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The path to $100B [video]
- billions 8y agoStartup School material has been incredibly helpful for us at Biterica.com. Highly recommend checking out all their videos, especially on finding product market fit and growth. We just launched if you want to check us out: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18293997 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18293997
- mothsonasloth 8y agoTres commas
- maxxxxx 8y agoWhy would anyone worry about scaling to 100B? Once you are at that level you probably won't watch this video and everybody else is probably more worried about 1 or 10 million.
- dxhdr 8y agoYeah, 1-10 million is actionable with a lot of hard work but 100B requires the world organizing around you. Eg having good timing, being fortunate, lucky, what have you. But hey if it happens to you, congrats. It was bound to happen to someone!
- rootusrootus 8y agoYeah I would much rather see something about 10M. I'm not looking to win the lottery, I want to live a successful, comfortable life.
- puranjay 8y agoI'm more interested in knowing if some companies are inherently designed to be $100B companies, or can any company get there by gradually expanding its operations. Can the $1M ARR SaaS startup build products that can take it to $1B ARR? Or does that require a different DNA altogether?
- cercatrova 8y agowww.indiehackers.com/interviews has a lot of good content regarding what you're looking for.
- sjg007 8y agoThe insight on Facebook's success and its implicit focus on the network vs Google's focus on product is interesting. Same with their conviction on the newsfeed.
- ArtWomb 8y agoI was thinking about this in light of the recent MegaMillions lottery frenzy. Chance of buying a winning ticket is about one in a million times the number of successive draws in which no winner is declared in order for the jackpot to reach a sizeable pot. Ballpark estimate around 1:10M. Whereas the chance you could actually build a company with billion dollar valuation is probably well under 1:1M. Just from being in the pool of startup school attendees or auditors. There are additionally many other factors which could substantially increase those odds. Also, would just like to mention the recent podcast with Laura Deming of Longevity Fund was excellent. Incredibly informative and reasonably optimistic about the probability of a breakthrough in our lifetimes.
- jedberg 8y agoOf course the odds of building a company to 1B are better, because of the work involved. Buying a lottery ticket takes a couple of minutes of work and $2 at most. Building a billion dollar company takes generally 10+ years of work (and even if you're YouTube, 1.5 years) and also probably a lot of your own money, at least in opportunity cost if not actual money.
- econner 8y agoAlso, building a company is not all or nothing. You could even shoot smaller and likely get to $1M in revenue for a $5M or so company. The odds are much better.
- ronilan 8y agoThe odds of winning a lottery (lets say the Mega Millions or the Diversity Visa) are, to an extent, evenly distributed. The odds of succeeding in a social endeavour (lets say a business or a Green Card obtained via application) are not. While on average the odds of the latter (the business) may be better, for a given person (which is always me and never an average person) the odds of the former (the lottery) may actually be much higher. On a side note, while it may seem "un-meritocratic" to the HN crowd, having lotteries as gateways to social mobility and resource allocation is a decent idea.
- brian_herman__ 8y agoHow about the path to $1
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- iamgopal 8y agoThis.
- HugoDaniel 8y agoRight now I am worried about the path to $10k
- max76 8y agoFocus on what you can ship today. Find users that love your product and determine what they love about it. Talk to the users that do not love your product, and determine which features you can add to make them fall in love with your product. Go after high impact easy to implement features first. 100 users paying $8.25 a month will equal a $10k/yr MRR business.
- r32a_ 8y agoEasier said than done when everyone follows this strategy you're going to have lots of competition.
- maxxxxx 8y agoGet some venture capital and pay each user $10/month so they pay you $8.25. Worked for Uber :)
- HugoDaniel 8y agoI did try it with gridgenerator[0]. A painting application to create geometric patterns and shapes. I tried to have users, people loved it but didn't feel they were the target audience. Tried to get some b2b partnerships afterwards which failed for various reasons. I have a few debts to pay now (because I was using my pension money for it) and a large amount of bugs to fix when my willpower comes back up again. Today no one uses it. I had to shut down the export server, and got about 40 followers on instagram with some of the works I managed to do with it[1]. [0] https://gridgenerator.com/ https://gridgenerator.com/ [1] https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/ https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/ Now i work at a web company trying to slave my way to pay the debt and in another 10 years try it again. Does it entitle me to say "been there done that" ?
