Lecture 20: Later-Stage Advice

I just wanted to say thank you to Sam and YC for creating this class and putting it all online. I enjoyed each of them and its most probable that these set of lectures are going to return more value to me over my life than any of the other classes I am taking right now in college.

Really nice advice.

The company I founded just hit 25 employees and I just got finished spending a couple quarters trying to ignore management because it seemed cooler to have no structure, and working on a project in hero mode because I got over-excited about it... wish it had come out 6 months ago :)

Sam, I'm just just wondering if you could expand on your productivity advice? You said that you:

- Have 1 piece of paper with 3-12 month goals that you look at every day

- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each day of these goals? Can you expand on this?

- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each employee? Can you expand on this?

I'm working on my own method similar to this and I'm just curious about your preference of paper vs. book vs. tools.

Thanks in advance! Micah

I haven't seen this lecture yet, but I also want to thank you Sam and all other people who had lectures.

These 2.5 months have been very interesting and being from the other part of the world I don't have access to these kind of people and information. The people I know and hang out who have created companies have revenues of a couple of millions when they have something "big", surely not billions.

I hope one day to be also part of the YC family

Great lecture series. Favourite part of this lecture was hearing about all of the distractions that founders will face throughout the life of their startup (especially if they're successful). Getting a heads up on what to expect is the first step towards planning on how to deal with it.

Here are 42 quotes I picked up from the lecture that I've published here: https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/42-quotes-from-sam-altman-o...

P.S. I've somewhat religiously been watching/taking notes from these lectures since they started. I really agree with a lot of the comments here, that it's been a very practical lecture series with lots of tactical advice that you can directly apply to your startup (as opposed to high level strategy discussions). Thanks to YC and Sam for putting this together.

I have found these series very entertaining and there have been some great suggestions along the way. I know that Sam is not going to organise such a course, but it would be great to have a series on the non-vc path on how to start a start up (the unfairly defamed lifestyle businesses).

We are a company with 20 People and this is really a great lecture for me personally (Single Founder with Organic growth and never raised outside investment). Thanks for doing this.

The whole lecture series is great addition to startup community and will be useful for founders everywhere for years to come.

Thanks Sam. For me the note on how you stay personally organised and the last answer I.e 'wait till it's working' were little insights that may make a big difference. Ta!

These were amazing lectures. Only suggestion is to have longer q&a's at the end with the speakers. Well done and thank you!

Yeah, thanks to Sam and all the speakers who made this possible, The advice was really good!

Good end, to a great set of lectures. Thank you.

Surprisingly good, thoughtful, experienced, well informed, mature. Definitely get the transcript and slides.

For some of the work, e.g., trademarks, I would suggest getting those filed earlier than "later-stage". Similarly for the bookkeeping, tax planning and taxes, accounting, employee benefits, stock planning, where to put the intellectual property to lease back to the operating business, etc.

Altman suggested each year, for the first 10 years, assign another 3-5% of the stock to employees. That sounds generous and like it would create one heck of an internal fight for stock.

Once an apparently wise adviser told me, "Never give stock to an employee who doesn't contribute directly to earnings.".

For some more on leadership and culture, also draw from the AVC.com blog user JLM's contributions and links, often back to JLM's Web site, at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com. JLM has long been the most popular contributor to that blog.

Altman seemed to want a fairly strict organizational hierarchy. He recognized that too little hierarchical organization can be bad but was not clear on just how much a good hierarchy should do.

A strict hierarchy can lead to a lot of goal subordination (where a middle manager works for their own interests largely against the interests of the company), process and formality over reality and progress, fighting with people down the hall instead of against problems inside the company or competitors outside, arrogance, fear that any effort at innovation could have a lot of downside with nearly no chance of upside, fear that good success could lead to jealousy and attacks from above, narrowly just managing the existing business with no interest in progress for new business directions or even for the existing business, etc.

For how to get work done and evaluate employees outside of just a strict hierarchy, I'm entertaining borrowing from other work. E.g., when someone sees a problem, find a likely person, or for a really big problem a person and some assistants for a team, and (a) have them investigate and write a paper and give a presentation describing the problem, its importance, etc. If continue, then (b) have them do some research and write a paper, etc., on proposed solutions and give a presentation. (c) If continue, then have them write a paper, etc., planning the implementation of the solution. (d) If continue, then have them write a paper on the implementation with budgets, other resources, milestones, quality control, due dates, progress reporting, etc. (e) If continue, then have them proceed as in (d).

At employee evaluation time, look at the papers and, especially, the completed projects.

I definitely intend to get the transcript and slides. Apparently Altman has learned a lot, somewhere, in his own start-ups, watching YC start-ups, somewhere.

20 videos already. Great work. 17/20.

Thanks!