Projects and Companies
blog.samaltman.com
Projects and Companies
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Projects and Companies
#2[deleted]
Re: Projects and Companies
#3I'm not sure the words "project" and "company" are the best words for it, but this idea is definitely important. It's a general principle in life to never take yourself too seriously.
If you find yourself not doing something because you don't think it's worthy of the fine company you've built, you're thinking way too much about the formal company and not enough about the ideas, work, and vision that made the company what it is.
Re: Projects and Companies
#4About a year ago I started being careful to call my things projects too.
In the current climate people want to hear what your monetization strategy is first, or they think you're a loser. And a lot of the time I don't have one, or it's really vague. I just have an idea that seems like it will be really important to at least some people.
Calling it a project also liberates me from feeling guilty about not having a corporation around it, or going to meetups to yammer with my city's alleged startup entrepreneur scene, etc.
Re: Projects and Companies
#5"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success."
I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad.
If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as possible before diving in. So essentially, if something seems like a bad idea, I'd move on to the next idea.
This may make it harder to create a unicorn (since I'd clearly miss some aspect that makes the idea not bad), but I bet it's a better, less risky way of trying to achieve a high-growth start-up with great potential. Good ideas fail as well, but I'd wager it's less often than bad ideas.
Re: Projects and Companies
#6I've been thinking about this recently. Especially as the term "startup" feels distasteful, a verb that's been turned into a noun. I'm not building a startup. Nor am I continually starting (though sometimes it feels that way.)
So what's the right word?
Project - Sam gives good reason why this word works in the beginning, so long as you're not looking for external validation. At some point though, your project becomes something more.
Company - the people working on the project, and all the processes and resources that go into supporting those people.
Business - the transactional model that enables the company to make money and keep doing what they're doing.
Mission - for some people, the business is the mission. But for most success stories, even in the beginning when it was just a project, there was an underlying mission, a purpose and a plan. Unfortunately, the word feels mushy. I'd hate to hear people going around saying they're "working on a mission."
Ultimately, the word I use will likely depend on the context.
Re: Projects and Companies
#7I've been my entire life working on projects, where I'm from no one knows anything about startups. I didn't know anything either. I thought Google and Microsoft had been there for years and were created like any other traditional company. Couldn't imagine anything built out of a garage or a dorm room.
I got money from all my different projects but never thought about them as companies, I used them to learn and pay for my hobbies. I never thought they could turn into real companies so I worked on them at night after my normal job.
Right now I got back to a project and idea I had back in 2008 when I even registered the domain and created the landing page and sketched a logo. Finally, I want to turn it into a real thing, into a company, but I still think about it as a project.
Same happens when I have to explain to family and friends why I left a well-paid job on tech in Ireland and moved back to my parents home in Spain to work on a website while the country is still broke. By saying "I'm working on a project" seems less serious. They still ask if I can live out of that but if I try to explain I'm working on a company people just freak out and things get really difficult to justify taking the attention out of what's important. Hope one day they understand.
Re: Projects and Companies
#8"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success." I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad. If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as…
I think the more nuanced version of the prevailing wisdom is "it seems like a bad idea to everyone else, because of a key set of facts that you know that very few other people know."
Knowing that secret, whatever it is, probably requires special insight into a particular area of the world, special ways of thinking that few others are using, and perhaps special methods of operating that few others are using.
That's how an idea that looks bad ends up being good.
Re: Projects and Companies
#9> The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn't let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a single engineer inside a company doing something totally different. Airbnb was a side project to make some money to afford rent. They all became companies later.
This is hardly a list of the best companies, and a few of them don't support the argument:
1. The search/portal market was already significant when Google launched. Companies like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos were already public traded at the time, and were some of the hottest issues in the tech space. So it's no wonder Andy Bechtolsheim cut Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000 before a corporate entity even existed.
2. When Facebook launched, Friendster already had millions of users and had received a $30 million acquisition offer from Google. MySpace, which was created by people who saw Friendster's popularity, was founded by people trying to capitalize on the social networking hype that was already present in 2003.
3. Even Airbnb is hardly a post child for Sam's argument. Homeaway, VRBO and Couchsurfing were all well established when Airbnb launched.
For most entrepreneurs, "start out with an idea that doesn't sound very good" isn't likely to turn out very good.
Re: Projects and Companies
#10"All of these were ideas that seemed bad but turned out to be good, and this is the magic formula for major success." I see this sentiment expressed often, like it's a good thing that you want to pursue an idea that seems bad. If I were to think about founding a start-up, I'd rather find an opportunity that makes sense and sounds good, validate the opportunity, talk to potential customers, and do as much diligence as…
I think you misunderstood the point of "seemingly bad ideas".
This is not about ideas that seem bad to you.
This is about ideas that seem bad to others, i.e. ideas that seem okay to you, that you probably even verified in the small, but still have trouble convincing others.