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some takeaways from Sam Altman today at Y Combinator startup school • this is one of the best times in history to start a company. ai is lowering costs, shortening build cycles, and expanding what’s possible. • the next 6 months of model progress could be comparable to the...

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Q: I’m 19 today and want to have a big impact on the world. Should I start a company? Even though Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”
1:51

Q: I’m 19 today and want to have a big impact on the world. Should I start a company? Even though Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

Michael McGuiness

494,583 views • 2 years 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)
2:25

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 • 6 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!
5:28

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

Startup Archive

407,717 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.”
5:28

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

Michael McGuiness

500,098 views • 2 years 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)
3:25

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 • 9 months ago

Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas As the former CEO of Y Combinator puts it in the clip below: “There’s a common misconception that your idea has to be great to start a company, and the first thing I want to do is destroy that misconception.” Michael was one of the cofounders of JustinTV, which later become Twitch and sold to Amazon for almost $1B. Their original idea was to create an online reality TV show—very different from where Twitch eventually ended up. Rather than falling for the trap of thinking that your initial startup idea has to be great, Michael advises founders to start with a problem: “Starting with ideas is tricky because people immediately want to grade your idea. It’s a lot easier to start with a problem and think about how you grade a problem.” Ideally the problem you set out to solve is one you've experienced personally or have some sort of connection to. You should ask yourself: “why am I uniquely qualified to work on this problem?” Is there some unique angle or approach you're taking to the problem that you understand but you don't believe others understand? Peter Thiel argues that “great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see." After identifying a problem, you’ll want to start thinking about your MVP. What's the first solution you're going to build and release to see if you can help your initial users solve this problem? But don’t fall in love with your MVP. As Michael puts it: “A lot of people fall in love with their product and are not in love with their problem or their customer. I advise the opposite. Be in love with your problem. Be in love with your customer. And treat your product in a way that can change, develop, and improve.” And once you have an MVP, you should have a strong opinion about who your initial customer is and handpick all of your initial users. The goal with an MVP is not to see how many people want to use your product. It's to see if your solution actually solves the problem for your initial target customers. “The best startups very heavily filter the people who are able to use the initial product and make sure that they’re the right type of initial customer.”
5:04

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

Startup Archive

101,023 views • 2 years ago

.tae kim believes the next six to nine months could be the biggest period of AI progress yet because of RSI. "The next six to nine months are going to be bigger than anyone believes... It'll be dramatically better for AI than the last two years in terms of advancements in capabilities." "RSI is a lot closer than people think... If RSI actually happens, and I think it sounds like both frontier labs think it's going to happen very soon, that's going to soak up an unbelievable amount of compute."
1:20

.tae kim believes the next six to nine months could be the biggest period of AI progress yet because of RSI. "The next six to nine months are going to be bigger than anyone believes... It'll be dramatically better for AI than the last two years in terms of advancements in capabilities." "RSI is a lot closer than people think... If RSI actually happens, and I think it sounds like both frontier labs think it's going to happen very soon, that's going to soak up an unbelievable amount of compute."

TBPN

73,014 views • 16 days ago

Sam Altman says the best startup ideas look stupid to every expert. For years, the whole field said building AGI was wrong and irresponsible. He says the doubt turned out to be a gift. It gave OpenAI time and no real rivals. He says if the smart money already agrees with you, the big prize is gone. “Everybody was calling us an idiot.” Being dismissed early is often the sign you are right. — Sam Altman (.Sam Altman) with Garry Tan (.Garry Tan) at Startup School.
0:41

Sam Altman says the best startup ideas look stupid to every expert. For years, the whole field said building AGI was wrong and irresponsible. He says the doubt turned out to be a gift. It gave OpenAI time and no real rivals. He says if the smart money already agrees with you, the big prize is gone. “Everybody was calling us an idiot.” Being dismissed early is often the sign you are right. — Sam Altman (.Sam Altman) with Garry Tan (.Garry Tan) at Startup School.

GeniusThinking

23,397 views • 2 days ago

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.
1:21

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.

