I've been watching it for 8 minutes as of now and despite the fact that the content looks good it really bores me to death that he is reading the whole thing like a robot. It does not sound like a natural converstation or presentation. Does anyone else share this feeling?
Some people prefer making presentations having only some general idea of what they are going to say before hand. Other people spend a good deal of time thinking about exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it. Both presentation styles are perfectly valid.
I really enjoyed sama's delivery. It was easy to digest; not too fast, not too slow; important ideas/concepts were repeated but not overly so; the choice and sequence of topics covered was very good. Length was just about right too.
I hate it when speakers "over engage" and keep throwing in jokes, personal anecdotes, rhetorical questions, funny slides etc. in a perceived need to keep people's attention. If a presentation's worth listening to, the content (delivered in a friendly and relaxed way) should be all that's needed to keep an audience engaged. If some people haven't got the attention span for that, it's usually their problem not the speaker's.
Totally agree. The content is great, but the delivery is uncomfortable (both speakers). I stopped watching and just listened. Ultimately, the content is the most important thing and I appreciate the opportunity to access awesome content. If anything, I think the first lecture helped humanize the whole "start-up scene". From the outside, it seems like everyone has figured it all out, but clearly we all have areas to improve.
Lastly, given that this will be so broadly distributed, I totally get the need to be on message so it may make sense to read in this scenario.
FWIW, this was the same content he gave us at Hack The North when he was visiting less than 24 hours ago. It makes sense to copy it down and repeat it rather than try to memorize all of it.
People are getting way too hung up on the fact the he read from a text. But so what? The content was interesting and compelling. I'd rather listen to somebody using a prepared text and conveying the information quickly (like Altman does here) than painfully reading slides.
I thought he did a good job. Usually I hate watching a video presentation if there's copy of the text to read. It's way more efficient to read the content than to watch most videos and then set the speed to 4x.
Are these values correct? If you join Dropbox as employee #100 with 10bp, you're 10bp is going to get massively diluted through subsequent rounds, no? Isn't it more like $1-2mil? And also this is wealth on paper, which means that you don't all of the sudden have $10mil sitting in the bank. I don't think he explains that but that's how it's portrayed, and is probably worth explaining, given the audience.
The dilution you'll get from Series B onward is maybe 30% total. That's not "massive" IMO. (Obviously much higher dilution in a down round, if you're a founder who gets kicked out and crammed down, or if the company has a marginal exit, you're not part of the retention, and they choose to put all the acquisition into retention...)
Being a senior-ish employee at a Pre-IPO (i.e. Series C/D company, on a great trajectory, and an obvious winner) is probably the optimal outcome for total compensation; for cash, consulting, if you can find the right niche.
(Startup founder MAY actually be superior to Seed/Series A startup employee, though, especially due to both tax issues and what happens when the company does anything less than stellar. OTOH, you can jump ship as a Series A employee, even manager, with no real negatives; if you're a founder, you're pretty much committed until the end, or at least until some serious inflection point, especially in a suboptimal outcome.)
Based on the holdings disclosed at the time of Facebook's IPO, and even accounting for the rise in the company's stock, I doubt very much that employee #100 at Facebook is sitting on $200 million in gains from his or her options or RSUs. In the case of Dropbox, looking at what the Box founders own according to Box's S-1[1] probably provides a more realistic comp.
One thing worth noting is that Dustin's slide apparently fails to take into account the cost of exercising options. You can absolutely make a lot of money at a startup, and you don't even need to be one of the earliest employees to do so, but today's valuation trend works against employees. Startups are raising money at significant valuations earlier and earlier, so even early employees aren't receiving cheap equity.
As an example of this, consider that Facebook had sold shares at a $15 billion valuation just three years after the company was founded. Google went public at a valuation under $27 billion (edit: corrected). If you had your choice, you'd almost certainly have received a better equity package as an early rank-and-file employee of Google versus Facebook.
The other point to note here is that there is not a way to tell what is the next facebook/dropbox either. So the amount of risk or the time that one might take to figure whether they are going to make a huge sum in options is pretty much the same. By the time the market guesses the big company, my guess is they are already on high valuation with highly diluted equity.
