7. In general, don’t start a startup you’re not willing to work on for ten years.
Best piece of advice he gave, and I think more important than "built something people want" (both are important).
13. Overcommunicate with your team. For some reason most founders are really bad at this one. Transparency is your friend.
Yes, but so hard to get this right. Start this early. Things you get in the habit of holding close to the m-team will probably stay with the m-team forever. This is something that's worth to spend mental energy on early, even though it won't matter until you're bigger, because it's so hard to do once you're bigger.
15. Hire slow; fire fast. Hiring is the most important thing you do; spend at least a third of your time on it.
People say this all the time and I don't believe it really works; I thought we're be a fire-fast company when we started but discovered it's hard to be fire-fast and not sociopathic. Don't count on being fire-fast unless you're sure you can do it (for instance, because you've done it before). Weight hiring decisions that much more.
16. Occasionally think about why the 20th person will join your company.
A great question, since we've been doing that for awhile, and answering it has motivated changes in how we approach the management of the company. Asking this question constantly will help your culture.
18. Hire friends and friends of friends. Go after these people like crazy to get them to join. Some other candidate sources are ok, but I always got bad results from technical recruiters.
I think this seems true because all the conventional hiring vectors suck so badly. Have a better plan for hiring than "friends of friends". There is really no reason to believe that you are so central to the talent graph that your friends of friends are going to be great. What makes this worse is that relationships will queer the readings you get during your hiring process; you'll want people to work out.
If your hiring process is fun for the interviewers, it's probably a bad hiring process.
19. Generally, value aptitude over experience.
1000x this; this is our hiring thesis.
20. Hire people that you could describe as animals.
I don't know what this means but if I look at our top performers I would not uniformly describe them as animals. Beware irrational criteria.
28. Keep salaries low and equity high.
This is probably vitally important for the kind of company YC starts but consider businesses that won't require you to do this, because retention is very very hard too.
33. Journalists like hearing directly from founders. If you hire PR people, resist their desire to control all the contact.
Be suspicious of ideas that require you to have a PR plan.
44. Get on planes in marginal situations. In-person is still better than tele-anything.
This is true and also can be usefully flipped, ie on investors or partners; someone who is serious about doing a deal with you will get on a plane, or, simpler, can be induced to take a call on a Saturday afternoon.
57. Celebrate your wins as a company. Get t-shirts for big milestones.
Something I learned at the largest company I worked for was that it's often valuable to brand milestones in advance. People can use the brand as a shorthand. Often had the effect of assumptively closing on management buy-in; once you had the manager using the branding name for the project, they were automatically sold on the project.
60. Meetups and conferences are generally a waste of time.
Yes.
63. Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It’s easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.
Yes.
68. Don’t have a diverse culture in the early days.
Probably no.
71. On the really bad days, remember that tomorrow will be better—it’s hard to see it being much worse!
Since I see people asking how to find cofounders so often, here I'd like to add: you know you have good cofounders when things are going wrong for you, the world seems like it's falling apart, and you suddenly realize with great relief that there are more people who will have to melt down before anything bad happens in the company. Can you imagine feeling that way about a prospective cofounder?
This is why I think the cofounder matching sites are kind of silly. But I guess if it works for dating...
94. Have a table in your offer letters that shows how much the stock you’re granting a new hire could be worth in various scenarios.
This sounds like a really up-front way to handle that. I think you should offer less equity and more salary, though.
This was a great list. Thanks, Sam Altman.