Startup Archive

316,188 views • 11 months ago

Not to be that guy and to be clear I think Sagat is too good ( damage and carry is too high), but this is actually one of the easiest ways to get the match on your terms, especially if you have a fast walk speed he has some of the most whiff punishable buttons in the game 😬
0:21

Not to be that guy and to be clear I think Sagat is too good ( damage and carry is too high), but this is actually one of the easiest ways to get the match on your terms, especially if you have a fast walk speed he has some of the most whiff punishable buttons in the game 😬

Totalsagat

219,111 views • 22 days ago

Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company? When deciding whether or not to invest in a founder, Thiel asks: “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other teams are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20. Source: Pando
0:59

Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company? When deciding whether or not to invest in a founder, Thiel asks: “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other teams are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20. Source: Pando

Startup Archive

40,425 views • 2 years ago

Raising a round may not be a signal to spend aggressively, and many of the best founders stay disciplined. Yuri Sagalov from General Catalyst advises to wait until the pain is real, then hire with intention. Taking your time can prevent painful layoffs, protect culture, and give your startup a longer runway to win. Listen to the full episode of Build Mode:
1:10

Raising a round may not be a signal to spend aggressively, and many of the best founders stay disciplined. Yuri Sagalov from General Catalyst advises to wait until the pain is real, then hire with intention. Taking your time can prevent painful layoffs, protect culture, and give your startup a longer runway to win. Listen to the full episode of Build Mode:

TechCrunch

24,567 views • 5 months ago

One of the toughest parts of being a founder is putting your ideas into the world, seeing if anyone cares (usually they don't - or worse, are rooting against you), and then seeing if you can actually pull it off (usually way more setbacks along the way than you thought!). You have to: (1) develop thick skin and find a way to ignore the haters (2) still take advice from people who have your best interests at heart (3) have the wisdom to know the difference Then move from one setback to the next with no loss of enthusiasm for longer than you thought. Be borderline delusional, get after it every day for a decade, and turn out to be right. Finally, when your tenth or hundredth approach to a problem doesn't work, just keep coming up with more ideas. Had a great day at Base Batches yesterday, meeting founders building on Base and hearing about the latest onchain innovations. Shout out to all the founders!
1:18

One of the toughest parts of being a founder is putting your ideas into the world, seeing if anyone cares (usually they don't - or worse, are rooting against you), and then seeing if you can actually pull it off (usually way more setbacks along the way than you thought!). You have to: (1) develop thick skin and find a way to ignore the haters (2) still take advice from people who have your best interests at heart (3) have the wisdom to know the difference Then move from one setback to the next with no loss of enthusiasm for longer than you thought. Be borderline delusional, get after it every day for a decade, and turn out to be right. Finally, when your tenth or hundredth approach to a problem doesn't work, just keep coming up with more ideas. Had a great day at Base Batches yesterday, meeting founders building on Base and hearing about the latest onchain innovations. Shout out to all the founders!

Brian Armstrong

93,160 views • 2 months ago

.Second Lady Usha Vance responds to a student's question about how to be the best Second Lady: "I think they key thing, for anyone who is in this kind of role, is to try to just continue to be yourself. You have to do the best job that you can. And there are some responsibilities that come with it...you don't always choose what you are doing...But the most important thing is to remember the kind of person that you were before it, and the kind of person you want to be. If you can do that all the way through, then you can have a lot of fun — and maybe be helpful. You don't want to just start thinking of yourself as the Second Lady, because then you're probably not that fun a person anymore."
0:37

.Second Lady Usha Vance responds to a student's question about how to be the best Second Lady: "I think they key thing, for anyone who is in this kind of role, is to try to just continue to be yourself. You have to do the best job that you can. And there are some responsibilities that come with it...you don't always choose what you are doing...But the most important thing is to remember the kind of person that you were before it, and the kind of person you want to be. If you can do that all the way through, then you can have a lot of fun — and maybe be helpful. You don't want to just start thinking of yourself as the Second Lady, because then you're probably not that fun a person anymore."

Mary Margaret Olohan

1,111,670 views • 11 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."
2:07

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

317,097 views • 3 months ago

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."
1:15

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."

Patrick OShaughnessy

33,016 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk: To go and help build a new civilization on a new planet is the best possible adventure. “It's important to emphasize even with the rocket that we'll be launching just at the end of this year, it will be capable of making life multiplanetary and thereafter it's just about continuing to hone the efficiency and capability of the rocket and reduce the cost per ton and reduce the cost per person to Mars. And like I said, ultimately make it so that anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilization can do so. Anyone out there. How cool would that be? And even if you don't want to do it, maybe you have a son or daughter who wants to do that or a friend who wants to do it. I think it would be the best adventure that one could possibly do is to go and help build a new civilization on a new planet.” SpaceX Update: The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary, May 29, 2025
0:48

