The path to $100B [video]
startupschool.org
startupschool.org
The best advice of the video is to have a strong vision of the future. How will the world be fundamentally different in 10 years compared to how it is today. Think about that change, and then build a company that will be well positioned with the new change. The stronger your vision, and the more accurate it is, the better your chance of success is.
In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of $100B companies is going to explode as well. More and more commerce is happening on the internet which scales much easier than brick and motor commerce. More and more goods purchased are entirely virtual, and have huge margins. More and more value is in software, which can be copied and used without practical limits. If your goal is to start a company that grows to $100B there has never been a better time to do that than right now.
2x or .5x won't make much of a difference, but if you are thinking 100x or 1,000x smaller then it will have an impact on your business in the early stages. If your goal is to make a $100M company you aren't likely thinking big enough to attract good talent and partners.
There are a lot of talented engineers that prefer working for startups than large corporations. There are not enough talented engineers to staff all of the start ups. It's a competition for companies to attract the best talent.
Microsoft's old mission statement: (Paraphrase) To put a computer on every desk and in every home.
Amazon's mission statement: "...build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online"
These mission statements don't specifically state they want to build a $100B company, but it seems pretty obvious that a company that does the things in their mission statement would be worth $100B.
Devil's advocate, is that actually a good thing?
Might be good for the consumer but not great for the laborer. Working for someone else is a bummer. Increasing consolidation means increasingly more of us will be in that position.
I find this highly unlikely as well.
Hypothetical situation:
Healthcare/Surgery could be practically free. You slide into a machine and there is an AI running on the cloud which compares your health data with your prior states and also with billions of other records from other human beings and makes the perfect diagnosis. Then it makes the precise cut into your flesh and gives you the perfect amount of anesthesia and inserts the stent and your heart surgery is done.
You don't need a radiologist, a general practitioner, a cardiologist etc.
It could still be a net gain since vastly more people get the care they need.
Hell, Intuitive Surgcal (makers of the Davinci) already have plenty of data to run procedures automated - but they wont do that yet...
The data from recorded successful surgical procedures executed by robots but driven by human surgeons is extremely valuable data.
That will be an interesting fronteir in med when you can run diffs across thousands of surgeries to smooth out the execution tailored to each particular subject.
The future will have it's own set of advantages and disadvantages. It's important to leverage your own position in the present to give yourself a better position in the future.
People may say that is too-dystopian and cynical of a perspective, but all data-points over the last several decades are very solidly pointing in this direction....
There will certainly be lots of 10B, 50B and 100B companies - then the 1-5T companies will consume them just as the 5B companies grabbed up everything they could to build their moats over the last few years.
There will be cyber-wars for privacy in the next 20 years. There will be digital outcasts who seek to hack and bring down large systems.
There will be plenty of cyber-terrorism to come.
Personally, I thin kthe US is sitting on its laurels way too much and will be completely unprepared for a real cyberwar when it actually happens.
Anyone know of some good authors with a contemporary grasp of where we currently are with technology who is putting out some good cyberpunk fiction about the impending future?
Gibson is the master of the genre.
But I see the dystopian dark nature of it. I helped, along with everyone on HN, build this monster we have now.
I tried Gibson's latest story, and I wasnt too into it...
Look at Microsoft, they did everything wrong and still won big.
They all hacked the innovator's dilemma: they're building bigger and bigger moats. And when they miss on a paradigm shift they jump on the next one. For example, maybe you miss mobile but win cloud etc.
If you set your goal at an unfathomable amount of net worth, then you lose focus on the problem you're trying to solve, and basically set your self up for failure.
A good example of this is [1] marshmallow challenge, which is a challenge where you build a tower out of spaghetti and balance a marshmallow on top. The biggest tower wins. The organiser discovered that if he offered a $10,000 prize to the highest structure... No one could build anything, the pressure of a large incentive would overwhelm people and the marshmallow would collapse the hastily designed structure.
