Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

There was a problem loading this video. This could be due to a temporary network issue or the video might be unavailable.

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re... validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – Eric McShane, 5050 alum. • Eric McShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • Mark Budde 🦕🏆 joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and Tay Shin joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜show more

Seth Bannon

39,592 subscribers

106,580 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

Finance Education Science & Technology

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

10 Comments

Fifty Years2 years ago

Wow seems like a great program!

Seth Bannon2 years ago

😆

Alexis Rivas2 years ago

Super underrated. Have met some killer founders and startups that started through 5050.

Seth Bannon2 years ago

Folks are going to be blown away when they see the caliber of the 5050 alumni.

Turner Novak 🍌🧢2 years ago

Still can't believe you guys do this for free, so awesome!

Seth Bannon2 years ago

We get paid in psychic capital! Feels so good to help great scientists become great founders.

Peregrine Badger2 years ago

Love supporting our scientists and engineers!! Crazy amount of passion and skill in this group. 🤯 🚀

Seth Bannon2 years ago

💯. We're lucky people!

Drew Moxon2 years ago

Can't wait to meet the next great scientist-founders!

Seth Bannon2 years ago

So excited for this next cohort!

Related Videos

The SaaS startup playbook doesn’t work in deep tech. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply when building nuclear reactors or bioengineering cell therapies. That’s why we built 5050, “a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” (quote from an alumni) Applications open! 5050 is a program to help scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. We’ve distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into a two phase program. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? How do I recruit a world-class team Am I ready to be a founder? We'll help you diagnose and mitigate risks and pivot quickly if necessary. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build Phase II: Build You’ll join a select cohort of the most high-speed founders solving massive world problems. Build will help you de-risk their technology, hit milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed faster than you think is possible. You’ll learn everything you need to know about starting a deep tech company and what it takes to become a world class entrepreneur. At Fifty Years, we’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups, helped them raise over 5.5 billion dollars, and supported our founders in achieving many firsts: ➜ the first carbon-negative molecule factory ➜ the first cultivated meat approved in the U.S. ➜ the first microgeo satellite for internet connectivity ➜ the first in-orbit space pharma drug factory ➜ the first de novo synthesis of a 1000+ base DNA molecule ➜ and many more Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. Apply! ➜

The SaaS startup playbook doesn’t work in deep tech. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply when building nuclear reactors or bioengineering cell therapies. That’s why we built 5050, “a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” (quote from an alumni) Applications open! 5050 is a program to help scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. We’ve distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into a two phase program. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? How do I recruit a world-class team Am I ready to be a founder? We'll help you diagnose and mitigate risks and pivot quickly if necessary. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build Phase II: Build You’ll join a select cohort of the most high-speed founders solving massive world problems. Build will help you de-risk their technology, hit milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed faster than you think is possible. You’ll learn everything you need to know about starting a deep tech company and what it takes to become a world class entrepreneur. At Fifty Years, we’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups, helped them raise over 5.5 billion dollars, and supported our founders in achieving many firsts: ➜ the first carbon-negative molecule factory ➜ the first cultivated meat approved in the U.S. ➜ the first microgeo satellite for internet connectivity ➜ the first in-orbit space pharma drug factory ➜ the first de novo synthesis of a 1000+ base DNA molecule ➜ and many more Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. Apply! ➜

Seth Bannon

147,026 views • 2 years ago

Ben Horowitz on the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video source: UC Berkeley (2009)

Ben Horowitz on the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video source: UC Berkeley (2009)

Startup Archive

36,789 views • 5 months ago

Ben Horowitz explains the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video Source: UC Berkeley

Ben Horowitz explains the two things every successful technology startup must do 1. Build a product that improves how some large group of people does something by 10x. “You have to build a transformational product. There is no way to build a great new company without a great product… If you look at the great technology companies, the thing that distinguishes them is the ability to keep coming up with a better way of doing things.” 2. Taking the market. “You can come up with the best product, but if you don’t [take the market], you really don’t have a company. Most technology businesses are network effects businesses. You have to win… If you’re an engineer, what business skills do you need to build a technology company? They’re all around the skills that you need to win the market. How do you out-market, out-sell, and beat the competition?… Do you build a good enough company that you go win?” Video Source: UC Berkeley

Startup Archive

77,268 views • 2 years ago

✨ To inspire more people to go build something now that we have AI to help us (especially non-tech people, cause I still know so many who are scared of building something): I added a [ BUILD IT ] button to It's like a mini-Lovable/Replit/v0: Any idea you see you like, you can click [ BUILD IT ], and it will use Opus 4.6 to build a landing page for it And then you can download the code it generated It's not a full startup of course, but a nice preview of what it can be, to give you an idea and inspire you to build it out further The code is live streamed also so you can see it being built 😊 Ironically this itself took me 1 hour to build with AI too Completely free and I pay for the tokens (please don't abuse it :D)