Elon Musk: To go and help build a new civilization on a new planet is the best possible adventure. “It's important to emphasize even with the rocket that we'll be launching just at the end of this year, it will be capable of making life multiplanetary and thereafter it's just about continuing to hone the efficiency and capability of the rocket and reduce the cost per ton and reduce the cost per person to Mars. And like I said, ultimately make it so that anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilization can do so. Anyone out there. How cool would that be? And even if you don't want to do it, maybe you have a son or daughter who wants to do that or a friend who wants to do it. I think it would be the best adventure that one could possibly do is to go and help build a new civilization on a new planet.” SpaceX Update: The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary, May 29, 2025

ELON CLIPS

34,538 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)
1:40

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

Q: Should startup founders be able to code? In the clip below, Naval Ravikant gives advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” He continues: “If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages.” Of course there are some examples of non-technical founding teams building terrific companies (e.g. Craigslist). But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. As Sam Altman puts it in a separate interview: “For a very long time, the classic co-founding team was one very strong business person and one very strong tech person… now it has shifted towards two really strong tech people. That works a lot of the time and may be better overall.” And I think the reason for this—as Naval points out—is that when you can build the product yourself, your iteration cycles become so much faster. Another quote from Sam Altman in a previous Startup Archive Answer on the importance of fast iteration cycles: “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.”
0:58

Q: Should startup founders be able to code? In the clip below, Naval Ravikant gives advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers: “You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.” He continues: “If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages.” Of course there are some examples of non-technical founding teams building terrific companies (e.g. Craigslist). But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. As Sam Altman puts it in a separate interview: “For a very long time, the classic co-founding team was one very strong business person and one very strong tech person… now it has shifted towards two really strong tech people. That works a lot of the time and may be better overall.” And I think the reason for this—as Naval points out—is that when you can build the product yourself, your iteration cycles become so much faster. Another quote from Sam Altman in a previous Startup Archive Answer on the importance of fast iteration cycles: “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.”

Michael McGuiness

509,926 views • 2 years ago

OpenAI’s Bob McGrew on how AI startups should think about moats Startups building agents today tend to look at the cost of human labor when they think about pricing. For example, some startups building AI lawyers think they’ll be able to charge tens of thousands of dollars per month because human lawyers really expensive. Bob McGrew, former Head of Research at OpenAI, disagrees: “The reason lawyers are expensive is because their time is scarce — there’s only so many people who have undergone that training. But by the time you’ve made an AI model out of it, there will effectively be an infinite number of lawyers.” He continues: “Maybe you with your AI lawyer startup will be able to have a lead over other people, but it’s the same frontier model underneath. Some other startup can come in and compete that away. So we should expect to see it priced at some opportunity cost over the cost of compute.” Where will value accrue in AI? Bob believes it will be at the application layer — so much so that frontier model investment from companies like OpenAI should be viewed as “an option on the valuable places in the application layer.” ChatGPT is one valuable application. Coding is another. He offers startups the following advice: “I think you can compete with frontier labs, but you want to do something more than just a personal productivity task on your computer — something that involves other people or an enterprise. The moats that you have for your business are going to be the same moats they always were: network effects, brand, economies of scale.” Video source: Sequoia Capital (2025)
3:23

OpenAI’s Bob McGrew on how AI startups should think about moats Startups building agents today tend to look at the cost of human labor when they think about pricing. For example, some startups building AI lawyers think they’ll be able to charge tens of thousands of dollars per month because human lawyers really expensive. Bob McGrew, former Head of Research at OpenAI, disagrees: “The reason lawyers are expensive is because their time is scarce — there’s only so many people who have undergone that training. But by the time you’ve made an AI model out of it, there will effectively be an infinite number of lawyers.” He continues: “Maybe you with your AI lawyer startup will be able to have a lead over other people, but it’s the same frontier model underneath. Some other startup can come in and compete that away. So we should expect to see it priced at some opportunity cost over the cost of compute.” Where will value accrue in AI? Bob believes it will be at the application layer — so much so that frontier model investment from companies like OpenAI should be viewed as “an option on the valuable places in the application layer.” ChatGPT is one valuable application. Coding is another. He offers startups the following advice: “I think you can compete with frontier labs, but you want to do something more than just a personal productivity task on your computer — something that involves other people or an enterprise. The moats that you have for your business are going to be the same moats they always were: network effects, brand, economies of scale.” Video source: Sequoia Capital (2025)

Startup Archive

76,458 views • 1 year ago