and they assume that they just can’t work hard enough or don’t have enough energy or passion or whatever. And that’s actually not true. It’s just that that thing didn’t work. And what you should do is shut that company down, go on vacation, and try again.” He concludes: “When you look at really successful people and say, How do they get all those things done? It’s that they have the benefit of momentum. And momentum is energizing.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Sam Altman on the importance of momentum and why burnout doesn’t come from working too hard “I was told, and I thought for a long time, that you get burned out from working too hard. At least in my own experience, what I’ve found is that burnout actually comes from failing and things not working.” Sam continues: “Momentum is really energizing. The lack of momentum is super draining. And I find that I have infinite energy to work on things that I find interesting and that are working, and almost none to work on things that I either don’t find interesting or aren’t working.” He offers the following advice to startup founders: “I think you see a lot of founders try something and fail, and they assume that they just can’t work hard enough or don’t have enough energy or passion or whatever. And that’s actually not true. It’s just that that thing didn’t work. And what you should do is shut that company down, go on vacation, and try again.” He concludes: “When you look at really successful people and say, How do they get all those things done? It’s that they have the benefit of momentum. And momentum is energizing.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

122,846 次观看 • 8 个月前

Startups are like StarCraft justin waldron, co-founder, Zynga & gemzfun: “This idea is Actions Per Minute. If you look at StarCraft players, basically the more actions per minute they do, generally the better player they are. I like to think that startups are a lot like that.”

Startups are like StarCraft justin waldron, co-founder, Zynga & gemzfun: “This idea is Actions Per Minute. If you look at StarCraft players, basically the more actions per minute they do, generally the better player they are. I like to think that startups are a lot like that.”

Press Start Capital 👉🎮

48,915 次观看 • 1 年前

Q: Why is it easier to start a hard company than an easy company? In the clip below, Sam Altman tells the class at Stanford: “It’s easier to start a hard company than an easy company. Most people—especially young people—want to pick something that doesn’t sound too ambitious. They say to themselves: ‘starting a company sounds really hard. I better pick the easiest possible company.’” But as Sam explains: “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do. If you start a hard company though and you inspire passionate people—for example, if you are working on general AI or supersonic airplanes or nuclear power—you’ll find a lot more people who are excited about that than another derivative idea.” He elaborates on this idea even further in a blog post from four years ago: “The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful… An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind. If people care about your success because you seem committed to doing something significant, it’s a background force helping you with hiring, advice, partnerships, fundraising, etc.” He continues: “Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars. Be willing to make a very long-term commitment to what you’re doing. Most people aren’t, which is part of the reason they pick ‘easy’ startups. In a world of compounding advantages where most people are operating on a 3 year timeframe and you’re operating on a 10 year timeframe, you’ll have a very large edge.”

Q: Why is it easier to start a hard company than an easy company? In the clip below, Sam Altman tells the class at Stanford: “It’s easier to start a hard company than an easy company. Most people—especially young people—want to pick something that doesn’t sound too ambitious. They say to themselves: ‘starting a company sounds really hard. I better pick the easiest possible company.’” But as Sam explains: “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do. If you start a hard company though and you inspire passionate people—for example, if you are working on general AI or supersonic airplanes or nuclear power—you’ll find a lot more people who are excited about that than another derivative idea.” He elaborates on this idea even further in a blog post from four years ago: “The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful… An easy startup is a headwind; a hard startup is a tailwind. If people care about your success because you seem committed to doing something significant, it’s a background force helping you with hiring, advice, partnerships, fundraising, etc.” He continues: “Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars. Be willing to make a very long-term commitment to what you’re doing. Most people aren’t, which is part of the reason they pick ‘easy’ startups. In a world of compounding advantages where most people are operating on a 3 year timeframe and you’re operating on a 10 year timeframe, you’ll have a very large edge.”

Michael McGuiness

504,007 次观看 • 2 年前