✨ To inspire more people to go build something now that we have AI to help us (especially non-tech people, cause I still know so many who are scared of building something): I added a [ BUILD IT ] button to It's like a mini-Lovable/Replit/v0: Any idea you see you like, you can click [ BUILD IT ], and it will use Opus 4.6 to build a landing page for it And then you can download the code it generated It's not a full startup of course, but a nice preview of what it can be, to give you an idea and inspire you to build it out further The code is live streamed also so you can see it being built 😊 Ironically this itself took me 1 hour to build with AI too Completely free and I pay for the tokens (please don't abuse it :D)

@levelsio

277,548 views • 5 months ago

Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company. But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was: “You can build a great company, but it’s hard.” He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups: “If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.” He continues: “Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.” Video source: This Week in Startups @jason (2015)

Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company. But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was: “You can build a great company, but it’s hard.” He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups: “If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.” He continues: “Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.” Video source: This Week in Startups @jason (2015)

Startup Archive

105,347 views • 11 months ago

Over the past few months at Dedalus Labs, we’ve noticed how many talented founders from around the world are being held back by one thing: location. There is no better place in the world to build an AI startup than San Francisco. SF is home to all the major AI labs, top talent, world-class investors, and it is where the future is being built every day. That’s why, this December, we’re giving builders everywhere a chance to break in. We are taking over and launching Break In—a month-long hacker house program in the heart of San Francisco. If you’re not from SF, and you’re building an AI startup, this is your chance to join us. Build your startup on top of Dedalus’ Agents SDK or MCP deployment infrastructure and we’ll cover your stay (housing, lunch, and co-working space). As a member of Break In, you’ll get access to all the best parts of SF. You’ll be introduced to top founders, mentors, and investors. You’ll get to skip the line at the biggest tech events. Plus, you’ll receive free API credits and expanded access to the best-in-class AI stack through our partner network of top AI infrastructure companies. Applications open October 27th and close November 10th. We will be accepting applications on a rolling basis. Final acceptances will go out November 14th to ensure international founders have enough time to secure visas. Ready to break in? Follow us on Twitter/X for more updates and visit the link in the comments to apply on October 27th!

Over the past few months at Dedalus Labs, we’ve noticed how many talented founders from around the world are being held back by one thing: location. There is no better place in the world to build an AI startup than San Francisco. SF is home to all the major AI labs, top talent, world-class investors, and it is where the future is being built every day. That’s why, this December, we’re giving builders everywhere a chance to break in. We are taking over and launching Break In—a month-long hacker house program in the heart of San Francisco. If you’re not from SF, and you’re building an AI startup, this is your chance to join us. Build your startup on top of Dedalus’ Agents SDK or MCP deployment infrastructure and we’ll cover your stay (housing, lunch, and co-working space). As a member of Break In, you’ll get access to all the best parts of SF. You’ll be introduced to top founders, mentors, and investors. You’ll get to skip the line at the biggest tech events. Plus, you’ll receive free API credits and expanded access to the best-in-class AI stack through our partner network of top AI infrastructure companies. Applications open October 27th and close November 10th. We will be accepting applications on a rolling basis. Final acceptances will go out November 14th to ensure international founders have enough time to secure visas. Ready to break in? Follow us on Twitter/X for more updates and visit the link in the comments to apply on October 27th!

Cathy Di

109,650 views • 10 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

407,717 views • 2 years ago

I’ve spent my career backing innovation and healthcare is one of the fastest-moving sectors right now. The challenge? Adopting tech in a way that improves outcomes without losing the human touch. I’m going to be at WHX Tech in Dubai this September, sharing what I look for in startups, how to build a business and scale globally, as well as how to secure funding. I’ll also be judging the Xcelerate competition with a prize fund of $50,000! See you there. Best PJ #WHXTech25 WHX Tech

I’ve spent my career backing innovation and healthcare is one of the fastest-moving sectors right now. The challenge? Adopting tech in a way that improves outcomes without losing the human touch. I’m going to be at WHX Tech in Dubai this September, sharing what I look for in startups, how to build a business and scale globally, as well as how to secure funding. I’ll also be judging the Xcelerate competition with a prize fund of $50,000! See you there. Best PJ #WHXTech25 WHX Tech

Peter Jones

12,329 views • 1 year ago

Sam Altman: "I can kind of automate an entire startup of agents and four of us. Four people and all this compute." This might be the biggest startup opportunity of 2026. He says the startups being created today could be far more valuable than the startups of the past. Why? What took his first YC startup 3 months to build can now be done by a coding agent in minutes. And his advice is simple: "You can now do three months of work in 17 minutes, but you better just go do three months of work." Most founders are still using agents to write code. The next ones will build entire companies around them. But that starts with knowing how to build agents that actually work. Here's your chance to learn and build one today ↓