On Sam's part -- am I the only one who got the "heard this before" feeling? Obviously he attributed everything pretty appropriately, but I thought I could've placed 50-75% of his sentences in the "Summary" sections of various PG essays, Peter Thiel writings, and other luminaries of the startup-sphere.
I'm not saying it was wrong or that his delivery was bad. But I remember reading the Class Notes from Thiel's class after Blake made them available and thinking "Wow, there's some original thoughts in here I haven't come across before."
Maybe it's because PG already put it all to paper, and some of these other figures just added post scripts. Maybe it was a solved problem by the time Sam got a seat at the table. Just some food for thought. Looking forward to the other lectures regardless.
Surely, but for lecture 1 in a "Startup 101" series, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. We're talking about a very, very well documented path at this point, with established best practices.
I think on Sam Altman's part this is deliberate. He has distilled the core message of Grahamsian thought beautifully into slides. YC has been espousing this specific philosophy for a while, and I think Sam & PG both represent this school of thought.
This is part of the reason I believe PG picked Sam, he thought Sam internalized & helped form the YC approach to startups. The two are like Epicurus & Lucretius; Leucippus & Democritus.
Disagree completely with the very first opinion expressed - 'Don't do a startup just to do one - do it only if you really want to solve a problem'.
India has produced about 3 big ~billion dollar compaines in the recent past - inmobi, flipkart, druvaa. None of the founders really started to 'solve' a problem they were passionate about. What they were really passionate about was just 'starting up' - and based on their personal strengths, industry knowledge and what they thought could be sold, stumbled on these big businesses. This was probably true for HP too.
It is absolutely ok to do a startup just for the heck of it. Get in the game and find out the intersection of what you can build and what a customer will buy. If you build a big business - the passion will follow. Do not forget to bullshit though on your big interview on how the so solved problem kept you awake at nights - it makes for some good reading and impressionable pr.
I made some notes while watching/listening. Might include minor errors or misinterpretation on my side
4 critical parts: Idea, Team, Product, Execution
1. Idea
-> Good startups take about 10 years
-> Startup should feel like an important mission
-> Hardest part coming up with great ideas: best look terriblea t the beginning (e.g. search engine, social networks limited to college students without money, a way to stay at stranger's couches)
-> "Today only a small subset of users want to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them"
-> You need to believe and willing to ignore naysayers
-> Most people will think your idea is bad: be happy. they won't compete. it's not dangerous to tell people your idea.
-> it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first. first version should take over a small specific market and expand from there. unpopular but right
-> take the time to think about how the market will evolve. market size in ~10 years. think about growth rate of the market instead of its current size. small, but rapidly growing market! people are desperate for a solution
-> you cannot create a market that does not exist
-> there are many great ideas, pick and find one you really care about.. "SW is eating the world"
-> "Why Now?" - dixit Sequoia - have a great answer to this question
-> Build something that you yourself need. You'll understand it a lot better.
-> Get close to your customers. Work in their office or talk to them multiple times a day
-> If it takes more than a sentence to you know what you're doing, it likely is too complicated
-> "Do more when you're a student." Think about new ideas and meet potential co-founders
-> Think about the market first and you'll have a big leg up
2. Product
-> Great Idea > Great Product > Great Company
-> Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters
-> Sit in front of the computer working on product, or talk to your customers
-> Biz Dev, Raising Money, Raising Press, Hiring are significantly easier when you have a great product
-> Step 1: build something that users love
-> YC is all about: Exercise, Eat, Sleep, Work on Product and Talk to Customers
-> "It's better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like"
-> Get growth by word of mouth. This works for consumer as well as enterprise products. You'll see organic growth. If you don't have some early organic growth, then your product isn't good enough. It's the secret sauce to growth hacking.
-> Breakout companies always have a product that's so good that grows on word of mouth
-> Great products win. Make something users love.
-> Keep it simple. Look at first versions of Google, Facebook, iPhone
-> Founders care about small details. They're fanatical
-> One thing that correlates with success is hooking up PagerDuty to their ticketing system. Response time within an
hour.
-> Go recruit your first users by hand to get feedback every day.
-> When everyone tought Pinterest was a joke, Ben Silbermann walked around coffee shops in Palo Alto to convince people to use Pinterest. He set Pinterest to the home page in the Palo Alto public library so people would discover the website. Do things that don't scale. Read Paul Graham's essay.
