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Sam Altman: “Hire for values first, aptitude second, and skills third.” Most executive recruiters, Sam argues, will reverse this order: “If you say I need to hire a CFO, they will bring you people with 20 years of experience as a CFO at vaguely similar companies. But unfortunately, it’s... usually like 20 years of the exact same year of experience over and over again.” But if you’re trying to scale fast, values are most important: “You really need someone who is aligned with the values of the company so that when things change or when they have to make a decision, they’ll make the one you would make if you can’t be there or they will be a good team player and go do that thing.” Sam continues: “You need someone who has high aptitude because the role is going to constantly shift. And the rate of learning - the rate of improvement - dominates skills.” And then skills obviously matter, but for Sam it’s third on the list: “The very best companies take this exceptionally far in how much they’re willing to hire a non-traditionally qualified executive.” Video source: Y Combinator (2017)show more

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Sam Altman: “You want to hire for values first, aptitude second, and skills third.”

Sam Altman: “You want to hire for values first, aptitude second, and skills third.”

Z Fellows

22,771 views • 6 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg on why he prefers to recruit people directly out of college In this interview from 2005, a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is asked what he looks for in a new hire. There’s two things, he says. “Number one is raw intelligence. You can hire someone who has been doing software engineering for 10 years, and if they’ve been doing it for 10 years, that’s probably what they’ll be doing for the rest of their life. That’s cool — there are some things that that person can do and they’re definitely useful in an organization and can do a lot of stuff. But if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker. Within a very short amount of time they’ll be able to do a lot of things that [the person with 10 years of experience] will never be able to do. So that’s the most important thing that I look for.” The second thing he looks for is alignment with what the company is trying to do: “People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they’re not going to work hard or care enough to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed. The best people I’ve hired so far have been people who didn’t really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electric engineers out of Stanford to do programming stuff, and they had very little programming experience going in, but they were really smart and really willing to go at it. The guy who just wrote photos was one of those guys, and if you’re willing to just do whatever it takes to get photos out, then you’re probably more valuable than someone who is just a career software engineer.” He concludes: “Those are the things I’m looking for and why I would rather recruit people out of college.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2005)

Mark Zuckerberg on why he prefers to recruit people directly out of college In this interview from 2005, a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is asked what he looks for in a new hire. There’s two things, he says. “Number one is raw intelligence. You can hire someone who has been doing software engineering for 10 years, and if they’ve been doing it for 10 years, that’s probably what they’ll be doing for the rest of their life. That’s cool — there are some things that that person can do and they’re definitely useful in an organization and can do a lot of stuff. But if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker. Within a very short amount of time they’ll be able to do a lot of things that [the person with 10 years of experience] will never be able to do. So that’s the most important thing that I look for.” The second thing he looks for is alignment with what the company is trying to do: “People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they’re not going to work hard or care enough to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed. The best people I’ve hired so far have been people who didn’t really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electric engineers out of Stanford to do programming stuff, and they had very little programming experience going in, but they were really smart and really willing to go at it. The guy who just wrote photos was one of those guys, and if you’re willing to just do whatever it takes to get photos out, then you’re probably more valuable than someone who is just a career software engineer.” He concludes: “Those are the things I’m looking for and why I would rather recruit people out of college.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2005)

Startup Archive

54,696 views • 6 months ago

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 views • 4 months ago

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 views • 1 year ago

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

167,320 views • 9 months ago

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 views • 1 year ago

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 views • 5 months ago

Brian still spends over two hours a day on recruiting and personally hires the top 200 people at Airbnb. I loved this idea of being in the flow of talent to find the best people: "Don't do searches. Build pipelines. I try to map out all the best people in the Valley. So let's say I need to hire really good engineers. I don't do searches. I just informationally meet the best engineers in the world. Every meeting, the job is to get the next meeting, meet someone else. The mistake people make when they hire. They go, "I need to hire a blank." So they hire a search firm. They give you 50 profiles, and you pick the best one. That is the wrong way to do it. The best way to do it is pipeline recruiting. You're constantly recruiting, you're constantly meeting people. in advance of searches. And all of it is referral based. The two ways to find out if people are good – is to start with the results and work backwards to the people. Find an ad you like and figure out who made that ad. Start with the results. Work backwards to people. Don't start with the resume. The other thing to do is just keep asking people to build your Rolodex. The moment I find somebody that's really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. And I build these little mafias and they tell you who the other good people are. I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive team, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal. You always want to be marrying up, hiring people of the future. It should be like we're reaching. If you can hire them without my help, we're not reaching far enough. You want to hire the very best person you can."

