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Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan’s advice for startups: “When you’re small, act small” A lot of founders try to emulate large companies, and will do things like use the same terminology as Microsoft to describe their products. But Garry argues this is a mistake: “When you’re starting something new,...

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Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”
2:44

Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”

Startup Archive

36,050 views • 1 year ago

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

407,653 views • 2 years ago

“Everything is difficult. If you’re going to do something important it’s going to take you a decade or more to have an impact. You might as well pick something you care about. Pick the really big thing. It’s always bothered me when I talked to entrepreneurs and they tell me about the thing they're working on and I ask: What do you *really* want to do? And they say well the big thing I want to do is actually this [other idea] But in their mind it’s a little too ambitious, it’s a little too difficult, they need more capital…. You should just go for that now. You might as well work on the thing that will have a major impact if it works.”
0:47

“Everything is difficult. If you’re going to do something important it’s going to take you a decade or more to have an impact. You might as well pick something you care about. Pick the really big thing. It’s always bothered me when I talked to entrepreneurs and they tell me about the thing they're working on and I ask: What do you *really* want to do? And they say well the big thing I want to do is actually this [other idea] But in their mind it’s a little too ambitious, it’s a little too difficult, they need more capital…. You should just go for that now. You might as well work on the thing that will have a major impact if it works.”

David Senra

92,085 views • 4 months ago

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”
2:43

Marc Andreessen on the 3 things he looks for when investing in a startup The first thing Marc Andreesen looks for is a big market: “Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents? Or do you believe there will be a new market that will be big?” The second thing he looks for is a 10x better product: “Is there a fundamental technology or economic change that justifies a new company? And the way I always think about that is: Is there a 10x change happening in the technology landscape? Is something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x better? If it’s not 10x, we as both VCs and entrepreneurs have to ask ourselves if it’s really worth doing because it’s really hard to start new companies . . . Existing companies are usually pretty good at what they do. So for a new company to exist, it has to bring a product to market that’s so much better than what exists that it punches through the status quo.” The third is the team: “Is the team outstanding? . . . You want to have a founding team of complementary skillsets. You want to have at least one super strong technologist — quite possibly more than one. Some of the best startups are actually more than one founding technologist. And then it often helps to have someone who is a marketing or salesperson who has a really good understanding of business.” Marc believes that you need all three of these, but if you’re going to compromise on one of those as an investor, it should be the product: “A great market is a lot easier to make up for with iterative product execution. The problem with a poor or small market is that even if you do a good job on the product, there just aren’t that many customers so it’s hard to ever get big and people get demoralized . . . And then we evaluate the team of a startup by its ability to get into a big market with a good product.”

Startup Archive

17,333 views • 5 months ago

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

Ben Horowitz on what makes the job of a startup CEO so difficult “The way to think about [the CEO job] is: You invent something the world may want, so you start a company. You hire every person you know who you think is good and respect. You raise money from people. You go sign up customers, and those customers depend on you to succeed. It’s a lot of pressure. But you don’t actually know what you’re doing. You’ve never been a CEO. You’ve never run a big organization.” Ben continues: “You know everyone’s depending on you. And all you do is work, so you don’t have any life outside of this, and your life is basically over if this company fails. And you don’t know [if your decisions] are the right thing to do — you only think it. And then you have people around you telling you, ‘No, it’s not the right thing to do.’ So how do you trust your eyes and trust what you think, then go do it? It’s a very difficult problem.” “This is where I see CEOs fail all the time,” Ben says. They think they know what the right thing to do is, but they don’t act on it. They hesitate because there’s “too much scary stuff” between you and making that decision (e.g. the pressure of it all, people telling you you’re wrong, etc.). Video source: a16z (2025)
1:34

