$@*! Sam Altman says
According to Paul Graham, Loopt's Sam Altman is one of the five most interesting founders of the last three decades. There's a simple reason for it: he really knows what he's doing.
While searching through Hacker News archives, I came across a bunch of sama's classic posts from years past. They read like a user manual for startups. As YC's Winter 2012 batch gets started, they're worth another read.
Five years ago, the nature of founding a startup:
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-Get ready for high highs and low lows, and practice keeping yourself in the middle or you'll never get good work done. You're going to be pretty sure your company is dying at least once a month, and it usually isn't. This is very important and very difficult to learn.
-Focus on the product, especially in the early days. You'll have time to make deals later. Now, you've got to build something great. -If you hire, do it very slowly and carefully. The culture of a company is set very early, and so is the quality of the team. -Don't be afraid to change your idea if the market seems bad. Early is a good time to do it. You can change your product, you can change your team, you can change your sales strategy, but you can probably not create a market. Good startups surf someone else's wave. -Figure out what the important things are, and spend lots time on those and little on the rest. Lots of startups work very hard, but on the wrong things. They still die an untimely death. -Watch out for fights and brewing tension among cofounders (ie, make sure everyone feels they have a reasonably fair deal). I've seen this derail more early startups than anything else. And, if you are really sure you have the wrong cofounder, fire fast. -The startups in my Y Combinator 'class' that tanked the fastest were the ones that spent the most time worrying about option grants for members of their board of advisors and the least time on their product. Could be a coincidence, but why risk it? Build your product. -Great products, technology, and people win the day in the long run. History backs this up. Do not be afraid of competitors without them, no matter how much money they raise or how much noise they make. -It's most tempting to give up right before you're about to succeed. Best of luck, Sam Altman |
Shortly after, a simple algorithm for what to do next at a startup:
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Good:
-Things that will get you more revenue -Things that will get you more users (and thus hopefully revenue) -Things that will make your product better (and thus hopefully more users) -Things that will get you great hires (and thus hopefully better products) -Focusing on the right market Bad: -Going to events at business schools or 'networking' with the people that do |
Three years ago, how to sell to enterprises:
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One of the most important things you can do is appear credible. Most big companies forget that they did their most interesting things when they were just a few people with an uncertain future. When a big company wanted to visit us in our early days, we got a bunch of our friends to come hang out in the office so we looked bigger than we were. Along the same line, an introduction is much better than a cold call. (What big co? I'll help if I can.) And find a way to convince them you'll be around for awhile (we had to have our investors call a ceo once).
Getting a meeting, by the way, is about 10% of the work. Big cos often have difficult political landscapes and multiple decision makers. You have to figure out who wants what and convince them all they will get it. Also, big cos often except a discount for 'taking a risk' by working with a startup.
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Without naming either company involved, two companies from Stanford started approximately simultaneously with pretty much the same vision. One group spent months (literally) drafting employment and consultant agreements, filing patents and trademarks, setting up various shell corporations to shield themselves from liability, etc etc and then hired an offshore development team to build the product. The other guys just built the thing, only coding and talking to users, and were delighted to find that everything else could be done retroactively. They had tons of happy users before the first guys had anything but a gigantic stack of legal documents, nicely written but protecting nothing. By the time they pitched the same VC, company B had probably a 1000x lead in user traction, with a growing spread. Easy decision for the VC firm. A is dead; B is a massive success. |
