Startup advice, briefly

One suggestion I would give Sam is to provide for each of the &quot;bullet points&quot; a couple of relevant stories about YC companies.<p>Most public advice is devoid of context where it originated and unless stated very precisely is wide open to misinterpretation, forming a cargo-cult, or being ignored as too generic. Only a few people in the world can be that precise (I know just two), but adding a relevant story is available to any diligent thinker and it works nearly as well. The best stories are either those that gave rise to the advice, or those where the advice was applied with a visible outcome.

DON&#x27;T WORK WITH PEOPLE YOU HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT: I can not stress how dogmatically this should be adhered to enough.

I always wonder about this: &quot;Obsess about your growth rate, and never stop. The company will build what the CEO measures. If you ever catch yourself saying “we’re not really focused on growth right now”, think very carefully about the possibility you’re focused on the wrong thing.&quot; There was a point in my current startup where it wasn&#x27;t prudent to focus so much on growth, as we were transitioning from MVP to v1 product. Being bootstrapped and with a small team, spending money and time on acquiring users for the MVP would&#x27;ve been a bit of a waste. Maybe that&#x27;s b&#x2F;c we don&#x27;t buy into the vision to grow fast and sell faster.

<i>The best startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas but are good ideas.</i><p>I&#x27;ve thought about this one a lot. Obviously we can&#x27;t apply these one liners to everything, for example Dropbox and Stripe seemed like plainly obvious good ideas (to me).<p>You can make them seem like bad ideas in retrospect (&quot;Oh, personal file hosting in the cloud? Been done a million times!&quot;) but I think even the traction of Dropbox&#x27;s first HN post showed it was a good idea.<p>Is there a better way we can phrase this rule to be closer to an absolute truth?

&quot;Have a strategy. Most people don’t. Occasionally take a little bit of time to think about how you’re executing against your strategy. Specifically, remember that someday you need to have a monopoly &quot;<p>Remember to ask yourself 4 questions: <a href="https://blog.ukigumo.eu/content/images/2015/02/governance-questions-cycle-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ukigumo.eu&#x2F;content&#x2F;images&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;governance-qu...</a><p>(sorry for the bad image quality btw)

It it contradictory to recommend that a founder a) prefer making something a small number love to making something a large number like but also b) obsess over growth? I took these to be valid for different stages - first a), then b).<p>Obviously this is all very insightful and has been discussed before as these ideas were developed. Nice to have the 20k ft view in one place.

<i>&quot;The best startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas but are good ideas.&quot;</i><p>Great tip. So it&#x27;s easy then. Find an idea that seems like a bad idea but is good. Also, if an idea <i>seems</i> like a good idea... throw it away. It&#x27;s shit. Find one that <i>seems</i> bad. But is good.

Great list. I finally watched all of the YC Startup Class lectures this week, and I was hoping that someone would compile something like this.

Great advice for startups. Except I would say start with a problem rather than just an idea - a problem that no one is solving and that you think is important. That would hopefully lead to building something people want.

&quot;Be a relentless execution machine.&quot; I wish it was as easy as it sounds. thanks for the one pager on tips .

It&#x27;s hard to compress so much advice into one blog post and let is sound reasonable if context is missing.<p>However, I agree with all points except this one:<p><i>&gt; In general, avoid the kind of stuff that might be in a movie about running a startup—meeting with lawyers and accountants, going to lots of conferences, grabbing coffee with people, sitting in lots of meetings</i><p>In general a successful CEO is 30% of his time networking and 70% working on hiring and leading the team and working on the product the product. Looking out for peers and spending time with them is important because...<p>- It changes your mindset, from being an employee to a real founder, this takes quite some time and your old employed friends are not the right peers anymore<p>- You learn a lot, small information exchanged on a conference can help you with fund raising; usually every meeting with a new person has some value, in particular at the beginning of your journey<p>- Especially lawyers—the good ones—are extremely well connected and sometimes help you with the first introductions<p>There are some CEOs who are real networking animals and do 100% networking and 0% working on their product, that&#x27;s for sure not the way and I guess Sam referred to them.

<i>Figure out a way to get users at scale (i.e. bite the bullet and learn how sales and marketing work).</i><p>Any pointers for reading material on this?