Ben Horowitz on what makes the job of a startup CEO so difficult “The way to think about [the CEO job] is: You invent something the world may want, so you start a company. You hire every person you know who you think is good and respect. You raise money from people. You go sign up customers, and those customers depend on you to succeed. It’s a lot of pressure. But you don’t actually know what you’re doing. You’ve never been a CEO. You’ve never run a big organization.” Ben continues: “You know everyone’s depending on you. And all you do is work, so you don’t have any life outside of this, and your life is basically over if this company fails. And you don’t know [if your decisions] are the right thing to do — you only think it. And then you have people around you telling you, ‘No, it’s not the right thing to do.’ So how do you trust your eyes and trust what you think, then go do it? It’s a very difficult problem.” “This is where I see CEOs fail all the time,” Ben says. They think they know what the right thing to do is, but they don’t act on it. They hesitate because there’s “too much scary stuff” between you and making that decision (e.g. the pressure of it all, people telling you you’re wrong, etc.). Video source: a16z (2025)

Startup Archive

44,950 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”
1:24

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Startup Archive

34,567 views • 7 months 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 • 8 months ago

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice, you have two choices: Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” He argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!
1:41

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

Startup Archive

565,774 views • 2 years ago

Balaji Srinivasan on what he looks for in the founders he backs “You’re really looking for people who are very fast, very resourceful, very positive… And obviously high intelligence, work ethic, all that type of stuff, but I think the positivity thing [is really important].” As Balaji explains, startups are so hard and you need to be positive and resilient. “Lots of people will break if you put enough pressure on them and you don’t really know who has titanium adamantium skeletons until that pressure actually arrives.” He continues: “As a VC, an investor, or an angel, what you really want to do is throw coins into a hot air balloon in the sense that you want to back somebody who has independent lift and who’s going to take off on their own… The money is a help but it’s not even necessary for you to do it. They would be able to do it even with you. That’s a person who, as an investor, you want to bet on typically.” Video source: Startup Grind (2017)
2:36

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

Startup Archive

11,541 views • 1 year ago

Mike Macdonald on every player's sixth sense: they know who's full of crap. “Players know. What do they know? They know who’s fake. They know who’s a good coach. They know who the best players are. They know what the organization is like. They just know.” “If you go around trying to fool them, shame on you. You have no idea. They’re living it. Their livelihood is on the line.” “There’s something to be said for authenticity in the process. If it’s a real, honest process, you’re not trying to fool anybody. You’re not trying to pull a fast one.” “You actually understand what’s going to work, how your industry works and what your customer wants.” “You’re not going to fool your customer. Whoever you’re serving is going to know. You can go into a company or a restaurant and feel it. Do they really care about the customer?” “That’s a real thing.”
1:34

Mike Macdonald on every player's sixth sense: they know who's full of crap. “Players know. What do they know? They know who’s fake. They know who’s a good coach. They know who the best players are. They know what the organization is like. They just know.” “If you go around trying to fool them, shame on you. You have no idea. They’re living it. Their livelihood is on the line.” “There’s something to be said for authenticity in the process. If it’s a real, honest process, you’re not trying to fool anybody. You’re not trying to pull a fast one.” “You actually understand what’s going to work, how your industry works and what your customer wants.” “You’re not going to fool your customer. Whoever you’re serving is going to know. You can go into a company or a restaurant and feel it. Do they really care about the customer?” “That’s a real thing.”

