"How to Start a Startup" - Sam Altman/YC/Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs
- 20 taped lectures + background reading materials
"Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture" - Netflix
- 128 slides in a pdf
"Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future" - Peter Thiel
- 200pg book
Sam Altman: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
- Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
- Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
- It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesnât really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
- Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.
- Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
- Communicate clearly and concisely.
- Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
- Outcomes are what count; donât let good process excuse bad results.
- Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
- Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
- Fast iteration can make up for a lot; itâs usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
- Donât fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
- Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
- Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
- Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
- Get back up and keep going.
- Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.
My own personal pieces of advice:
Hiring is unbelievably important. No matter how good a candidate looks on paper, no matter how much you like them, no matter what their role is, always do a live technical test (I call it an âexerciseâ to lower their anxiety, and I do it somewhat collaboratively).
Give them a set of data (e.g. in a google spreadsheet), have them share their screen, explain the context of the data, explain what it is that you want, encourage them to ask questions, and see how it goes.
Do they try to understand the data? Do they understand the goal of the task? Do they go directly to their favorite tool (e.g. a pivot table) without understanding how it applies to this data set? Do they sanity check their results in a different way? Do they get flustered by not knowing the answer/being outside their element? Are they comfortable asking questions when theyâre confused? Are they threatened by you making corrections/pointing out something they missed? Do they seem to understand and update based on your guidance?
Maybe theyâll bomb and youâll decide to hire them anyway, but at least youâll have a lot more information about where theyâll need support.
See also Useful Services (the thing I am currently most impressed by is Mercury bankâit was already clearly the best bank for startups, and it just keeps offering more thoughtful services and user interfaces. They even have a great option for low-risk investing for allowing your treasury to keep up with inflation). I find myself wanting to invest in Mercury, poach their talent, or at least get an insider tour to better understand whatâs making them so good.