How to Succeed with a Startup [video]
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
1) Build a product people actually want and need and will pay money for
2) Promote yourself incessantly because others will be promoting themselves even more incessantly.
3) Spend your money wisely - focus on people, product, and marketing. Don't waste your money on office trappings and stuff that makes you feel good. Save your lunch money.
4) Ignore Venture Capital. If you are actually selling something people want, you can grow on revenues. If it takes a lot of money to create what your customers want or if your growth is greater than revenue, then the VCs will want to talk to you anyways. Because a) you're growing and b) customers actually want what you have. But don't start by focusing on what VCs want. Focus on what your customers want instead.
5) Always be selling. To your customers. To the press. To your employees. To anyone who matters. Never stop talking about your company.
6) Always be listening. To your customers. To your employees. The easiest and best ideas come from others.
7) Re-invest. Plow your earnings back into the company and promotion.
8) It's ok not to have a competitive advantage. What? Ok maybe you need to have some advantage but it doesn't have to be nearly as significant as is stated in this video. You need to have some reason for your customers to buy your product or service instead of competitors', so there's always some advantage. It could be price. Features. better service. But it could also be just a better connection with your prospects. Or perhaps you manage to place yourself in the right place at the right time. Or maybe you're just spending a lot on marketing. If you want to be successful, you need to identify at least one FAIR competitive advantage that your customers care about. And if you want to be super successful, identify one UNFAIR competitive advantage that locks out the competition. That could be an exclusive partnership, some intellectual property advantage, or connections with your customers that your competitors can't easily obtain.
This applies no matter if you're running a silicon valley style startup or a cybersecurity enterprise-focused government client startup -- both can make you millions or billions.
And besides, how many startup founders are REALLY building the next Google or Facebook right now? Most are building something much more modest, in which case, in those cases the user is most likely the customer and so building something they want to buy is important.
This piece advice seems leftover from a bygone era as this is so fundamental that I wonder does it even bear saying?
Again, if you're building something people don't want or aren't going to pay for, something is seriously fundamentally wrong and you should try to define what you're even trying to achieve; that is, you're not even trying to build a business but may think you are.
In most industries, making money is usually the very first thing that happens and, in some cases, happens before a thing is built or a service is provided.
Starting a business == making money. Maybe it's not profitable, but money should be changing hands. If that's not happening, go back to the drawing board and question everything.
We're not in the Dropbox circa 2013 era anymore.
How many times do you see a "show HN" post where the project being showcased is just a very simple project. I am not sure if people are just showing it for feedback or if they want to make the project into a startup eventually. A lot of these projects I see seem like they are just simple features but the developer wants to commercialize it. Problem is the current version of the project is so simple that I rarely see any real market for it unless the project is something really amazing.
1) Get to <insert singular mind-blowing metric, like 1 billion users or 1 million drivers>, whatever it takes (bending the laws of unit economics or bending the law in general).
2) Monetize.
1. Be good at product management
2. Do marketing a lot
3. Be smart financially
4. Be smart financially
5. Do marketing a lot
6. Be good at product management
7. Be smart financially
8. Be good at product management
I have trouble seeing how this works in a robotics or biotech company. Yes, if you're building something facing consumers on the web you can go a long way on small savings and people just putting time in. But if you want to build something that requires some capital simply to keep the business running that's going to be difficult.
> If it takes a lot of money to create what your customers want
I assume that covers what you are talking about...
Which is only a little bit true.
- The point about "exponential growth in market" is very important if your startup wants to raise money from VCs and has similar goals. Otherwise, focusing on creating value even in mature markets can be a good choice too. Same point applies to the "Huge if it works" point too.
- His point about real trend vs fake trend is also a good point for your own product's real usage vs fake usage. Are people "really" engaged and using your product or are they just thinking that it's cool but not really using it?
- I have nothing to add to what he said about the team, but team is so important that I wanted to mention it as well.
