C'mon now, kids.<p>While there is some laudable-if-extremely-conventional wisdom in here, almost every point suffers from either survival bias ("Successful companies succeed by being successful.") or from having obvious counter-examples ("Was Steve Jobs a nice guy?"), or both.
<i>> - The founders are nice. I'm sure this doesn't always apply, but the most successful founders I know are nicer than average. They're tough, they're very competitive, and they are ruthless, but they are fundamentally nice people.</i><p>ruth·less, ˈro͞oTHləs/, adjective<p>1. having or showing no pity or compassion for others.<p>what does "ruthless" mean nowadays in valley newspeak? or did i miss a memo about "nice"..?
<i>Mediocre founders try to hire people for the parts that they don't like. Great founders just do whatever they think is in the best interest of the company, even if they're not "passionate" about that part of the business.</i><p>I don't often like to follow people, but when I do, this attribute matters to me. I'm not sure, but I suspect that it's a signal that someone wants to build something great more than accumulate accolades. In the latter case, I help someone get rich and famous (which is fine!). But in the former, I'm a part of something awesome.<p>I find it a little difficult to articulate why this affects me so deeply, but it resonates with me, and talented people I know.<p>In general, I suspect these attributes are important if for no other reason than talented people you might be recruiting will be on the lookout for them.
Another important trait Ron Conway highlighted at Startup School that really stuck with me was that Founders of 'super successful companies' can careless about other distractions, especially the media. He highlighted the example of Ben Silbermann and how he used to reject several interviews so as not to lose focus on Pinterest.<p>So although it's a hybrid of two traits mentioned in the article ("They are obsessed with the quality of the product/experience" and "They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup"), it is still one that should be there by itself.
To all those people screaming "survivorship bias", isn't that what this whole post is about? Like, explicitly in the title of the thread?<p>Of the companies that became very successful, what were some common traits? That's what this post is about.<p>"Yeah but you only looked at the successful companies."
::smacks head::
"They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup"<p>That's the biggest difference between me now and starting my first company - I was ultra-excited to call myself "CEO of startup" the first time around, this time around we don't even have titles because we don't give a shit. We have a CEO because you need to know at whom the buck stops, but we've even discussed using that interchangeably depending the situation (decided against it) because of how thoroughly we don't care.<p>I don't think the way I felt the first time around was bad or the reason we failed - but it was a pretty good signal, and I even knew it at the time.
Great article ... Some of the points might seem obvious in hindsight, but are rarely followed in practice. Perhaps it is because they are <i>so obvious</i> as to be somewhat invisible, or they are repeated so often as to be ignored.<p>I thought one of the less obvious, and especially interesting, insights was the following:<p><i>Another way this trait shows itself is "right-sized" first projects. You can't go from zero to huge; you have to find something not too big and not too small to build first. They seem to have an innate talent for figuring out right-sized projects.</i><p>I wonder how much of this talent (which I'd call a "knack") can be acquired from experience.<p>I noticed in myself an <i>instinct</i> for categorizing projects as "right time"/"right place". By "instinct" I don't mean I'm particularly good at this, I may be really bad. I mean that I have a <i>feeling</i>, which I can imagine as some sort of neural pattern recognition algorithm. I'd guess everyone has this same feeling .. to what extent can it be tuned into a "knack"?
Funny, seems like I always narrow my list down to this 1 item:<p>"They are obsessed about their customers' success."<p>Everything else is a byproduct.
I like this one: "They respond to emails quickly." It always amazes me just how many would-be "founders" are unbelievably flaky, miss appointments, drop off the face of the earth for days or weeks at a time...
This started out with some boilerplate SV platitudes (obsess over your product, obsess over talent), but got quite good by the end. The concrete items, particularly "They make something a small number of users really love" and "They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup" really resonate with my experience and are things I think everyone should keep in mind when running a company.
I think a lot of the points are great but when we talk about super successful, I can think of some great startups that grew organically but also a lot of operationally efficient companies that knew how to build businesses at scale with a combination of organic growth, massive marketing, and smart PR. For example, one of Google's largest advertisers in spend is Booking.com (owned by Priceline). They have built an efficient machine that can acquire users/customers in an efficient manner and in the process capture 48% market share of online hotel bookings in Europe and help make Priceline a $60B market cap company.
Great points. I would also add: They have serious intestinal fortitude.<p>You can possess all of the other traits, and you're still pretty much guaranteed to run into numerous points in the life of a company where you're staring into the abyss of imminent failure. The ability to withstand that kind of pressure is probably a prerequisite for highly successful founders.