Josh Chambers

42,008 views • 4 days ago

Sam Altman on the biggest mistake startup CEOs make when scaling a company “When you’re a Seed or Series A company, you spend a huge amount of effort recruiting, but almost no effort retaining talent — and that is [the right strategy] at the beginning. But if you don’t shift to viewing retaining talent as much of your job as recruiting talent, you eventually have some level of a disaster on your hands.” Sam recalls Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Y Combinator and saying he only hires people he’d report to if the roles were reversed. Sam reflects on this: “If you’re hiring people that are that good — which you should be doing — they have as many opportunities as you do… And so if you don’t make the role good enough that you yourself would stay in it, then you have a hard time retaining your best people for a long period of time.” Sam gives three pieces of tactical advice for CEOs who want to retain their best people: 1. Spend one-on-one time with your best people “The thing that your best 5-10 people crave the most is time with you, the CEO. And that is something that as people get busier, they spend less and less time on. Some of the best CEOs in our portfolio, every month they will take out for a one-on-one dinner or drinks or something each of their best 10 people. This is a huge time commitment. If you think about it, you only get 30 dinner slots in a month. It’s a really big thing to do. But I think it actually works because that is the thing these people really crave… They want you to ask them what you think they should be doing and listen to them and have a personal connection. That’s super important.” 2. Continually give them more responsibility “I think if you stop giving people more responsibility, they will eventually leave. If they get to take on new tasks every year or additional tasks every year, they’re happier.” 3. Proactively re-up their compensation “I think most founders are very bad about proactively re-upping — to the level that they should — their top 5-10 lieutenants.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2016)
2:24

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

Startup Archive

63,966 views • 1 year ago

Netflix founder Reed Hastings explains why “family” is a bad metaphor for your startup “The classic metaphor for companies was the family. You’d hire them and be like, ‘We’re a family. We look after each other.’ And that’s kind of baloney because you’ll lay someone off in a way that you wouldn’t your sister. It’s like you want them to work for you like they were a family member — for free and cheap. But you’re not really prepared to treat them like a family member if you’re honest.” Instead of a family, Reed believes that professional sports team is a better metaphor for a company: “Really, the professional relationship is like a sports team. And if you want to win a championship, you’ve got to have incredible talent at every position… We pay people well. We want them to win. And if you have one bad game, you don’t lose your position. But ultimately, you’re fighting for your position every year.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)
1:16

Netflix founder Reed Hastings explains why “family” is a bad metaphor for your startup “The classic metaphor for companies was the family. You’d hire them and be like, ‘We’re a family. We look after each other.’ And that’s kind of baloney because you’ll lay someone off in a way that you wouldn’t your sister. It’s like you want them to work for you like they were a family member — for free and cheap. But you’re not really prepared to treat them like a family member if you’re honest.” Instead of a family, Reed believes that professional sports team is a better metaphor for a company: “Really, the professional relationship is like a sports team. And if you want to win a championship, you’ve got to have incredible talent at every position… We pay people well. We want them to win. And if you have one bad game, you don’t lose your position. But ultimately, you’re fighting for your position every year.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)

Startup Archive

41,095 views • 8 months ago

Netflix founder Reed Hastings explains why “family” is a bad metaphor for your startup “The classic metaphor for companies was the family. You’d hire them and be like, ‘We’re a family. We look after each other.’ And that’s kind of baloney because you’ll lay someone off in a way that you wouldn’t your sister. It’s like you want them to work for you like they were a family member — for free and cheap. But you’re not really prepared to treat them like a family member if you’re honest.” Instead of a family, Reed believes that professional sports team is a better metaphor for a company: “Really, the professional relationship is like a sports team. And if you want to win a championship, you’ve got to have incredible talent at every position… We pay people well. We want them to win. And if you have one bad game, you don’t lose your position. But ultimately, you’re fighting for your position every year.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)
1:16

Netflix founder Reed Hastings explains why “family” is a bad metaphor for your startup “The classic metaphor for companies was the family. You’d hire them and be like, ‘We’re a family. We look after each other.’ And that’s kind of baloney because you’ll lay someone off in a way that you wouldn’t your sister. It’s like you want them to work for you like they were a family member — for free and cheap. But you’re not really prepared to treat them like a family member if you’re honest.” Instead of a family, Reed believes that professional sports team is a better metaphor for a company: “Really, the professional relationship is like a sports team. And if you want to win a championship, you’ve got to have incredible talent at every position… We pay people well. We want them to win. And if you have one bad game, you don’t lose your position. But ultimately, you’re fighting for your position every year.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2015)

