How to Start a Startup (2014)
startupclass.samaltman.com
startupclass.samaltman.com
I will probably watch the Adora Cheung video later today. I think that's one I haven't seen and I've really liked everything I've seen by her so far.
YC also has a free library of stuff. You don't need to be in Startup School to start accessing their educational things.
So if you want to learn and don't yet feel ready to commit to starting a business, you can start learning on your terms, at your pace.
Don't discount the value of that for laying the groundwork for a future business. If you can only give it an hour or two a week now, do what you can now. It adds up over time.
1. People think the point of education is credentials and free online courses don't typically come with credentials.
2. People routinely use price as a proxy for value. This makes it hard to feel confident that a free course is actually worthwhile.
The nice thing about YC's free education is that neither of these applies.
If you want to start a business, you mostly don't need credentials. (There are exceptions.) You mostly just need to know how to make it happen.
They have a really good reputation. They know what they are talking about.
Bonus points: They do this stuff for free because HN and Startup School are both part of their funnel. If you actually do start a business and hope to grow it big, they would like a piece of the action.
So you know they are giving you good information because they want you to succeed so they can get a cut of some of the businesses that succeed that started out just consuming their free stuff. That's exactly how they make their money and there is a lot of money at stake, so it's worth it to them to give some stuff away for free.
I am less of a fan of the rest of the material, but that might be just my preference.
I keep seeing lots of "bashing" when Sam Altman writes or says anything, and I'm not sure why. Agreed that he has his own way of interacting with the world, which sometimes suggests (at least to me) that he's living in a very thick bubble, and/or that he's not really able to be empathic with "normal" people. But besides that, I think he's a decent human being and his intentions are good, which in my book is more than enough to cut some slack and appreciate what he can offer.
I am also sometimes a critic of YC's material and "cool aid" approach, but again, I just try to take what works for me and simply ignore the rest. YC has the great merit of having democratized part of the process.
I think that right now founders have usually a decent deal; VCs are the top of the food chain; and early employees, and then mid-stage employees, got the shorter stick. But it's overall much better than it was twenty years ago. Again, IMHO.
On "how to start a startup", it's almost the year 2021, and I think that while some principles apply, we might need new ones; and that large corporations are making it harder for startups to succeed. E.g. try to build and "enterprise IT" startup, and you'll quickly see some sort of competition from AWS, Azure and GCP (in descending order), way earlier that what it would have been 10 years ago.
Or try to build b2c stuff, and wait for the big guys to show up at your door with a competing product or service very quickly.
I still admire the ones that start a startup these days. There's a huge difference of "opportunity cost" between white guys with a Stanford/MIT/etc background and a wealthy family behind them, versus a "normal" set of founders from a non-US background and very little money as a backup plan. I root for the latter, perhaps unfairly. I want to see more "rags to riches" stories, I want to hope that inequality and unfairness are going down in the world.
And finally, I also hope that instead of simply building "something that people want" (YC's motto), we see more and more people building something that is good for the world.
- https://www.ycombinator.com/library
- https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/
There’s a striking aspect of this talk, near the end: it explains why you don’t need to start a startup to have a big impact on the world. Google Maps and the Facebook Like button were two examples.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman:
> In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. It was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.[11][12]
It was more a case of trying something, seeing if it worked, keeping it if it did and stopping it if it didn't. Aka trial and error.
Problem with trial and error is that unless you're naturally gifted at running a business (I'm not) or lucky (I'm not) it takes a long time to learn all the lessons you need to learn to make a successful business.
The best shortcut is a good mentor...but those are hard to find.
Edit: Having said that, Reddit has a lot of smart people on it that are able to provide sensible guidance for specific business problems.
Also: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-... <-- this was a great framework for running various areas of a business. Wish I had stumbled across it sooner than this year.
I have no idea how to act on that nugget. All of my own attempts failed (clearly).
Show them that you are on a path to success and they will want to push you over the finish line.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/48-mistakes-first-time-f...
These guys don't know how to build your business, they know how to get funds to change hands. So kiss their ass, jump through whatever inane hoops they use to trick the wealthy to part with their jewels, and you might just be among the chosen few.
But to claim that Sam Altman doesn't know how to build a business is a bit of stretch. OpenAI seems to be doing quite well.
Also, note this quote from Paul Graham [1]:
> Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19."
Not to mention that PG still declined him, and Sam refused to leave. Sounds to me like a bit more than just your average lucky kid.
I'm sure there are ways to lean on the scales and enhance your "luck," but if you don't attribute most of anyone's success to luck you are a fool. How many potential business geniuses died of cholera in the last couple hundred years?
How so? OpenAI is nowhere near turning a profit, it’s a research lab masquerading as a business. It’s alive only due to massive injections of capital from investors (and when they weren’t prepared to fork over any more, Microsoft).
Sam Altman is clearly brilliant at raising capital. I don’t want to downplay the importance of that skill. But selling a product to actual customers for more than it cost to make is a completely separate - and let’s face it, less sexy - endeavour.
No, I think all these startups employees with families to feed are going to be out of a job. VCs fund startups that shouldn’t have been funded in the first place. They create a market that artificially props up unsustainable businesses. This video is a good explanation of how the VC world actually works. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NVVsdlHslfI
5 years ago is shockingly recent and well past the SV gold rush curve.
It means any other warm body inhabiting that space at that time would have similar results. There are infinite right places and right times.
Most of these videos had counterintuitive information that I was happy to have heard before getting started — especially since I came from a completely different industry. They won’t tell you near everything you need to know to get started, but nothing will so as far as these things go I found them to be very helpful.
Just because you understand the theory doesn't mean you can start a business. That's all I'm hoping to point out. I wish to take nothing away from Sam's success. In purely monetary terms Sam is infinitely more successful than I might ever be.
Sorry, are you talking about the same Sam Altman who wrote about "life advice" when he turned 30? https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...
Or the Sam Altman who tells us:
- How to invest in Startups https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups
- How to be successful https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
- etc.
Sam Altman is a PG wannabe, but without the actual insights and experience
You want to go in the right direction, age is irrelevant. Think more about what you want to be doing. Being ageist is not what you want to be doing.
Most need to find their answers from within.
If we were to evaluate him against his investment record, the score looks even better - he's clearly a wealthy guy, and it appears that most of his pre-OpenAI money comes from this area. This is significant, since if he can spot a good startup early on, then supposedly his thoughts on early stage startups are likely valuable.
You might go ahead and trivialize those data points, but the reality is that's a 100x better resume than the majority of people whose blog posts form a basis for daily discussions here on HN. Why hate on Sam specifically?
There may be elements of Altman people admire beyond the sustainable business - but your criticism is fair.
As an investor, he's also incentivized to dish out solid advice to his portfolio companies and also to companies that are potential investments.
But yeah once you take the money and you need that exit, you're going to have a hard time. It's up to the founder to decide from the beginning