-> Create a tight feedback loop. What do users like? What do they pay for? What would make them recommend it?
-> Try to keep your feedback loop going for all of your companies' life
-> Do sales and customer support yourself in the early days. This is critical. Do not hire these people right away.
-> Keep track of metrics. Look at active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, etc. Be brutally honest if they don't go in the right direction
-> If you don't get your product right, nothing else in this class will matter.
Why start a startup?
-> "It's glamorous", "You'll be the boss", "Flexibility", ...
-> Entrepreneurship gets romanticized
-> The reality is not so glamorous. It is a lot of hard work. You're sitting at your desk, focused, figuring out hard engineering projects. It is quite stressful.
-> Founder depression is a real thing. If you start a company, it's gonna be extremely hard
-> You have loads of responsilibity
-> You're responsible for the opportunity cost of the people who decide to follow and help you out
-> You're more committed. A founder cannot leave a company. For 10 years if it's going well. Probably for 5 years if it's not going well.
-> "Number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology"
-> You're always on call, you're a role model. You'll always be working anyway
-> If you joined Dropbox or Facebook early on, your financial reward might be a lot better than when starting a startup
-> If you join a later stage startup, you have more impact - massive userbase, existing infrastructure, work with an established team. E.g. Brett Taylor was employee #1500 at Google and he invented Google Maps. He got a big financial reward for this.
-> What's the best reason? You can't NOT do it. You have to make it happen
-> Do it out of passion
-> The world needs it (if not, go do something else) and/or the world needs you (you're well-suited to do it). The world needs you somewhere, find where.
The surprising thing was that Sam's advice about working on a big mission and something "important" seems directly contradicting what pg has been writing for years.
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
I'm not too keen on Dustin Moskovitz's whole spiel about telling people not to start startups. In a course about how to start startups, it seems really misplaced.
"All the advice in this class is geared towards people starting a business where the goal is hyper-growth and eventually building a very large company. Much of it doesn't apply in other cases and I want to warn people up front that if you try to do these things in a lot of big companies or non-startups it won't work."
One thing that bothered me about the lecture was reinforcement of the idea that working hard is the same as working long. I can appreciate the fact that at times as a founder you have to work all hours of the day, but surely this is not the optimum scenario for maximum productivity. If I look at my own work situation currently, it's abundantly apparent to me that the law of diminishing returns affects me strongly after working 8-10 hrs straight.
I would have expected the message to be that the most successful founders in the long-term are the ones that figure out the right work/life balance, to ensure they don't burn out. In other words, successful founders are able to be focussed and driven for the hours that they work, and in recharge-mode when offline.
This is intuitively what I would have expected and I'm curious if the message from the lecture of "work all day, everyday" is really right.
Let's say you have 10 employees and you decide to work 7 hours/day. All your employees decide well sounds good. Versus, let's say you work 10 hours day and on average your team work 9 hours day. 3 plus 20 = 23 hrs * 350 days = 8000 more hours that year. Your an investor which team do you pick?
To temper some of the nit picks, just wanted to say this lecture felt insightful and fun to watch. I hope YC continues this trend of investing effort in shareable advice content in the spirit of pg's essays.
This is the first time a lot of the YC flavor of startup how-to material has been presented in a lecture video format[1]. I suspect much of the long-term audience of these lectures wouldn't have come across pg's essays, Blake Masters' Peter Thiel startup notes or Dustin Moskovitz's excellent Medium posts before. Maybe some lecture watchers were allergic to long-form articles, or maybe some would rather receive a weekly email with videos. Myself, I consume this sort of material on my walk to work, either text-to-speeching essays or listening to lectures. The video lecture format was especially fun, I watched it full screen on the TV while eating an enchilada and poking my fiancee about points she might find relevant to her side project. How often do you get to consume this sort of content like that?
Having read pg's essays[2], I still had a number of "aha!" moments from Sam's slides and hearing his presentation. And hearing Dustin describe in his low-key tone why you should be employee 1,000 at an obviously successful startup rather than start your own, and backing it up with charts and photo-jokes about the elephant in the room was just entertaining. Seeing "this is how we'll teach you to do this thing. Here's an expert on why not to do this thing." is not always the type of juxtaposition you get with standalone online essays.