- His point about optimism is another point where team (or advisors or well-wishers) help. A startup is a roller-coaster. You will have days of negativity and doubts. At that moment, a team member (or someone similar) who pushes you and encourages you is very important!
- Love the points about "We'll figure it out" and "I've got it"
- "Bias towards action" doesn't mean being busy for the sake of being busy. In my career, I've seen so many months wasted because action wasn't based on well-thought-out logic. So, certainly keep bias towards action, but don't use it as no excuse to not think. A good way to not move fast is to move fast in unnecessary directions.
- The "Never lose momentum" point is so difficult in real world (unless you're lucky). But, good to be reminded about.
- The point about "Distribution startegy" is another great point. Every distribution strategy we are thinking of is going to turn out to be harder than we thought. Still, finding new / unexplored distribution sources compared to your competition can be a great win!
- I am sure this wasn't intentional, but I'll say that the talk didn't focus enough on users / customers. In the end, it's all about creating genuine value for the customers / users.
It also can't be good if you're not implementing the ideas being surfaced in those interactions, and implementing takes longer than talking with people. If you have a conversation with someone and end up building something they ask for that takes six weeks of full time work, then does it really make sense to delay the timeline on shipping that feature so that you can keep talking with more potential users who will likely have the same objections anyway? I'm not trying to justify not talking with users, but at the same time once you've gotten the message, it may be time to hang up the phone.
This applies to a subset of Silicon Valley-style, hyper consumer oriented, VC-backable startups that at the end of the day, are fairly interchangeable.
How to succeed in sports? practice, focus, take care of your diet and health
How to succeed in a large company? keep your boss happy, work hard, focus
etc
This is not Altman's fault. I don't think the videos can -- or are supposed to -- replace actual detailed daily advice on struggles which, presumably, you get if you join Ycombinator.
I don't think that "focusing on bringing stories of various startups to light" is all that different from what he is doing. The same criticism applies: it is their story not yours.
And the same caveat applies: it is a sample of the kind of advice you will get.
The problem doesn't just lie in the answer, but the question itself. When you ask a question such as "How can I do well in life?", that lends itself to generic bullshit advice.
My problem with Sam Altman is that he keeps perpetuating these kinds of questions as if he is going to help people. I am disagreeing with both what he is trying to appoint as a question, i.e. "How to success with a startup?" and his generic answers to his generic questions.
It helps nobody. Stop asking these questions.
I am addicted to them. As a kid I used to read books on judo, karate, the guitar, programming, and how to be a spy.
I now read books on startups, investing, programming and writing.
The actual improvement comes from the practice, but I still feel the books and advice play a critical role. They can do the following:
1. They pump me up to go and practice.
2. They actually demonstrate particular exercises or thought experiments.
3. They just get me thinking about the particular item
4. They make me fell less alone because others are thinking about it
5. They make the activity seem important in the life affirming sense of it is worth my time
I think all we can ask of "startup advice" is that it fill a similar niche.
Even if "generic advice" isn't worth anything else, the psychological benefits of keeping a subject at the front of your mind, being reminded something is possible, and building excitement are valuable.
I think you may be just looking from your own point of view that you find things obvious but that doesn't mean general advice won't help others.
In a similar vein to the question "Why do startups win?", which besides having a rich history of rigorous academic inquiry and to my thinking has never been adequately resolved.
One can ask, "Why does Startup School work?" And a chief factor is the imposition of an external hard deadline (Demo Day). As well as the tracking of performance metrics by a team outside the locus of founders.
To that end, a "Milestone Tracker" interface that is both public and designed with accountability in mind could be a key component in making things "real" for participants.
It also occurs to me that in a class of 15K startups, you are going to receive a lot of "offers" to try products and services from your fellow classmates. Just in the past hour I got $250 in credits from a cloud analytics startup, and a discount coupon from a crowdfunding platform for foodies ;)
Manageable for a cohort size in the low hundreds. But perhaps an issue at scale that may result in missed opportunities.
