Lecture 10: How to Start a Startup | Hacker News Reader

Lecture 10: How to Start a Startup

startupclass.samaltman.com

78 pointskqr211 comments

Notes: http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/10/23/htsas-lec10/

This lecture so far seems like the mystical missing one that I left at the back of my head but didn't consider it as important to visit until you're already 100+ employees in.

By what Brian says, it seems extremely hard to hire anyone who doesn't have the same culture you're looking for. I say that, because I think of culture as being tightly twisted with your company products. How do you find people with the same cultural values, when they haven't grown with your product idea the same way that you have while building it?

These are just my initial thoughts for now..

I've seen that the best way to grow your company's culture is to hire people that your own employees recommend. That is, if you want to build your culture you'll want to hire people that your current employees have worked with before.

Brian didn't mention it, but I'll bet that their first engineer hire recommended friends or colleagues in the industry that s/he worked with in the past - whether that was at another company or even in an open source arena. From there, that network grew, much like a network of your first 100 people that love your product grows.

Hi, how do I get to the lecture? The page says "The lecture video is currently private (unlisted) until approved by Airbnb. Join the Facebook group or mailing list to get exclusive access."

I joined the list, but any ideas when airbnb might approve it??

Here's the youtube link as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfWgVWGEuGE

Thank you so much!! #CerealEntrepreneurs = #SerialEntrepreneurs :)

I felt that everything about Brian's stories comes back to doing things that don't scale. - Interviewing the first 300 employees - Taking 3-4 months to make his first hire - Stories of talking to/meeting/living with users - Door to Door taking pictures and the entire hacked together process of taking pics - Selling cereal to fund the startup

Overall, what's most interesting was seeing his intensity and focus permeate through the entire lecture.

Anyways - here are 39 Quotes I took away from the lecture: https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/39-quotes-from-bri...

It's very difficult to hear about their values, when the effects they have at scale are so close to the opposite of what is intended. Couchsurfing never reached an industrial scale, for example, but in this case they're creating enormous areas of highly transient populations with no stake in communities.

The good point is the one about the machine that builds the product in the long term (i.e. the company) is the real product. This is why I suspect so many engineering types rise to the top of companies these days, as the company becomes an extension of the grand machine - a sort of abstract assembly line and supply chain.

> Couchsurfing never reached an industrial scale

Since when was being a startup founder supposed to scale at that level?

Realistically, the number of people trying to do startups will be consistently small. They either grow into stable businesses 5-6 years down the line, or they sputter out and fail in that time or less. If a big chunk of our economy was based on < Series B level startups, we'd be in for a giant crash of epic proportions.

These people don't sound like they're starting a company. They sound more like they're starting a social movement or a cult.

It's weird, and in the context of a commercial company, which ultimately exists to make money, seems wildly out of place. I keep wondering whether they are actually sincere or just spouting this crap for the marks.

If they're not sincere, they're just liars trying to wring an extra 10 percent out of their labour force for free. And if they are sincere, their passion seems misplaced to the point of delusion. I mean, why the heck get excited about selling shoes?

If you click the Facebook Group link you can view the video.

edit: And you don't have to join the group.

Phew, is there a way to hold the lectures a little bit longer invervals? I'd really love to watch them all, but a new one every three days is a lot to watch.

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