article

] So at YC, we've been teaching people how to start startups (off the record) for over nine years, most specific to "the" startups
] but thirty percent of it is pretty generally applicable, which is what we will teach here, on the record
] Counting YC itself, every guest speaker has been involved in the creation of a billion plus dollar company. So the advice shouldn't be that theoretical, it's all been people who have done it.
] geared towards people starting a business where the goal is hyper growth and eventually building a very large company.
] WARNING: if you try to do these things in a lot of big companies or non-startups, it won't work.
] I really think that startups are the way of the future and it's worth trying to understand them, but startups are very different than normal companies
] an overview of the four areas you need to excel at in order to maximize your success as a startup

] Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I

] You may still fail. The outcome is something like idea x product x execution x team x luck, where luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand. Literally that much. But if you do really well in the four areas you can control, you have a good chance at at least some amount of success.
] It's become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn't matter. In fact, it's uncool to spend a lot of time thinking about the idea for a startup. You're just supposed to start, throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and not even spend any time thinking about if it will be valuable if it works.
] And pivots are supposed to be great, the more pivots the better. So this isn't totally wrong, things do evolve in ways you can't totally predict. And there's a limit to how much you can figure out without actually getting a product in the hands of the users. And great execution is at least ten times as important and a hundred times harder than a great idea.
] But the pendulum has swung way out of whack. A bad idea is still bad and the pivot-happy world we're in today feels suboptimal. Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere. There are exceptions, of course, but most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot
] If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something the founders themselves wanted, not a random made up idea. I myself used to believe ideas didn't matter that much, but I'm very sure that's wrong now.
] The definition of the idea, as we talk about it, is very broad. It includes the size and the growth of the market, the growth strategy for the company, the defensibility strategy, and so on. When you're evaluating an idea, you need to think through all these things, not just the product. If it works out, you're going to be working on this for ten years so it's worth some real up front time to think through the up front value and the defensibility of the business. Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is really valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
] Long-term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. There is a huge advantage if you do it. Remember that the idea will expand and become more ambitious as you go. You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in your path to world domination, but you really want a nice kernel to start with. You want something that can develop in interesting ways.
] As you're thinking through ideas, another thing we see that founders get wrong all the time is that someday you need to build a business that is difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.
] important: the idea should come first and the startup should come second. Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea you feel compelled to explore. This is also the way to choose between ideas. If you have several ideas, work on the one that you think about most often when you're not trying to think about work. What we hear again and again from founders is that they wish they had waited until they came up with an idea they really loved.
] the best companies are almost always mission oriented. It's difficult to get the amount of focus that large companies need unless the company feels like it has an important mission. And it's usually really hard to get that without a great founding idea. A related advantage of mission oriented ideas is that you yourself will be dedicated to them. It takes years and years, usually a decade, to build a great startup. If you don't love and believe in what you're building, you're likely to give up at some point along the way. There's no way I know of to get through the pain of a startup without the belief that the mission really matters. A lot of founders, especially students, believe that their startups will only take two to three years and then after that they'll work on what they're really passionate about. That almost never works. Good startups usually take ten years.
] a third advantage of mission oriented companies is that people outside the company are more willing to help you. You'll get more support on a hard, important project, than a derivative one. When it comes to starting a startup, it's easier to found a hard startup than an easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand. It's difficult to overstate how important being mission driven is, so I want to state it one last time: derivative companies, companies that copy an existing idea with very few new insights, don't excite people and they don't compel the teams to work hard enough to be successful.
] The hardest part about coming up with great ideas, is that the best ideas often look terrible at the beginning. examples google, facebook, airBnB If they sounded really good, there would be too many people working on them.
] - you want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly right away. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand. This is why some great startup ideas look really bad at the beginning
] "Today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them, and in the future, almost everyone is going to use my product."
] Here is the theme that is going to come up a lot: you need conviction in your own beliefs and a willingness to ignore others' naysaying. The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other. But keep in mind that if you do come up with a great idea, most people are going to think it's bad. You should be happy about that, it means they won't compete with you.
] That's why it's also not dangerous to tell people your idea. The truly good ideas don't sound like they're worth stealing. You want an idea where you can say, "I know it sounds like a bad idea, but here's specifically why it's actually a great one." You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right. And you want an idea that not many other people are working on. And it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first.

Details Photos Edit more

article

how to start a startup - lecture 001

[WHAT]

[WHY]

[WHERE]

[WHEN]

[EXAMPLE]

[HOW-TO]

[REFERENCE]

my notes - pass 1

Details

photos

actions