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How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#61

Post by Reedx »

Alupis wrote: post #49
CptJamesCook wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's last round valued them at $500 million, and it is something like the 25th most visited site on the Internet. That's a successful company by any standard.

> Reddit's last round valued them at $500 million > That's a successful company by any standard. Simply being "valued" at some dollar amount doesn't actually mean success. Revenue and positive net profit mean success...

What if Reddit is around for 50 years, paying dozens of employees the whole time while never making a net profit. Would that not be a successful company to essentially everyone? (except the investors)

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#62

Post by nibs »

hugs wrote: post #38
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're at it, how about Mark Cuban? Did Broadcast.com ever work past a basic stage? Did it ever have huge, if any, positive revenues? It really sounds like he bought a domain name and fucked around a little with html and won big in the dotcom craze. A lot of "heroes" in this world are fairly fraudulent. Worse, some went from young tech luminaries to older VC sharks with questionable ethics like Mark Andreeson. I…

There's yet another kind of startup founder, who merely starts a successful company that makes millions of dollars per year and is still in business almost a decade later. The company doesn't fail, but it doesn't have a huge blow-out liquidity event, either. The founder remains heads-down, in the trenches, with no interest in going the VC route. Regardless, they're in a boring B2B niche, so you'll never read about th…

So much more likely to succeed and so much less likely to make $100M. Definitely the surest path to $5-10M near the end of your career. If you only want <$5M perhaps being a corporate VP would be more optimal risk adjusted. This is my strong preference, I just wish there were more of a culture of that here. It could be the fact that this is a start-up forum but sustainable B2B niche business is really interesting and provides good opportunities to create wealth and do impactful work. It is merely less interesting to investors with large overhead and expectations. So it makes sense investors go big.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#63

Post by mbesto »

CptJamesCook wrote: post #47
dwaxe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By YC startup standards again, Reddit isn't a very successful company. The amount of early investment that went into it has certainly paid off, but monetization is a seriously hard problem for them.

Reddit's last round valued them at $500 million, and it is something like the 25th most visited site on the Internet. That's a successful company by any standard.

It might be "successful" (however you define that), but $8.3M in Revenue in 2014 (and an estimated $10M in 2015) on $50M in investment (not including Conde Naste's investment) in a 10 year period for a company valued at $500M and the 25th most visited site, seems like it's under-performing.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#64

Post by nostrademons »

tptacek wrote: post #57
CptJamesCook wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham started Y Combinator, which is a company. Paul Graham was a borderline founder of Reddit, as well.

Sam operates YC, which is a company. If the argument is that he lacks operational experience, and YC is a company, you've defeated your own argument.

As I read the grandparent, his argument is that YC's business is teaching you how to start a company, not operate one. Thus, it's relevant to prospective customers whether its leaders have experience starting successful companies, not just starting unsuccessful ones or operating successful ones. Eric Schmidt may be one of the best CEOs ever, but if your goal is to start the next Google, you're probably a lot more interested in what Larry Page has to say.

Not saying I agree, BTW - I think that binary startup success has a large skill factor, but the magnitude of that success is largely luck, and that good luck can mask bad practices to a large extent. So in my view, people with relatively minor startup successes like Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, or Michael Siebel might actually be better coaches than knock-it-out-of-the-park successes like Larry Page, Mark Cuban, or Notch. But don't misrepresent the argument: operational experience running an existing business is very different from experience founding one.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#65

Post by enraged_camel »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #44
flyosity wrote: post #15

I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but why should I or other engineers/entrepreneurs look at Sam Altman as a massive startup success story when his lone startup Loopt never really achieved product-market fit, and ended up in a firesale? Across 5 funding rounds, Crunchbase lists Loopt as having raised $39 million and then was acquired (acqui-hired?) for $43 million. He didn't create any multiples of value…

To be fair, Warren Buffet has never been much of a traditional entrepreneur but I would certainly listen if he gave me advice on my business. Perhaps some people are players, some are coaches.

Buffet does give great advice for running well-established companies, but to my knowledge he doesn't say anything about entrepreneurship.

Starting a company requires a very different set of skills than running one. That's why a lot of founders either step down or get ousted after their companies mature.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#66

Post by surfmike »

sama wrote: post #20
flyosity wrote: post #15

I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but why should I or other engineers/entrepreneurs look at Sam Altman as a massive startup success story when his lone startup Loopt never really achieved product-market fit, and ended up in a firesale? Across 5 funding rounds, Crunchbase lists Loopt as having raised $39 million and then was acquired (acqui-hired?) for $43 million. He didn't create any multiples of value…

I turned out to be a better investor than an entrepreneur (though somewhat to my surprise running YC is more about running a company than being an investor). I think I've learned a lot from working closely with entrepreneurs that run massively successful companies that's worth sharing. If you disagree, no one is making you watch this. You're free to hit the back button.

I think the parent raised a good (and fair) question and this is a good (and honest) answer. YC has done fantastically well under your leadership.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#67

Post by cma »

flyosity wrote: post #15

I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but why should I or other engineers/entrepreneurs look at Sam Altman as a massive startup success story when his lone startup Loopt never really achieved product-market fit, and ended up in a firesale? Across 5 funding rounds, Crunchbase lists Loopt as having raised $39 million and then was acquired (acqui-hired?) for $43 million. He didn't create any multiples of value…

> It was certainly one of the first interesting location-based apps in the App Store, but soon was surrounded by other location-based apps and never really appeared to surface and gain traction.

I think you are selling the prescience of it short in this part. Loopt was out long before the App Store existed.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#68

Post by liquimoon »

YC is producing lots of fluffy content lately.

I was very disappointed with the How to Build the Future series. Particularly, the interview with Elon Musk. The quality of the questions was mediocre at best.

And the podcasts are just about showcasing YC companies. As an entrepreneur, I basically got zero value from these.

PG should write more essays. Whenever one of them came out, I dropped whatever I was doing to read them.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#69

Post by Alupis »

Reedx wrote: post #61
Alupis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit's last round valued them at $500 million > That's a successful company by any standard. Simply being "valued" at some dollar amount doesn't actually mean success. Revenue and positive net profit mean success...

What if Reddit is around for 50 years, paying dozens of employees the whole time while never making a net profit. Would that not be a successful company to essentially everyone? (except the investors)

If all your business does it extract money from investors and deposit it into employee's pockets (and never generates self sustaining revenue, let alone turn profits), I think we'd call that a charity, more than anything.

Re: How to Build the Future with Sam Altman

#70

Post by Alupis »

npezolano wrote: post #31
sama wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I turned out to be a better investor than an entrepreneur (though somewhat to my surprise running YC is more about running a company than being an investor). I think I've learned a lot from working closely with entrepreneurs that run massively successful companies that's worth sharing. If you disagree, no one is making you watch this. You're free to hit the back button.

I find you learn the most from mistakes, either your own or from others.

> either your own or from others.

If people honestly learned from the mistakes of others - I assert there'd be an awful lot fewer mistakes.

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