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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…
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.
@3:12: "There are much easier ways of getting rich." Could I get some examples? Thank you!
Start a boutique consultancy with a buddy. Hire up until you get to ~8 employees. Continue for 10 years. Congrats, you're a millionaire.
Everyone knows the management consulting / investment banking career path, right? Congrats, you're a millionaire.
Go to med school. Specialize in whatever the high-demand fields are, like e.g. anesthesiology. Execute competently for 10 years. Congrats, you're a millionaire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Google went public the valuation was ~$23 Billion (they raised just under $2 billion in the IPO) [1]. However to your point this was around 6 years after founding, whereas Facebook was valued at ~15 billion by Microsoft in 2007, 3 years after it was founded. I had a friend who turned down a job at Facebook in late 2008 because he felt the 15 billion valuation was very high and it limited his upside. And before a…
> I had a friend who turned down a job at Facebook in late 2008 because he felt the 15 billion valuation was very high and it limited his upside. He was way off and probably did not ask the recruiter proper questions. Common stock issued to employees is a different class from preferred stock issued to Microsoft.
> Even if you joined Facebook as employee #1000, so you joined it in like 2009, you still made 20 million dollars.
I find it hard to believe that it is true, but obviously both you and the speaker know much more about it than I do. However I've also seem people commonly overstate things like this.
Some basic math:
$200 billion current value / ($15 billion value in 2009 * 50% discount factor from preferred to common) = 26.6x
So already assuming the most optimistic things [1], to get to $20 million dollars today, you'd have needed to get the equivalent of $750k worth of RSUs in 2009. Even vesting over 4 years that seems like an extremely high amount, high by a factor of about 5-10x of what I'd guess.
And don't get me wrong, I have no doubt people who joined Facebook in 2009 earned quite a bit of money assuming they held onto the stock. But 20 million dollars is a big number.
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[1]: The employee joined in 2009, you still work there, you haven't sold most of your stock (which is impossible because you had to sell some in the IPO to pay your taxes, but whatever)
Anyone have thoughts on this?
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 think the visual indication plays a huge part in the perception.
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…
Good notes. A few typos.
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…
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.
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 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.
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 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.