Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

startupclass.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 191 posts

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#41

Post by sloanesturz »

tucaz wrote: post #19

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?

I was there in person, and I felt the same way. Very surprising.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#42

Post by jwomers »

philipDS wrote: post #27

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…

Thanks for the great summary, saved me time and was a great snapshot of the take aways.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#43

Post by TimPC »

smuss77 wrote: post #7

@3:12: "There are much easier ways of getting rich." Could I get some examples? Thank you!

So here is a simple idea. If you're going to work 80h/week anyway and you're a talented coder: source one contract job billing hourly in London and another in SF. Working out of EST you work 5AM-9PM on a 10-6 in both places -- Billing $80/hr with a good corporate setup and working 4000 hours/year you can get 320,000/year, if you have EU citizenship (potentially from one of the return countries) and US citizenship you can probably setup a decent double irish and keep about 280,000+ of that in offshore money. If you want the money in the US and are clever about it you can keep over 250,000 of that money. I suggest London and SF because the 8h timezone difference and high cost of living in both cities. But to give you an idea this is basically $2.5M after-tax locked in the time it takes to make a 10 year exit. That's 1/4 of the first example and way more than 25% of start-ups fail. Admittedly $2.5M isn't the kind of resources that lets you go after solving the biggest problems in the world, but it's pretty solid by developer standards. 1.8X is a good return for a venture capital fund and they have more favourable stock than employees or founders, so you have to think the average start-up return for founders, even enormously talented ones is far worse than that.

Edit corrected typo in time worked.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#45

Post by TimPC »

ThomPete wrote: post #2

Don't get me wrong I love Sam Altman I love y-combinator but a small part of me is thinking that a good first step to start a startup is to not watch that video and find your own way. Not because it's probably not great but because a startup is not a formula. Your path is your own.

Disagree strongly. These lectures are about 40 minutes and seem jam packed with good advice. A start-up isn't a formula but it does follow certain trends. Doing it wrong is a disaster and if you're taking on what can be a 10 year commitment without spending less than 20h exploring advice from some of the best data and people in start-ups you probably have misaligned your priorities. I suspect heeding the advice in the first lecture of this course would save most start-ups more time and money than 20h of the "CEO" co-founder.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#46

Post by dkural »

cjmb wrote: post #38

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 a…

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.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#48

Post by AVTizzle »

cjmb wrote: post #38

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 a…

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.

Re: Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]

#49

Post by dkural »

porter wrote: post #47
porter wrote: post #4

Ycombinator leading the way once again. Looking forward to this!

I guess all the people downvoting this are from other incubators. Not sure why this is being downvoted.

Because your comment does not add anything to the discussion.
Post reply on HN