4 critical parts: Idea, Team, Product, Execution
1. Idea
-> Good startups take about 10 years
-> Startup should feel like an important mission
-> Hardest part coming up with great ideas: best look terriblea t the beginning (e.g. search engine, social networks limited to college students without money, a way to stay at stranger's couches)
-> "Today only a small subset of users want to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them"
-> You need to believe and willing to ignore naysayers
-> Most people will think your idea is bad: be happy. they won't compete. it's not dangerous to tell people your idea.
-> it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first. first version should take over a small specific market and expand from there. unpopular but right
-> take the time to think about how the market will evolve. market size in ~10 years. think about growth rate of the market instead of its current size. small, but rapidly growing market! people are desperate for a solution
-> you cannot create a market that does not exist
-> there are many great ideas, pick and find one you really care about.. "SW is eating the world"
-> "Why Now?" - dixit Sequoia - have a great answer to this question
-> Build something that you yourself need. You'll understand it a lot better.
-> Get close to your customers. Work in their office or talk to them multiple times a day
-> If it takes more than a sentence to you know what you're doing, it likely is too complicated
-> "Do more when you're a student." Think about new ideas and meet potential co-founders
-> Think about the market first and you'll have a big leg up
2. Product
-> Great Idea > Great Product > Great Company
-> Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters
-> Sit in front of the computer working on product, or talk to your customers
-> Biz Dev, Raising Money, Raising Press, Hiring are significantly easier when you have a great product
-> Step 1: build something that users love
-> YC is all about: Exercise, Eat, Sleep, Work on Product and Talk to Customers
-> "It's better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like"
-> Get growth by word of mouth. This works for consumer as well as enterprise products. You'll see organic growth. If you don't have some early organic growth, then your product isn't good enough. It's the secret sauce to growth hacking.
-> Breakout companies always have a product that's so good that grows on word of mouth
-> Great products win. Make something users love.
-> Keep it simple. Look at first versions of Google, Facebook, iPhone
-> Founders care about small details. They're fanatical
-> One thing that correlates with success is hooking up PagerDuty to their ticketing system. Response time within an hour.
-> Go recruit your first users by hand to get feedback every day.
-> When everyone tought Pinterest was a joke, Ben Silbermann walked around coffee shops in Palo Alto to convince people to use Pinterest. He set Pinterest to the home page in the Palo Alto public library so people would discover the website. Do things that don't scale. Read Paul Graham's essay.
-> Create a tight feedback loop. What do users like? What do they pay for? What would make them recommend it?
-> Try to keep your feedback loop going for all of your companies' life
-> Do sales and customer support yourself in the early days. This is critical. Do not hire these people right away.
-> Keep track of metrics. Look at active users, activity levels, cohort retention, revenue, etc. Be brutally honest if they don't go in the right direction
-> If you don't get your product right, nothing else in this class will matter.
Why start a startup?
-> "It's glamorous", "You'll be the boss", "Flexibility", ...
-> Entrepreneurship gets romanticized
-> The reality is not so glamorous. It is a lot of hard work. You're sitting at your desk, focused, figuring out hard engineering projects. It is quite stressful.
-> Founder depression is a real thing. If you start a company, it's gonna be extremely hard
-> You have loads of responsilibity
-> You're responsible for the opportunity cost of the people who decide to follow and help you out
-> You're more committed. A founder cannot leave a company. For 10 years if it's going well. Probably for 5 years if it's not going well.
-> "Number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology"
-> You're always on call, you're a role model. You'll always be working anyway
-> If you joined Dropbox or Facebook early on, your financial reward might be a lot better than when starting a startup
-> If you join a later stage startup, you have more impact - massive userbase, existing infrastructure, work with an established team. E.g. Brett Taylor was employee #1500 at Google and he invented Google Maps. He got a big financial reward for this.
-> What's the best reason? You can't NOT do it. You have to make it happen
-> Do it out of passion
-> The world needs it (if not, go do something else) and/or the world needs you (you're well-suited to do it). The world needs you somewhere, find where.