61–70 of 86 posts
Just sharing the notes I compiled while watching the online sessions @ https://startupclass.samaltman.com/ . I've been sitting on this for about half a year, and almost forgot I'd compiled it. I hope some of you find this useful (:
Probably you should also look at "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" https://medium.com/west-stringfellow/disciplined-entrepreneu... Many suggestions are practical with case studies.
wow, great stuff. i was starting to do the same after watching dozens of yc videos. you made it better :)
Nice job on the formatting. Looks great with an auto-outline. Appreciate the share.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing
I recently started out on this road as a solo founder [0], and out of all the given pieces of advice that YC gives, two things are the most conflicting for me: - This pressure to have a co-founder. I see that quoted as a major reasons for why startups go bust but also necessary for doing anything meaningful. I can imagine there being truth to both statements. I've seen startups go bust in my own network on both sides…
YC advice isn't optimizing to help founders at all. It's optimizing for their business model. I don't know why people think otherwise. Do you think venture capitalists are your friends? Pretty sure they're not!
Overwhelmingly the greatest outcomes are produced by companies with founders at the helm for long periods of time. The best VCs in the industry know this well, with few exceptions. If you're dealing with VCs that routinely like to replace or marginalize founders, you're dealing with either a subpar firm or one of the couple old bureaucratic dinosaur firms that occasionally are prone to 'IBM thinking.'
Examples: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Netflix, Salesforce, Qualcomm, HP, Dell, nVidia, Sony, Intel, Oracle, Airbnb, Twitter. Even IBM, at its most successful it was run by the Watsons.
I haven’t finished reading this, but what strikes me about the advice in the notes is that much of it is either contradictory or there exist counterexamples to the claims. For example, the reader is encouraged to start building, but is told you also need a good idea and that you can pivot but most good companies don’t start with a pivot. Counterexample: Slack was a pivot. We’re also instructed that you should build s…
To be clear, I'm not saying that there's not good advice floating around. There is. The trick is knowing how to separate the bad from the good, and as someone who's new to the startup world, that's pretty hard (impossible?) to do.
I haven’t finished reading this, but what strikes me about the advice in the notes is that much of it is either contradictory or there exist counterexamples to the claims. For example, the reader is encouraged to start building, but is told you also need a good idea and that you can pivot but most good companies don’t start with a pivot. Counterexample: Slack was a pivot. We’re also instructed that you should build s…
Youtube was a hard pivot from a video dating site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC advice isn't optimizing to help founders at all. It's optimizing for their business model. I don't know why people think otherwise. Do you think venture capitalists are your friends? Pretty sure they're not!
That's fascinating for me. It certainly comes across like "best for all parties" kind of advice, but only magnifies the need for clear separation of business advice that is fully aligned towards founders.
They want two cofounders to test for sociability like they say, but also because it lowers their risk (if one develops problems or is a loser, the other can step up), and actually increases their leverage over the founders. I mean, one founder can always be some stubborn type who says "no." It's easier to get to "yes" when you have two people making choices -this is basically an algorithm. The sociability thing is reasonable and a good test in many ways, but I know about as many solo founders who made it as I know founder-teams, so the advice is obviously wrong for some. Distribution is about what you see in big firms: plenty of Zucks and Bezoses out there to balance out the famous dyads.
The "go for unicorn" thing should be familiar to you as a trend follower. I believe the old Turtle systems would have a majority of initiated trades as expected to lose money (aka start up failures -most of them fail!). You make up for the losing trades by doubling up and riding the winners. It's also vastly lower risk to do it this way than try to get a lot of medium sized deals/trades: the longer the trend rolls, the more you are certain the trend is real. The only way to make money on lots of little/medium moves is stat arb; a trading strategy where you can hedge, and VCs can't hedge.
The founder's utility function is vastly different from that of a VC. VCs optimize their utility; not yours. You're just one of many dice they roll.
If you want founder advice, get it from non-VC founders who succeeded at something, or people who have tried to do what you're doing. Otherwise: you are the product.
I haven’t finished reading this, but what strikes me about the advice in the notes is that much of it is either contradictory or there exist counterexamples to the claims. For example, the reader is encouraged to start building, but is told you also need a good idea and that you can pivot but most good companies don’t start with a pivot. Counterexample: Slack was a pivot. We’re also instructed that you should build s…
Furthermore, they are extremely biased towards start-ups, which is understandable. You could not easily make a worse financial decision, statistically speaking. But they need most of us to do it for them to stay in business.