Looking forward to the next lecture. I'd say it's well worth the time and opportunity cost of putting this all together, so thanks all involved.
[1]: Yes, some Lean Startup™ and Principles of Entrepreneurship™ flavored material has been presented in lecture format before, but not YC™ lensed AFAIK.
[2]: Okay, I skipped the early seemingly pure-Lisp-focused ones. Though like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't about a long motorcycle trip, and maybe pg's Lisp essays are not really all about writing Lisp?
There are easier ways to get rich? For Stanford Graduates, maybe. For those who don't have a degree in an ultra-paying job, I'd really like to know an easier way.
I'm usually sceptical about start-up chances, I know how much work it means, and I know that a lot of early-stage employees get rich, too. Yet, I don't think you can get rich this fast/easy with a modest degree... Even as early-stage employee often you'll still get a raw deal or you overestimate their chances of success.
Great presentation and very clear that the rest of the course will be focusing on advice for SV-style hyper-growth startups.
There's still some good advice for those of us not interested in that life style. I was particularly taken with the idea of building something that just a handful of people will really love. Having a rapt-audience for your product would be a huge win if you decide to build more, scale up, or sell out.
I think it's really good that they're at least trying to convey how difficult building the style of companies they're talking about can be. I can appreciate how challenging that must be. The cultural yard-stick for success these days are valuations and IPOs. There's a ton of pressure to go that route especially from YC. I'm glad they're being conscientious about it even if they don't 100% succeed at removing some of the glimmer from the stars in peoples' eyes.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to start a smaller enterprise and aspire to keep just a handful of customers you know by name.
@2:22: "You may still fail. The outcome is something like Idea x Product x Execution x Team x Luck, where Luck is a random number between 0 and 10,000, literally that much."
What does that mean? I'm not trying to rip on the video or anything like that, but am genuinely curious as to how much luck Sam Altman thinks is involved in a startup.
That simply means if you are extremely unlucky (e.g. luck being 0, like being hit by a bus), then all the other factors don't matter. On the other extreme, extreme luck can turn your company around even if you don't do so well on the other parts.
He believes he should recommend to risk a substantial amount of life blood (and money) on the chances of having a big success. Not to anyone, but a lot of highly talented individuals.
It depends on his ethics, of course, but I'd say this recommendation alone means he believes there to be a substantial chance...
Wow this was good information. It really got me thinking on what my reasons are and how bad they might be. Did anyone else get that from this?
I would also love if they cover how you work on a startup if you still have the 40 hours a week programming job as well. And how to avoid getting in trouble or legal issues with your job.
I cannot find "The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership". Is it a book? I don't see it on Amazon. Is it an article? Does someone know the authors (I can't quite make it out on the image), or the link?
How does this compare with an MVP approach where you put something out there first and test the market. Then there is the issue of runway. With enough time, you can start with an MVP and iterate in private beta until users love it, but in many cases a founder is not going to have that kind of runway. They have just enough resources to put something together, and they're going to have to go out to the market with that and iterate on the fly. Unfortunately, once you do get out there and need to take on all of the other responsibilities, then that's time taken away from building a great product.
The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. If you target a big enough pain point, your first users will love the product even if it lacks polish. It's also important to remember that MVP != shit. It is the minimum viable product; in the context of the YC motto it's the minimum product that a small, core group of users will love.
This is all theoretical on my part, FWIW--I have not successfully built such a thing on my own yet.
Sam Altman's law of conservation of how much happiness you can put into the world with the first product from a startup -> the total amount of love is the same it's just a question of how it's distributed.
This seems like a really valuable recruiting tool for YC. Start early at Stanford, groom freshman to have a great mindset and understanding of the fundamentals, fund them and make money.
[+] [-] tucaz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pius|11 years ago|reply
Give the guy a break. It's Lecture 1, I'd imagine he was nervous.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
That said, the content is strong and for the desired audience it is all probably novel, besides the fact that this was day 1 of a new course.
When I thought about it more though, it seems like the idea of the class is more of a lecture series style than traditional instruction anyway.
[+] [-] sloanesturz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bequanna|11 years ago|reply
The content is great and communicated well.
Some people prefer making presentations having only some general idea of what they are going to say before hand. Other people spend a good deal of time thinking about exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it. Both presentation styles are perfectly valid.
