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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

I also never find the things he says very inspiring. Just rehashing the obvious mostly. Of course even the most obvious things might be useful to someone, but the bars for what Sam Altman says during what he calls a "lecture" should be higher than that.

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If you listen to what a lot of YC partners say, most of them never say anything that is very insightful. Most are generic advice that can be applied to anything. And some partners have already spent more time at YC than actually founding startups, which makes me think how useful their advice really is. I, myself, don’t really find much value in them. But I am sure young 20 something founders gobble their advice up.

From what I've read [0], the most obvious advice is what first time founders need (even if they do not seek it). Serial entrepreneurs may already know but obvious advices re-align their internal compass.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/48-mistakes-first-time-f...

Back in 2014 I found his lectures, and many of the other videos in the course very useful. Coincidentally, at the time of the course I was launching a software product and by applying some of the concepts learnt in the course it became something that is now bringing some $600K yearly in mostly passive income. So you do not need to go all the way in start up mode to get value from it. Reharshing the obvious is still great advice. We all have lots of blind spots.

What were some of those concepts that ended up being usefu?

Possibly those that turned out to be most useful were the importance (and resilience) of integrations (Box guy), the quest to try to create monopolistic situations (Palantir guy), importance of a North star KPI (Facebook guy). But the course has lots of other concepts (understand your customers by doing things that don't scale, focus on what customers want, not on what competitors do, etc).

Thiel is an outlier for me imo, that guy is gangsta

Would you be willing to share roughly what space your product is in?

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