Thanks, Sam. This is is a nice list. I would only add, don&#x27;t listen to advice. For example, &quot;make something people want&quot; is fine, since most startups fail because no one wanted what they made. But it&#x27;s also all too similar to a music industry exec asking for artists to &quot;make what people want to hear.&quot; That&#x27;s a great strategy to get more Top 40 hits but there&#x27;s a risk of turning a whole generation of musicians into Michael Bubles producing well-received, cheaply-conceived pop music. I think I would say, &quot;Be conceited enough to have a vision and, if money interests you, be humble enough to potentially throw some of it out to meet the market half-way.&quot;

<i>&gt;In general, avoid the kind of stuff that might be in a movie about running a startup—meeting with lawyers and accountants</i><p>Where is the line that says you move from &quot;project&quot; to needing to have your legal ducks in a row? All business advice I have ever heard says if you are doing business then you need to have a real business, with associated costs of legal, accounting, insurance, and so on.<p>It seems very risky to start making $500&#x2F;mo while risking my house in the event a patent troll decides to sue me. Am I too paranoid on this front?<p>&quot;Fuck you pay me&quot; covers this [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://vimeo.com/22053820" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;22053820</a>

Honest question: Who is the intended audience for all these startup&#x2F;advice articles? Wouldn&#x27;t the best founders be too busy building stuff instead of reading articles on the web. Wouldn&#x27;t the majority of the audience of these articles be procrastinators (like me)? If so, wouldn&#x27;t the best advice for such people be to stop procrastinating on the web, and to build stuff instead?<p>PS: The advice by Sam is great. I&#x27;m questioning the medium.

I like the end. &quot;Keep doing this for 10 years&quot;. :)

The last point that should be made:<p>Even if you follow all of the above, there is a 90% probability you will still fail. Startup success is still largely dictated by luck.

I believe running a startup is like playing jazz. It&#x27;s all about improvization. You are given a rhythm (company laws) and you are given the main theme (industry, markets). The rest is up to you. Think at least a few notes ahead and see if others like what you are doing. No other advice is valid in jazz, neither is it valid in startups.

Maybe Ive read too many blogs. Maybe its because I watched the class but Im starting to feel like this is the &quot;generic&quot; advice for startups. It doesn&#x27;t make it any less true or valuable, but everytime I read it I feel somewhat empty; as if there is something critical missing that everyone but me knows but doesn&#x27;t write down because it feels like common sense. I&#x27;m not sure other people feel this way or how to not feel this way. It seems really obvious, almost too obvious that you should work really hard on ideas that other people want. Maybe thats all there is too it; It just feels hollow.

I wish more founders had experience working in annoying corporate environments with a variety of managers (on the &quot;good&quot; &quot;bad&quot; scale) before starting a startup. I believe that would result in picking better management. And that management would more closely align with the culture.

My general advice to anyone reading the article:<p>1. Ensure the list of tips are easily accessible. (The advice will do nothing for you if you can&#x27;t find it when you are making critical decisions.)<p>Once you have solved the distribution problem, now comes the real opportunity:<p>2. Follow through with the list. :-)

Just do it for 10 years, and comment after that. I can guess that 2 from 10 will be still negative about this &quot;generic advice&quot;, but other will reach success. Another strange thing - definition of success in general.

&quot;The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.&quot; --George Bernard Shaw

I feel like this post boils down the hundreds of posts that I&#x27;ve seen on YC into one small digestible reference. It&#x27;s pretty nice.

Would be great if someone could say how they got their personal connections to work for their startup in a meaningful way.

I wonder if there are counter-examples of successful companies that ignored some of these rules?

Startup advice - make sure what you do is not something someone else does!

Not taking any advice is the best advice.

&gt; The best way to start a company is to build interesting projects.<p>The best way? Lots of successful entrepreneurs would disagree, and did set out to build a business to make money. And outside of the SV bubble people don&#x27;t imply that is The Wrong Way.

what if you have an mvp, you are gettin feedbacks from paying users, and you are trying to make them happy. what is this processed called formally and where would it be on the startup map?

<p><pre><code> Don’t waste your time on stuff that doesn’t matter (i.e. things other than building your product, talking to your users, growing, etc.). In general, avoid the kind of stuff that might be in a movie about running a startup —meeting with lawyers and accountants, going to lots of conferences, grabbing coffee with people, sitting in lots of meetings, etc. Become a Delaware C Corp (use Clerky or any well-known Silicon Valley law firm) and then get back to work on your product. </code></pre> First you tell me not to waste a lot of time with lawyers and accountants, then you tell me to start a subchapter-C corp. Okaaaay.