[+] [-] corford|11 years ago|reply
I hate it when speakers "over engage" and keep throwing in jokes, personal anecdotes, rhetorical questions, funny slides etc. in a perceived need to keep people's attention. If a presentation's worth listening to, the content (delivered in a friendly and relaxed way) should be all that's needed to keep an audience engaged. If some people haven't got the attention span for that, it's usually their problem not the speaker's.
[+] [-] peter_mcrae|11 years ago|reply
Lastly, given that this will be so broadly distributed, I totally get the need to be on message so it may make sense to read in this scenario.
[+] [-] jonalmeida|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|11 years ago|reply
I think the visual indication plays a huge part in the perception.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wyclif|11 years ago|reply
I thought he did a good job. Usually I hate watching a video presentation if there's copy of the text to read. It's way more efficient to read the content than to watch most videos and then set the speed to 4x.
[+] [-] andrewchambers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
Are these values correct? If you join Dropbox as employee #100 with 10bp, you're 10bp is going to get massively diluted through subsequent rounds, no? Isn't it more like $1-2mil? And also this is wealth on paper, which means that you don't all of the sudden have $10mil sitting in the bank. I don't think he explains that but that's how it's portrayed, and is probably worth explaining, given the audience.
[+] [-] rdl|11 years ago|reply
Being a senior-ish employee at a Pre-IPO (i.e. Series C/D company, on a great trajectory, and an obvious winner) is probably the optimal outcome for total compensation; for cash, consulting, if you can find the right niche.
(Startup founder MAY actually be superior to Seed/Series A startup employee, though, especially due to both tax issues and what happens when the company does anything less than stellar. OTOH, you can jump ship as a Series A employee, even manager, with no real negatives; if you're a founder, you're pretty much committed until the end, or at least until some serious inflection point, especially in a suboptimal outcome.)
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
One thing worth noting is that Dustin's slide apparently fails to take into account the cost of exercising options. You can absolutely make a lot of money at a startup, and you don't even need to be one of the earliest employees to do so, but today's valuation trend works against employees. Startups are raising money at significant valuations earlier and earlier, so even early employees aren't receiving cheap equity.
As an example of this, consider that Facebook had sold shares at a $15 billion valuation just three years after the company was founded. Google went public at a valuation under $27 billion (edit: corrected). If you had your choice, you'd almost certainly have received a better equity package as an early rank-and-file employee of Google versus Facebook.
[1] http://fortune.com/2014/03/25/aaron-levie-owns-more-of-box-t...
[+] [-] vishalzone2002|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjmb|11 years ago|reply
I'm not saying it was wrong or that his delivery was bad. But I remember reading the Class Notes from Thiel's class after Blake made them available and thinking "Wow, there's some original thoughts in here I haven't come across before."
Maybe it's because PG already put it all to paper, and some of these other figures just added post scripts. Maybe it was a solved problem by the time Sam got a seat at the table. Just some food for thought. Looking forward to the other lectures regardless.
[+] [-] AVTizzle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkural|11 years ago|reply
This is part of the reason I believe PG picked Sam, he thought Sam internalized & helped form the YC approach to startups. The two are like Epicurus & Lucretius; Leucippus & Democritus.
[+] [-] dheer01|11 years ago|reply
India has produced about 3 big ~billion dollar compaines in the recent past - inmobi, flipkart, druvaa. None of the founders really started to 'solve' a problem they were passionate about. What they were really passionate about was just 'starting up' - and based on their personal strengths, industry knowledge and what they thought could be sold, stumbled on these big businesses. This was probably true for HP too.
It is absolutely ok to do a startup just for the heck of it. Get in the game and find out the intersection of what you can build and what a customer will buy. If you build a big business - the passion will follow. Do not forget to bullshit though on your big interview on how the so solved problem kept you awake at nights - it makes for some good reading and impressionable pr.
[+] [-] philipDS|11 years ago|reply
4 critical parts: Idea, Team, Product, Execution
1. Idea
-> Good startups take about 10 years
-> Startup should feel like an important mission
-> Hardest part coming up with great ideas: best look terriblea t the beginning (e.g. search engine, social networks limited to college students without money, a way to stay at stranger's couches)
-> "Today only a small subset of users want to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them"
-> You need to believe and willing to ignore naysayers
-> Most people will think your idea is bad: be happy. they won't compete. it's not dangerous to tell people your idea.
