Startup Playbook

Safest way to start an enterprise SaaS startup is to have a buyer lined up before it’s founded.<p>The way to have a buyer before founding is to have worked at an established, profitable firm that has that exact problem, cannot build a solution themselves, and get a signed agreement from them to buy your future product. If you leave that firm and have that document, you can raise money, then use that money to hire a team, then build the product and fulfill the contract.<p>Getting into such a position requires an established career. Therefore safe, reliable entrepreneurs cannot possibly be college drop outs - they need to be established careerists with good connections who have entrepreneurial ambitions.

Some unsolicited advice …<p>You can succeed in achieving everything in that playbook, and still fail.<p>Life can be brutal.<p>Appreciate the importance of timing &amp; luck.<p>Stars need to align &amp; lots of things are out of your control. Like an unexpected global pandemic, a persons health turning bad, or simply a key customer not paying timely - are all things that can tank your perfect business and more.

(2015)<p>According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151108010026&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playbook.samaltman.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151108010026&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playbook....</a>

It&#x27;s interesting to consider how much of this advice OpenAI violates. They spent years doing relatively derivative work in a well hyped space with lots of big companies that were in fact competently executing on a big technological transition. It took them, what, seven years to get to the point of doing ChatGPT. They are mostly in the b2b space but clearly didn&#x27;t start with a letter of intent.

I don&#x27;t see<p>&quot;First create a non-profit then make it for profit once it takes off.&quot;

&gt; Consider these criteria when you’re choosing a cofounder -- it’s one of the most important decisions you’ll make, and it’s often done fairly randomly. You want someone you know well, not someone you just met at a cofounder dating thing.<p>And yet...

Is this advice actually helpful? I feel like if I were considering a start-up I’d still have just as many questions after reading what amounts to, “If you want to be great, you need to … be great.”

&gt; They all started with a product that their early users loved so much they told other people about it<p>I have seen&#x2F;worked a few enterprise SaaS companies where the customers could not barely use the product without handholding from a customer success rep, let alone love it. Love YC&#x27;s advice for indie, first time founders but a lot of it falls flat if you know you know a guy, who knows a guy.

&gt; <i>The way to test an idea is to either launch it and see what happens or try to sell it (e.g. try to get a letter of intent before you write a line of code.)</i><p>&gt; <i>The former works better for consumer ideas [...] and the latter works better for enterprise ideas (if a company tells you they will buy something, then go build it.)</i><p>&gt; <i>Specifically, if you are an enterprise company, one of the first questions we’ll ask you is if you have a letter of intent from a customer saying they’ll buy what you’re building.</i><p>If you&#x27;re a new startup building a B2B product, how does that work in practice? It&#x27;s difficult to imagine an unproven, early stage startup getting letters of intent from customers. How would you even go about finding those customers?

&gt; If there are ten other companies starting at the same time with the same plan, and it sounds a whole lot like something that already exists, we are skeptical.<p>Is that why YC went so heavily into cryptocurrency startups?<p>&#x2F;s

Is there an epub version of this?