Brian still spends over two hours a day on recruiting and personally hires the top 200 people at Airbnb. I loved this idea of being in the flow of talent to find the best people: "Don't do searches. Build pipelines. I try to map out all the best people in the Valley. So let's say I need to hire really good engineers. I don't do searches. I just informationally meet the best engineers in the world. Every meeting, the job is to get the next meeting, meet someone else. The mistake people make when they hire. They go, "I need to hire a blank." So they hire a search firm. They give you 50 profiles, and you pick the best one. That is the wrong way to do it. The best way to do it is pipeline recruiting. You're constantly recruiting, you're constantly meeting people. in advance of searches. And all of it is referral based. The two ways to find out if people are good – is to start with the results and work backwards to the people. Find an ad you like and figure out who made that ad. Start with the results. Work backwards to people. Don't start with the resume. The other thing to do is just keep asking people to build your Rolodex. The moment I find somebody that's really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. And I build these little mafias and they tell you who the other good people are. I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive team, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal. You always want to be marrying up, hiring people of the future. It should be like we're reaching. If you can hire them without my help, we're not reaching far enough. You want to hire the very best person you can."

Patrick OShaughnessy

316,727 views • 2 months ago

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 views • 2 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg: "I'd rather hire someone with raw intelligence and no experience than a 10-year veteran" "The two most important things I look for, number one is just raw intelligence." Zuckerberg explains why: "You can hire someone who is a software engineer and has been doing it for 10 years. If they've been doing it for 10 years, that's probably what they're doing for their life. And that's cool. There are things that person can do. They're definitely useful in an organization." But here's the tradeoff: "If you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has way less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker. Within a very short amount of time, they'll be able to do a lot of things that the experienced person may never be able to do." The second thing he looks for: "Alignment with what we're trying to do. People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable. But if they don't really believe in it, they're not going to work hard. Even if they're a smart guy who doesn't have the relevant experience, if they don't care enough, they're not going to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed." On who he's actually hired: "The best people I've hired so far have been people who didn't really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electrical engineers out of Stanford as new programming staff. They had very little programming experience going in. But just really smart. Really willing to go at it." He gives an example: "The guy who built Photos was one of those guys. If you're willing to just go and do whatever it takes to get it out, you're probably more valuable than someone who's just a career software engineer."

Mark Zuckerberg: "I'd rather hire someone with raw intelligence and no experience than a 10-year veteran" "The two most important things I look for, number one is just raw intelligence." Zuckerberg explains why: "You can hire someone who is a software engineer and has been doing it for 10 years. If they've been doing it for 10 years, that's probably what they're doing for their life. And that's cool. There are things that person can do. They're definitely useful in an organization." But here's the tradeoff: "If you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has way less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker. Within a very short amount of time, they'll be able to do a lot of things that the experienced person may never be able to do." The second thing he looks for: "Alignment with what we're trying to do. People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable. But if they don't really believe in it, they're not going to work hard. Even if they're a smart guy who doesn't have the relevant experience, if they don't care enough, they're not going to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed." On who he's actually hired: "The best people I've hired so far have been people who didn't really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electrical engineers out of Stanford as new programming staff. They had very little programming experience going in. But just really smart. Really willing to go at it." He gives an example: "The guy who built Photos was one of those guys. If you're willing to just go and do whatever it takes to get it out, you're probably more valuable than someone who's just a career software engineer."

Jaynit

401,643 views • 2 months ago

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 views • 1 year ago

Some millennials have been working for 20 years and are still confused by corporate 😂 For those who are still in the dark let me fill you in. Your performance doesn't matter. Your performance review doesn't matter. Your compensation has been set by a budget committee a year ago. You are not "overachieving" anything. Management has a fixed pool of money to pay the people they manage so they can give them raises less than inflation. If they give you more money, they have to give someone else less money. It's a zero-sum game. Managers actually have a larger pool of money to hire new employees because corporations recognize that new hires need to be incentivized to come over. They won't just leave their company for the same money. If you've been at the same company for 5 years you are underpaid. If you've been at the same company for 10 years you are paid less than a new hire at a competitor. Loyalty doesn't matter because there is no reason for a company to voluntarily pay you more money. Corporations already know that over 95% of employees will not go anywhere and will take whatever they get. Even if that's nothing. There's no reason to pay everybody more money when only a tiny percentage of workers will leave. Even if you leave... (remember over 95% of employees will not) ... the corporation will distribute the work you were doing among all your coworkers. And they will take on the extra work. And they will stay. For nothing. Because in addition to a salary, what an employee wants is to not have to look for a new job. That's all the want. They don't want to move anywhere. And companies know it, and they will take advantage of that. Now you know! You're welcome.