The lesson is to solve a problem iteratively and not to focus on the reward. This is how large companies like FAMG do it too. Not try to make a multi-billion dollar business from day one.
[1] https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/10/19/lessons-innovation-...
Whereas the chance you could actually build a company with billion dollar valuation is probably well under 1:1M. Just from being in the pool of startup school attendees or auditors. There are additionally many other factors which could substantially increase those odds.
Also, would just like to mention the recent podcast with Laura Deming of Longevity Fund was excellent. Incredibly informative and reasonably optimistic about the probability of a breakthrough in our lifetimes.
Building a billion dollar company takes generally 10+ years of work (and even if you're YouTube, 1.5 years) and also probably a lot of your own money, at least in opportunity cost if not actual money.
While on average the odds of the latter (the business) may be better, for a given person (which is always me and never an average person) the odds of the former (the lottery) may actually be much higher.
On a side note, while it may seem "un-meritocratic" to the HN crowd, having lotteries as gateways to social mobility and resource allocation is a decent idea.
Also consider that poorer lottery winners are often ill equipped to deal with their winnings and frequently lose the entire sum of money within a few years; they may enjoy spending the money, but it doesn't lift a winners children and community out of a cycle of poverty as I would normally think of "social mobility".
Maybe we should randomly force people to get an MBAs instead.
Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero percentage chance of success.
Can the $1M ARR SaaS startup build products that can take it to $1B ARR? Or does that require a different DNA altogether?
100 users paying $8.25 a month will equal a $10k/yr MRR business.
Today no one uses it. I had to shut down the export server, and got about 40 followers on instagram with some of the works I managed to do with it[1].
[0] https://gridgenerator.com/ [1] https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/
Now i work at a web company trying to slave my way to pay the debt and in another 10 years try it again. Does it entitle me to say "been there done that" ?
I'm really interested in your decision to move away from a consumer model to a b2b model.
- Present it in a slightly different way (remove landing page and instantly start playing a dumbed down version of it that introduces the current features as a 'initialization/introductory process')
- Improve the mobile experience (by default shape creation must be done by choosing which areas to paint instead of the current approach of connecting points, this is a small fix that makes using it in mobile a much better experience)
- Allow anonymous export and sharing of works. Remove the login until it is absolutely needed.
- Create thematic portfolios with it and share them with current graphical artists that work with grids
- Restart instagram marketing
If you have any other ideas that don't fit the traditional "startup book" approach I will gladly do them or try to incorporate them in the reboot.
- Add a share button. Freeware gets a watermark, paid gets the clean image. Integrate with twitter, facebook, and instagram to make posts.
- Rebrand the application to something more artsy sounding. I now have three tabs open that say "Grid Generator" and it sounds like an engineer tool, while the application runs like an art tool.
- Hows the tablet experience? I would focus on desktop and tablets more than mobile. I think this application would lend itself to larger screens than cell phones have.
- Run a subreddit for people to share their work.
- Server costs for the export engine can be lowered by using AWS lambda to provide on demand computing. Implementing this can range from easy to difficult depending on which language the engine is written in.
If you want to reach out to me more about this subject you can find an email address in my profile. Good luck to you!
They said they would release the outcomes of who got in or not at 10pm PST. Instead it started to trickle in some 3 hours later. During that period the Slack channels had entrepreneurs panicking about whether they got in or not. Some even talking about suicide. And apparently this happens every, single time.
I have lost any and all respect for YC and the partners who claim they represent the interests of founders.
Founders should focus on making great products not trying to reach some arbitrary number.
As you said, founders should focus on making great companies (not just great products), so they should not focus on the outcome release time.
If you get into YC that's great. If not, you are still going to build your company anyways. There's not going to be a change in direction of your company either way.
YC is an accelerator. It accelerates your progress up a path, but ultimately you are responsible for setting the path and running up it.
Please don't consider suicide over a YC application. There's going to be a lot more obstacles ahead, that will be more stressful than applying to YC.