- max76 8y agoWho were your users? Were they paying? Why did you feel they weren't the users you wanted? I'm really interested in your decision to move away from a consumer model to a b2b model.
- max76 8y agoA lot of people here are saying $100B is too high of a goal to accomplish. The best advice of the video is to have a strong vision of the future. How will the world be fundamentally different in 10 years compared to how it is today. Think about that change, and then build a company that will be well positioned with the new change. The stronger your vision, and the more accurate it is, the better your chance of success is. In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of $100B companies is going to explode as well. More and more commerce is happening on the internet which scales much easier than brick and motor commerce. More and more goods purchased are entirely virtual, and have huge margins. More and more value is in software, which can be copied and used without practical limits. If your goal is to start a company that grows to $100B there has never been a better time to do that than right now.
- qaq 8y agoHonestly sounds like a strange goal to have what is special about 100B why not 200 or 50? Is it even meaningful to have a number as a goal?
- max76 8y agoIt's important to have an order of magnitude as a goal. In general the size of a company in dollars correlates with their impact on the world. The best talent is interested in making a big impact on the world. 2x or .5x won't make much of a difference, but if you are thinking 100x or 1,000x smaller then it will have an impact on your business in the early stages. If your goal is to make a $100M company you aren't likely thinking big enough to attract good talent and partners.
- yongjik 8y agoI don't buy it. Why would the best talent (according to your criterion) join some nobody who aims for $100B, when they can join ~$100B companies and start making impacts right now.
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- r32a_ 8y agoI'm interested to see who can build the first $100B, fully remote company.
- ph0rque 8y agoNot sure if fully remote is the best goal. What if a company is fully remote, except for ~10 employees in a city who request an office at the local downtown co-working space? That kind of flexibility would be ideal, IMO.
- sytse 8y agoI think it is important that there is no headquarter. Some people having desks at the same co-working space is fine. All the executives in the same building means everyone else is at a satellite office.
- r32a_ 8y agoPeople can choose to work together if they wish that's the whole point of fully remote.
- threeseed 8y agoI applied to YC for the first time after attending Startup School. They said they would release the outcomes of who got in or not at 10pm PST. Instead it started to trickle in some 3 hours later. During that period the Slack channels had entrepreneurs panicking about whether they got in or not. Some even talking about suicide. And apparently this happens every, single time. I have lost any and all respect for YC and the partners who claim they represent the interests of founders. Founders should focus on making great products not trying to reach some arbitrary number.
- daneyh 8y agoExcellent filtering technique then if you can ding the ones that are talking suicide because they didn't get into YC
- throwawayinside 8y agoYou can’t blame YC. Startups have become another high visibility “sport” that attracts people who are both incapable and unstable. None of those people would have known or applied back in 2005.
- MetalGuru 8y agoThis is ridiculous and sad. Getting rejected from YC is not the end of the world or even the end of your startup. And being 3 hours late for releasing acceptance decision does not mean YC unilaterally doesn’t care about founders. Get real
- confiscate 8y agoThis is not YC's fault. I am not sure why you would blame YC for this. As you said, founders should focus on making great companies (not just great products), so they should not focus on the outcome release time. If you get into YC that's great. If not, you are still going to build your company anyways. There's not going to be a change in direction of your company either way. YC is an accelerator. It accelerates your progress up a path, but ultimately you are responsible for setting the path and running up it. Please don't consider suicide over a YC application. There's going to be a lot more obstacles ahead, that will be more stressful than applying to YC.
- bwang29 8y agoAround 32:00 : I was confused a little when Paul was talking about when 80% of facebook's user revolted against the decision on newsfeed and then facebook decided to stick with the decision which is ultimately successful. Seems to in direct contrast in what he believed when he was building Gmail.
- jondubois 8y agoThere is no path to $100B. Even though this is Y Combinator, no one reading this article will ever build a $100B company (except if we get massive hyperinflation of the USD). In fact, massive hyperinflation of the USD is a much more likely path for you to build a $100B company rather than the path suggested by this video. It's much more likely that the world will end before you (who is reading this) will build a $100B company. That's how bad the odds are and how pointless this video is.
- htor 8y agostartup culture is destroying the planet! we don't need more innovators we need inventors!
- cvaidya1986 8y agoThis a fun challenge! Check back this comment in 10 years if I built it. We are doing some work in AI that could have a shot.