-> it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first. first version should take over a small specific market and expand from there. unpopular but right
-> take the time to think about how the market will evolve. market size in ~10 years. think about growth rate of the market instead of its current size. small, but rapidly growing market! people are desperate for a solution
-> you cannot create a market that does not exist
-> there are many great ideas, pick and find one you really care about.. "SW is eating the world"
-> "Why Now?" - dixit Sequoia - have a great answer to this question
-> Build something that you yourself need. You'll understand it a lot better.
-> Get close to your customers. Work in their office or talk to them multiple times a day
-> If it takes more than a sentence to you know what you're doing, it likely is too complicated
-> "Do more when you're a student." Think about new ideas and meet potential co-founders
-> Think about the market first and you'll have a big leg up
2. Product
-> Great Idea > Great Product > Great Company
-> Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters
-> Sit in front of the computer working on product, or talk to your customers
-> Biz Dev, Raising Money, Raising Press, Hiring are significantly easier when you have a great product
-> Step 1: build something that users love
-> YC is all about: Exercise, Eat, Sleep, Work on Product and Talk to Customers
-> "It's better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like"
-> Get growth by word of mouth. This works for consumer as well as enterprise products. You'll see organic growth. If you don't have some early organic growth, then your product isn't good enough. It's the secret sauce to growth hacking.
-> Breakout companies always have a product that's so good that grows on word of mouth
-> Great products win. Make something users love.
-> Keep it simple. Look at first versions of Google, Facebook, iPhone
-> Founders care about small details. They're fanatical
-> One thing that correlates with success is hooking up PagerDuty to their ticketing system. Response time within an hour.
-> Go recruit your first users by hand to get feedback every day.
-> When everyone tought Pinterest was a joke, Ben Silbermann walked around coffee shops in Palo Alto to convince people to use Pinterest. He set Pinterest to the home page in the Palo Alto public library so people would discover the website. Do things that don't scale. Read Paul Graham's essay.
-> Create a tight feedback loop. What do users like? What do they pay for? What would make them recommend it?
-> Try to keep your feedback loop going for all of your companies' life
-> Do sales and customer support yourself in the early days. This is critical. Do not hire these people right away.
-> Keep track of metrics. Look at active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, etc. Be brutally honest if they don't go in the right direction
-> If you don't get your product right, nothing else in this class will matter.
Why start a startup?
-> "It's glamorous", "You'll be the boss", "Flexibility", ...
-> Entrepreneurship gets romanticized
-> The reality is not so glamorous. It is a lot of hard work. You're sitting at your desk, focused, figuring out hard engineering projects. It is quite stressful.
-> Founder depression is a real thing. If you start a company, it's gonna be extremely hard
-> You have loads of responsilibity
-> You're responsible for the opportunity cost of the people who decide to follow and help you out
-> You're more committed. A founder cannot leave a company. For 10 years if it's going well. Probably for 5 years if it's not going well.
-> "Number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology"
-> You're always on call, you're a role model. You'll always be working anyway
-> If you joined Dropbox or Facebook early on, your financial reward might be a lot better than when starting a startup
-> If you join a later stage startup, you have more impact - massive userbase, existing infrastructure, work with an established team. E.g. Brett Taylor was employee #1500 at Google and he invented Google Maps. He got a big financial reward for this.
-> What's the best reason? You can't NOT do it. You have to make it happen
-> Do it out of passion
-> The world needs it (if not, go do something else) and/or the world needs you (you're well-suited to do it). The world needs you somewhere, find where.
[+] [-] revorad|11 years ago|reply
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
I'm not too keen on Dustin Moskovitz's whole spiel about telling people not to start startups. In a course about how to start startups, it seems really misplaced.
[+] [-] kul|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwomers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thoughtpalette|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/thoughtpalette/Startup-Video-notes
[+] [-] xavierkelly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chambo622|11 years ago|reply
Good notes. A few typos.
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smuss77|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kartikkumar|11 years ago|reply
I would have expected the message to be that the most successful founders in the long-term are the ones that figure out the right work/life balance, to ensure they don't burn out. In other words, successful founders are able to be focussed and driven for the hours that they work, and in recharge-mode when offline.