I think there are two important areas he doesn't touch on:
1. Timing: The most successful companies are also the ones that are usually at a particular point in time when an opportunity exists. Too early, you fail, too late, you fail as well (for different reasons).
2. A scalable idea: The most successful companies find product or service ideas that scale hugely. These ideas are pretty rare. More often, people find ideas they like and can execute but turn out to be ideas that scale only so far. Sometime it turns out that they've actually founded a services business and didn't know it. More often, they find an idea that can scale to, say, $5m in revenue but then has trouble scaling beyond that. Billion dollar ideas likely represent a very small portion.
I like Sam's blog posts. They are short and punchy. Always leaving me charged with energy. Good stuff. Keep it up Sam!<p>"They have a whatever-it-takes attitude." - This is such a powerful trait that it puts the "big dreamers" to shame and separates the Wannapreneurs from Entrepreneurs. Anyone is capable of dreaming, talking big, generate ideas et al.. but few are capable of executing them by doing whatever it takes to turn that dream into reality. Ha, it reminds me of the "never give up frog poster".
Good stuff. Only nitpick is the "partnership" comment. I actually think too many startups are too insular and not comfortable working with other companies early on. However perhaps here he meant the "hit it out of the ballpark" partnership type.<p>Please add to "They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup" - they're not on Twitter tweeting cliche's around vision/team/culture/design/customer love all day. That's a big red flag to me.
Wow, so many traits!<p>I noticed this one is not quite easy to make:<p>"*They grow organically. And they are generally skeptical of inorganic strategies like big partnership deals and to a lesser extent PR. They certainly don't have huge press events to launch their startup. Mediocre founders focus on big PR launches to answer their growth prayers."<p>Most startup companies are looking for big partnership deals with PR support intensively. But they are focusing on building customer base. It's really not easy.
All I can think about reading the comments (and the article, for whatever reason) is pg's advice to sama and how it didn't seem to help at all here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843726" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843726</a>
This is a great essay for any startup person who's actually serious about creating, advising, or investing in the next Waze in Tel Aviv, Oculus Rift in Orange County, California, or Dropbox in the Bay Area.<p>Of course we'd prefer a deep dive, but that requires a lot more thinking, data, reasoning and work.<p>You're talking about a book versus a blog.<p>I really liked this essay.<p>Yes, some of the stuff is redundant, but there's enough modifications and it is compact enough that this is a very useful list.<p>HN folks:<p>If you can do better, do it.<p>I see a lot of whining and complaining on here and no alternative solutions that are better. If you have something better to say, say it. If you've read something better, provide the link.<p>Otherwise, be a little more appreciative that someone who knows a lot more than 99.99% of the folks in startups is sharing his insights concisely for free.
Sam Altman is a great writer. He was also Founder/CEO of Loopt. I have to wonder why this post doesn't relate the traits back to his work at Loopt so the lessons learned can be more contextualized.<p>For example, are there areas where he was a mediocre founder by his own definition? Were there times when he was mediocre and then became great? What did it take to go from mediocre to great?<p>I'm surprised that the essay is so general in nature when there's a wealth of specific (and maybe more valuable) cases that could have been shared even after respecting privacy of individuals involved, etc.
It turns out that pattern matching on PG's essay style does not make one's essays as insightful..<p>All I can say is: the only factor really worth a damn is luck. Unfortunately you can't control luck, the only thing you can do is increase your luck surface. From my experience, nothing on that list actually does that - what increases luck is: hard work, value of idea, connections and personality. Re-order at will.
"They generate revenue very early on in their lives. Often as soon as they get their first user."<p>Is this true?
If "super successful" can be understood as "the biggest tech IPOs of the last 15 years", then I think that Google, Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter would be at the very top of that list. I guess it depends on how we define "very early".
With many of these points I completely agree, I also believe that there's data to back them up. The following however:<p>- the generate revenue very early on in their lives
- they keep expenses low<p>Is in direct contrast with many of the most successful startups. As far as I know, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Skype don't fit this criteria.
> *They grow organically. And they are generally skeptical of inorganic strategies like big partnership deals and to a lesser extent PR. They certainly don't have huge press events to launch their startup. Mediocre founders focus on big PR launches to answer their growth prayers.<p>Has Google+ written all over it.
These are great foundational traits, which are common among noble-failure and successful startups I've seen.<p>You still need to add in the resources (money, energy, charisma) to fund sustained hard work, market resonance, and luck to reach super success.
"Charging customers early" is actually the opposite. Few of the big internet successes charged early (google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, yahoo, etc.).<p>And, frugality is good in the beginning but after you prove yourself, you have to step on the gas.
Did you have a list of extremely successful companies you were looking at specifically when you wrote this? If so, I'd be interested in seeing that list to compare