Sam Altman: "I can kind of automate an entire startup of agents and four of us. Four people and all this compute." This might be the biggest startup opportunity of 2026. He says the startups being created today could be far more valuable than the startups of the past. Why? What took his first YC startup 3 months to build can now be done by a coding agent in minutes. And his advice is simple: "You can now do three months of work in 17 minutes, but you better just go do three months of work." Most founders are still using agents to write code. The next ones will build entire companies around them. But that starts with knowing how to build agents that actually work. Here's your chance to learn and build one today ↓

Rahul

22,194 views • 1 month ago

$PLTR CEO Alex Karp to builders: “You want to be in America” 🔮👷‍♂️🇺🇸 “If you want to be in the NFL, you come to America. You want to be in tech, you come to America. I wanted to be a philosopher, til I realized it was ridiculous. “There are lots of places you can go to be a ridiculous philosopher. Germany is a great place for that. And you’ll have a great social life. “If you want to know how good you are at tech, you do it here. “People tell you it’s a scale thing, a capital thing. No. This is more of a metier or art form than a science, and all the artists are here 🎨 Via the Hill & Valley Forum

$PLTR CEO Alex Karp to builders: “You want to be in America” 🔮👷‍♂️🇺🇸 “If you want to be in the NFL, you come to America. You want to be in tech, you come to America. I wanted to be a philosopher, til I realized it was ridiculous. “There are lots of places you can go to be a ridiculous philosopher. Germany is a great place for that. And you’ll have a great social life. “If you want to know how good you are at tech, you do it here. “People tell you it’s a scale thing, a capital thing. No. This is more of a metier or art form than a science, and all the artists are here 🎨 Via the Hill & Valley Forum

Jawwwn

186,103 views • 1 year ago

"Some of the biggest companies from the tech ecosystem in the last 25 years started with the consumer; Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple. "Their first goal was to entice a user to engage. That's a magical place to build from because you can move at the speed of technology." - Kirsten Green (Founder & Managing Partner Forerunner) "The consumer will build with you. They will tell you they hate it. They will tell you they love it." "Why not start with the consumer? Think big, think ambitiously about the future, and the role you want to play as a founder and company builder."

"Some of the biggest companies from the tech ecosystem in the last 25 years started with the consumer; Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple. "Their first goal was to entice a user to engage. That's a magical place to build from because you can move at the speed of technology." - Kirsten Green (Founder & Managing Partner Forerunner) "The consumer will build with you. They will tell you they hate it. They will tell you they love it." "Why not start with the consumer? Think big, think ambitiously about the future, and the role you want to play as a founder and company builder."

TBPN

18,752 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

167,484 views • 11 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.”

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 • 3 years ago

Beth Rigby, "You say that you won't compromise on the happiness of children, but you also know US big tech will hate this ban" "Are you concerned about how President Trump might react to this when you see him at the G7 and the consequences for the UK?" Keir Starmer, "This is about fighting for what we think is right" "I'm a fan of tech and AI, I think it has huge capabilities to change our world for the better, that's why I made a pro AI and tech speech at London Tech Week" "I do not accept that you can't be pro tech and AI and at the same time say we must protect our children" "The innovation is incredible in tech and AI. Don't tell me that's impossible for those innovators to devise a way to protect our children" "You can be pro AI and tech which I am, but also pro protecting our children which I am"

Beth Rigby, "You say that you won't compromise on the happiness of children, but you also know US big tech will hate this ban" "Are you concerned about how President Trump might react to this when you see him at the G7 and the consequences for the UK?" Keir Starmer, "This is about fighting for what we think is right" "I'm a fan of tech and AI, I think it has huge capabilities to change our world for the better, that's why I made a pro AI and tech speech at London Tech Week" "I do not accept that you can't be pro tech and AI and at the same time say we must protect our children" "The innovation is incredible in tech and AI. Don't tell me that's impossible for those innovators to devise a way to protect our children" "You can be pro AI and tech which I am, but also pro protecting our children which I am"

Farrukh

122,452 views • 3 months ago

Trump: 100% tariff on all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States.. if you have made a commitment to build or are in the process of building, as many are, there is no tariff. Ok? If for some reason, you say you are building and you don't build, then we add it up, it accumulates, and we charge you at a later date, you have to pay, and that is a guarantee

Trump: 100% tariff on all chips and semiconductors coming into the United States.. if you have made a commitment to build or are in the process of building, as many are, there is no tariff. Ok? If for some reason, you say you are building and you don't build, then we add it up, it accumulates, and we charge you at a later date, you have to pay, and that is a guarantee

Acyn

179,998 views • 1 year ago

The 9 traits Sam Altman looks for to identify founders who can build a $10 billion company “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

The 9 traits Sam Altman looks for to identify founders who can build a $10 billion company “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

Startup Archive

85,860 views • 2 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to 19 year olds that want to have an impact Even though 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.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to 19 year olds that want to have an impact Even though 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.”

Startup Archive

147,627 views • 2 years ago

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

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

Startup Archive

51,157 views • 6 months ago