Startup Archive

63,685 views • 1 year ago

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)
0:55

Marc Andreessen explains why startups are an “irrational act” “The biggest thing people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. Even whey they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with ‘you’re stupid.’ No, I will not come to work for you. No, I’m not going to buy your product.” Marc explains why: “When you’re a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you’re weak and they’ll lose faith in you. So you have to pretend you’re having a great time when you’re dying inside. Just misery.” Why do it then? “For most of these people - on a risk-adjusted basis - it’s probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got like a real job in a big company. But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves and some people just can’t tolerate having bosses.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

70,007 views • 1 year ago

AOC on why she’s considered controversial: When you fight really entrenched power, that power will fight you back. They cannot be seen attacking the message because that makes them look bad, so they attack the messenger. There will never be an uncontroversial messenger for challenging the structures of power keeping wages low. Secondly, I think my presence at someone who was a waitress… I’m not supposed to be there according to them and I’m not bought. There’s a real class aspect to this. There is a lot of people who think if you don’t make a lot of money, it’s reflective of your intelligence and your capacity as a human being. And of course, I’m a woman and I’m Latina. My mere existence is subversive in the place that is am. I also don’t act in a way that women are supposed to act in a society like this. You’re coming at me crazy, I’m not going to be deferential to you.
5:43

AOC on why she’s considered controversial: When you fight really entrenched power, that power will fight you back. They cannot be seen attacking the message because that makes them look bad, so they attack the messenger. There will never be an uncontroversial messenger for challenging the structures of power keeping wages low. Secondly, I think my presence at someone who was a waitress… I’m not supposed to be there according to them and I’m not bought. There’s a real class aspect to this. There is a lot of people who think if you don’t make a lot of money, it’s reflective of your intelligence and your capacity as a human being. And of course, I’m a woman and I’m Latina. My mere existence is subversive in the place that is am. I also don’t act in a way that women are supposed to act in a society like this. You’re coming at me crazy, I’m not going to be deferential to you.

Acyn

354,667 views • 2 months ago

Marc Andreessen on why we shouldn’t encourage people to be entrepreneurs “The idea of being an entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how fun it was. And people ask questions, ‘How do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?’ And my answer was always: no, we shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can’t not do it.” Marc continues: “It’s tremendously painful. Most of the experience of being in business as a startup is being told no. You need all these things: employees, financing, customers. Then you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Half the time they don’t even respond. And then just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts punching you square in the face. The minute you think your product is working, there’s a problem in it, and you have to do a recall. It’s just this constant rolling horror story.” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)
1:30

Marc Andreessen on why we shouldn’t encourage people to be entrepreneurs “The idea of being an entrepreneur has been a romanticized concept. There used to be TV shows talking about how fun it was. And people ask questions, ‘How do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?’ And my answer was always: no, we shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t be encouraged to do something that painful. They should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can’t not do it.” Marc continues: “It’s tremendously painful. Most of the experience of being in business as a startup is being told no. You need all these things: employees, financing, customers. Then you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Half the time they don’t even respond. And then just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts punching you square in the face. The minute you think your product is working, there’s a problem in it, and you have to do a recall. It’s just this constant rolling horror story.” Video source: Chris Williamson (2024)

Startup Archive

252,702 views • 9 months ago

Steve Jobs on leadership “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.” Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues: “We wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.” This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it: “A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people because you should think of each of those people as bringing along another ten people with them.” The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision. Follow Startup Archive for more timeless startup advice!
1:01

Steve Jobs on leadership “The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting consensus on a common vision.” Borrowing from his tagline for the original Mac, Steve continues: “We wanted people who were insanely great at what they did… and the neatest thing that happens when you get a core group ten great people is that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.” This observation on the importance of getting the first ten people right is a refrain you constantly hear from the very best founders. As Patrick Collison put it: “A large part of the reason why the first ten people you hire are so important is because you’re not just hiring those first ten people. You’re actually hiring 100 people because you should think of each of those people as bringing along another ten people with them.” The best leaders recruit “insanely great” people and align them around a common vision. Follow Startup Archive for more timeless startup advice!

Startup Archive

249,002 views • 2 years ago