This is intuitively what I would have expected and I'm curious if the message from the lecture of "work all day, everyday" is really right.
[+] [-] sharemywin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcjordan|11 years ago|reply
This is the first time a lot of the YC flavor of startup how-to material has been presented in a lecture video format[1]. I suspect much of the long-term audience of these lectures wouldn't have come across pg's essays, Blake Masters' Peter Thiel startup notes or Dustin Moskovitz's excellent Medium posts before. Maybe some lecture watchers were allergic to long-form articles, or maybe some would rather receive a weekly email with videos. Myself, I consume this sort of material on my walk to work, either text-to-speeching essays or listening to lectures. The video lecture format was especially fun, I watched it full screen on the TV while eating an enchilada and poking my fiancee about points she might find relevant to her side project. How often do you get to consume this sort of content like that?
Having read pg's essays[2], I still had a number of "aha!" moments from Sam's slides and hearing his presentation. And hearing Dustin describe in his low-key tone why you should be employee 1,000 at an obviously successful startup rather than start your own, and backing it up with charts and photo-jokes about the elephant in the room was just entertaining. Seeing "this is how we'll teach you to do this thing. Here's an expert on why not to do this thing." is not always the type of juxtaposition you get with standalone online essays.
Looking forward to the next lecture. I'd say it's well worth the time and opportunity cost of putting this all together, so thanks all involved.
[1]: Yes, some Lean Startup™ and Principles of Entrepreneurship™ flavored material has been presented in lecture format before, but not YC™ lensed AFAIK.
[2]: Okay, I skipped the early seemingly pure-Lisp-focused ones. Though like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't about a long motorcycle trip, and maybe pg's Lisp essays are not really all about writing Lisp?
[+] [-] jduhamel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
I'm usually sceptical about start-up chances, I know how much work it means, and I know that a lot of early-stage employees get rich, too. Yet, I don't think you can get rich this fast/easy with a modest degree... Even as early-stage employee often you'll still get a raw deal or you overestimate their chances of success.
[+] [-] agentultra|11 years ago|reply
There's still some good advice for those of us not interested in that life style. I was particularly taken with the idea of building something that just a handful of people will really love. Having a rapt-audience for your product would be a huge win if you decide to build more, scale up, or sell out.
I think it's really good that they're at least trying to convey how difficult building the style of companies they're talking about can be. I can appreciate how challenging that must be. The cultural yard-stick for success these days are valuations and IPOs. There's a ton of pressure to go that route especially from YC. I'm glad they're being conscientious about it even if they don't 100% succeed at removing some of the glimmer from the stars in peoples' eyes.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to start a smaller enterprise and aspire to keep just a handful of customers you know by name.
[+] [-] bramgg|11 years ago|reply
What does that mean? I'm not trying to rip on the video or anything like that, but am genuinely curious as to how much luck Sam Altman thinks is involved in a startup.
[+] [-] derekchiang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
It depends on his ethics, of course, but I'd say this recommendation alone means he believes there to be a substantial chance...
[+] [-] jtwebman|11 years ago|reply
I would also love if they cover how you work on a startup if you still have the 40 hours a week programming job as well. And how to avoid getting in trouble or legal issues with your job.
[+] [-] Reltair|11 years ago|reply
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Zero to One (CS 138A)
- The Facebook Effect
- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
- The Tao of Leadership
- Nonviolent Communication
[+] [-] acrefoot|11 years ago|reply
EDIT: http://consciousleadershipforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/... is the answer, I believe.
[+] [-] lukasm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdlecler1|11 years ago|reply
How does this compare with an MVP approach where you put something out there first and test the market. Then there is the issue of runway. With enough time, you can start with an MVP and iterate in private beta until users love it, but in many cases a founder is not going to have that kind of runway. They have just enough resources to put something together, and they're going to have to go out to the market with that and iterate on the fly. Unfortunately, once you do get out there and need to take on all of the other responsibilities, then that's time taken away from building a great product.
[+] [-] napoleond|11 years ago|reply
This is all theoretical on my part, FWIW--I have not successfully built such a thing on my own yet.
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petersouth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkaplan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steakejjs|11 years ago|reply
YC is still a for-profit company, after all.