It may be a good idea to have a centralized site at startupschool.org/offers with a canonical list of "startup-to-startup" (S2S) deals.
Of course it would be differentiated from third-party credits by the likes of GCloud, AWS, Stripe, etc
Just curious because I swear saw a blog where they want VR startups to apply awhile ago but can't find it now.
Twenty years later people demo slightly cooler things and are disappointed when I’m not excited. I’ve already seen this future. Wake me up when it gets here!
Nope, got aggressively nauseous about two minutes in and had to bail in a hurry, or I would have spilled my lunch all over the very nice simulation rig. The lack of inertial forces to match the simulated movement really wreaked havoc on my inner ear.
1: social VR movie going experience. Where you put on a headset in the comfort of your own space to watch a movie on release day in VR along with N other people who are experiencing the movie as well for the first time - but you can change which vantage point to view the movie from - either from audience position, or from the perspective of your choosing within the movie; camera, villian, hero, victim, isometric drone etc. Each movie has a finite number greater than 2 vantage points to watch the movie from.
2: out on VR to attend class events as a viewer: lectures at MIT or a concert at Carnegie or Sydney Opera house. On the night of the concert, from the vantage point of a camera hanging about 15 feet above the heads of the IRL audience.
3: a camera stream from a vehicle: formula car, spaceX launch, ISS, airliner.
His friends, and many others, definitely have let their headsets catch dust. But there is a core that does use them every day, and probably won't stop any time soon, and it's certainly being put to work in non-gaming use cases.
I think he's being properly cautious, though, using the date as qualifier.
Windows Mobile phones were out for years well before the iPhone was, and were pretty similar in terms of capability and even hardware, but never reached its type of traction.
When it comes down to it, there were only a few key features and a lot of polish (many still argue over how much more polished it really was) which differentiated the iPhone to go on to sell billions, versus competing products from Palm and Microsoft partners to sell a hundredth of that.
Even in retrospect, it's not straightforward to pin the how and why. Back in 2007, it would have been very hard to guess correctly. It's hard to fault people who dismissed the iPhone as being yet another failed mobile project, and also hard to fault people who thought that PocketPC's would revolutionize computing.
For entertainment, real-estate previews, watching movies together, the experience, learning & simulation, and art modelling its great, but other than that not really. VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.
If someone wanted a VR social experience, we've had MMOs for ages. VR social might as well be a VR gaming MMO. It needs to provide a medium to spur social interactions. That market is not very big, although Roblox (10MM average users) would be an interesting market to look at to see where that goes. Your market segment in VR social is going to be smaller than an MMO, which tops at around at 10MM as well. Instagram has 800MM users. Population of america is 300MM+. Put numbers in perspective, its a niche market and won't ever be big. To make a profit, you would have to dump an incredible amount of investment in comparison to making a simple CRUD app. RoI needs to be justified.
VR has already been around for 15+ years, I grew up playing VR games at Disney as a kid. This market is not new. VR is only fun for certain games as well, generally the same games that made Wii and Xbox kinect fun.
Even if VR/AR became entirely portable and seamless, its still not going to have widescale adoption. You can't replace real life.
VR's biggest profit potential is towards small niche groups of people with alot of money to throw around. Much like the mobile game market works, only a few users contribute 90%+ of sales citation needed. Currently, DoD is using VR/AR for leadership & simulation & hypothetical scenario training, because mistakes / setups are expensive and cost lives.
VR gaming will never be a big market until the cost of equipment goes down. And frictionless setup / no context switching. Its still a very high barrier to entry, and a high cost to maintain.
This is not out experience using VR chat for some of our meetings. We're a fully remote team building a VR product so we're in a somewhat unique position where all our employees have high end VR gear and we have a big need for effective remote collaboration and communication.