Some millennials have been working for 20 years and are still confused by corporate 😂 For those who are still in the dark let me fill you in. Your performance doesn't matter. Your performance review doesn't matter. Your compensation has been set by a budget committee a year ago. You are not "overachieving" anything. Management has a fixed pool of money to pay the people they manage so they can give them raises less than inflation. If they give you more money, they have to give someone else less money. It's a zero-sum game. Managers actually have a larger pool of money to hire new employees because corporations recognize that new hires need to be incentivized to come over. They won't just leave their company for the same money. If you've been at the same company for 5 years you are underpaid. If you've been at the same company for 10 years you are paid less than a new hire at a competitor. Loyalty doesn't matter because there is no reason for a company to voluntarily pay you more money. Corporations already know that over 95% of employees will not go anywhere and will take whatever they get. Even if that's nothing. There's no reason to pay everybody more money when only a tiny percentage of workers will leave. Even if you leave... (remember over 95% of employees will not) ... the corporation will distribute the work you were doing among all your coworkers. And they will take on the extra work. And they will stay. For nothing. Because in addition to a salary, what an employee wants is to not have to look for a new job. That's all the want. They don't want to move anywhere. And companies know it, and they will take advantage of that. Now you know! You're welcome.

Lazy Canadian Investor

66,816 views • 2 years ago

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 almost always fail. They’re always a year or two behind. The people aren’t as good. They don’t have the same sense of mission.” It’s easy to get stressed about copycat startups as a founder but they don’t really cause problems and you’re best off ignoring them. “It takes many years to learn to ignore them, but I believe that is the right answer.” Video source: The Family (2017)

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 almost always fail. They’re always a year or two behind. The people aren’t as good. They don’t have the same sense of mission.” It’s easy to get stressed about copycat startups as a founder but they don’t really cause problems and you’re best off ignoring them. “It takes many years to learn to ignore them, but I believe that is the right answer.” Video source: The Family (2017)

Startup Archive

58,673 views • 1 year ago

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 almost always fail. They’re always a year or two behind. The people aren’t as good. They don’t have the same sense of mission.” It’s easy to get stressed about copycat startups as a founder but they don’t really cause problems and you’re best off ignoring them. “It takes many years to learn to ignore them, but I believe that is the right answer.” Video source: The Family (2017)

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 almost always fail. They’re always a year or two behind. The people aren’t as good. They don’t have the same sense of mission.” It’s easy to get stressed about copycat startups as a founder but they don’t really cause problems and you’re best off ignoring them. “It takes many years to learn to ignore them, but I believe that is the right answer.” Video source: The Family (2017)

Startup Archive

30,053 views • 4 months ago

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 views • 2 years ago

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 views • 2 years ago

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 views • 1 year ago

The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

11,811 views • 7 months ago

Reid Hoffman explains the Paypal Mafia’s hiring strategy “The thing that was unique about the PayPal crew is typically when people start companies they’ll go: ‘I need to get people with a lot of experience at doing just this job’—you have a lot of experience coding, running a data center, marketing, selling, etc. But PayPal opted for very high-talent young people with the expectation that the high-talent young people would learn the jobs.” He continues: “So as opposed to hiring someone who has had a ton of experience doing an exact job, we said: we’re going to hire someone we think is a very fast learner, and we’re going to trust that they’re going to learn the job really fast… We’ll hire some experienced people too, but we had a huge predilection to [hiring fast learners].” Video source: Khan Academy (2019)

Reid Hoffman explains the Paypal Mafia’s hiring strategy “The thing that was unique about the PayPal crew is typically when people start companies they’ll go: ‘I need to get people with a lot of experience at doing just this job’—you have a lot of experience coding, running a data center, marketing, selling, etc. But PayPal opted for very high-talent young people with the expectation that the high-talent young people would learn the jobs.” He continues: “So as opposed to hiring someone who has had a ton of experience doing an exact job, we said: we’re going to hire someone we think is a very fast learner, and we’re going to trust that they’re going to learn the job really fast… We’ll hire some experienced people too, but we had a huge predilection to [hiring fast learners].” Video source: Khan Academy (2019)

Startup Archive

106,162 views • 9 months ago