A big advantage of VR over voice or video conference calls is being able to see where everyone is looking. This makes for smoother flowing conversations as you're able to look at someone when you pause and want their input. It's a real advantage over video conferencing. This is true even with very primitive avatars that don't reflect any facial expressions. Being able to collaborate around virtual objects in the environment is also useful in some situations, although virtual whiteboards are still quite primitive in most apps. Social VR is a very different experience from an MMO played in a 2D window.
The hardware cost will continue to come down but it's already not a major barrier for many enterprise use cases. Is certainly not a top concern for our customers.
My only counter argument to VR chat for enterprise level applications is four fold:
1. Its synchronous, like any conference call. Async is still going to be the main form of communication (Slack, git issues, email, etc). Synchronous communication has a higher weighting on just communicating ASAP with frictionless joining, since time lost is expensive for any company. That time lost comes from putting on your rift, turning it on, navigating to the meeting, minor details like that etc. It might really be minimal issues at best if your team is used to it.
2. Replaying VR, or even 360* videos. Information hides in a 3D plane as opposed to just everything displayed on a 2D screen. Mostly for people that did not attend the conference video / webinar etc. I don't know about you but I watch many of my videos at 2x playback speed. That would give me nausea
3. The advantages you are getting in VR over a traditional video conference call aren't that high. You would know more here, do you really value facial expressions and social cues over a simpler environment without 3d head set?
4. People remoting in need to have a VR set. That eliminates your coffee shop / travel nomad employee, is he really going to be carrying VR gear around? Of course he can just use chat / video, but still you want your work culture to embrace your ideals.
My counter argument to VR chat to general social everyday use, is primarly to cost / portablility / mass adoption / convenience. But these will get better over time.
It definitely has applications for things with your SO/best friend who lives in a different city, I can definitely see the appeal in that.
...I might have overstated myself here at least on that statement
As I mentioned, we all have high end VR gear and most of us have it at our desks and are already in and out of VR all day as part of our development work. The use case for our project also benefits from us having capable portable setups so yes we do have people joining VR meetings from Starbucks but I don't expect that to be a mainstream thing for a while until the tech improves.
Any sub-$100 system is a total joke that no one is going to use for more than a minute. Anything less than $1000 isn't pushing the frame rate or the latency to keep users from vomiting, and even if you don't get sick you're probably constrained to your chair.
It's going to take serious technological advances to get VR into a place where it's fun to use consistently for most people.
IMO, the best place to look for VR opportunities right now is actually in AR/MR. Plenty of enterprise customers interested, frame rate comes second to utility, augmentation means you can actually see what's going on so frame rate doesn't actually matter that much (indeed when I developed for the HoloLens, 30fps was sufficient.)
I think one of the "killer apps" for VR will be in education. It will be for unique user experiences related to whatever the student is studying. Right now most students learn by lecture, reading books and maybe going online to watch a video on youtube. Well just imagine if you can do activities like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hXlwRlhueE
Now compare that to the lecture, reading books or watching a video. The VR experience is educational, it is interesting, it is fun, it is exciting. When you ask many kids how they feel about school, what do they say? They say it is BORING and I tend to agree with them (based on experience in school). Add in these VR educational experiences and the whole game changes.
Thoughts?
Perhaps that is a sign. If you like VR and think it is the future then think about what that killer app could be and invent it because right now, I don't see any killer app for VR yet. Just lots of ideas floating around but no real product.
I remember Altman saying an AI for X startup would be a good idea though. I guess Cruise Automation played things well.
- Have rich & powerful friends directly or indirectly
- Impress & become friendly with the rich & powerful either through clear data that shows your worth an investment(your startup data shows traction) or lie your butt off; aka fake it before you make it. I always strive(d) for the former as darn my parents and the morality they instilled.
No idea his background... yet did he not go to an Ivy League school?
If it's not Ivy League why am I paying more to go there then the hallmark ivy league school?
I would consider stanford a top tier school... but ivy league appears to have a specific definition.