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My Notes on How to Start a Startup by YC
- namaljayathunga 8y agoI like to read summaries. This is amazing, thanks for sharing.
- charleswzx 8y agoJust sharing the notes I compiled while watching the online sessions @ https://startupclass.samaltman.com/ https://startupclass.samaltman.com/. I've been sitting on this for about half a year, and almost forgot I'd compiled it. I hope some of you find this useful (:
- tomglynch 8y agoThanks for this. How has it worked for you?
- charleswzx 8y agoI'm still early days with my startup, but some of the stuff on here has come in useful. It's a document that attempts to span the whole lifecycle of a startup, and some parts don't apply right now. Definitely something to refer back to now and again.
- _the_inflator 8y agoAwesome, thank you! :)
- charleswzx 8y agoWelcome!
- dragonsh 8y agoProbably you should also look at "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" https://medium.com/west-stringfellow/disciplined-entrepreneurship-summary-and-review-1d0a7c310644 https://medium.com/west-stringfellow/disciplined-entrepreneu... Many suggestions are practical with case studies.
- charleswzx 8y agoThank you! This looks like a great resource :)
- trampi 8y agoThanks a lot, I find it very interesting!
- charleswzx 8y agoVery welcome!
- mluggy 8y agowow, great stuff. i was starting to do the same after watching dozens of yc videos. you made it better :)
- charleswzx 8y agoThanks for the kind words! Hope it helps.
- spencerwgreene 8y agoGoogle Docs is already showing "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file." I predict this posts hits 100 points and then it crashes. (Currently at 31.)
- sdrothrock 8y agoAt 47 and had issues loading it, so I printed to PDF and hosted a copy on Docdroid -- I hope that's ok. If not, I'll delete it. https://docdro.id/tOVflQx https://docdro.id/tOVflQx
- ignoramous 8y agoOutlined the doc: https://outline.com/ntbkvW https://outline.com/ntbkvW
- geoah 8y agoStill works at 108 :p
- midway 8y agoCatchy title with strong words ('57-page', 'YC'), no real click-bait but close. I skimmed the first pages and most of the advice is neither wrong or bad. Still, reading a lenghty 57-note in order to learn is wrong. You learn by doing. If you want to start something stop procrastinating on HN and execute the first step: found the legal entity for your endeavor. This will keep you busy for the next days, and you learn. Btw, you don't need to have a good or any idea or co-founder now. This will all come. Just start, make mistakes, stop reading random advice. Edit: Don't downvote if you disagree, downvote if a comment doesn't add anything to the discussion.
- randomsearch 8y agoDon’t set up a legal entity. Find the nugget of your idea. Do something to get market feedback. Eg your idea is Uber for pet food - go interview people leaving a big pet food store and ask them if they’re interested. Old school market research. Or say your idea is a sports news site for minor teams. Set up an MVP that serves for your local team and promote it, see how many many people go to the site. MVP could be a stream of article links from other sites, or perhaps better a newsletter via email. On site have sign up box for other teams. Market feedback is key. Once you have a good signal, continue building and gather more feedback.
- midway 8y agoWhile I agree with most what you wrote, I still think that setting up a legal entity is a good first step. Most wannabes struggle with starting. They wait for the perfect idea, the perfect team and so on. They never start. Even if you start with a crappy idea. Ideas will evolve, get pivoted, whatever. My message is about to start and not wasting your time with inactivity like reading random Google Docs by random dudes.
- cmogni1 8y agoI haven’t finished reading this, but what strikes me about the advice in the notes is that much of it is either contradictory or there exist counterexamples to the claims. For example, the reader is encouraged to start building, but is told you also need a good idea and that you can pivot but most good companies don’t start with a pivot. Counterexample: Slack was a pivot. We’re also instructed that you should build something that’s hard to replicate, but also that the thing you build first should be simple. What am I supposed to take away from this? If it’s simple, isn’t it almost surely replicable? Also, Netflix is a good counterexample: they just started with a DVD mail service, and were easily replicable by an incumbent, like Blockbuster. And the advice about not creating a market goes against what sometimes occurs through branding. The original Banana Republic sold “safari clothing”. There was no market for this before Banana Republic. Nor was there a market for energy drinks before Red Bull. I’m told that you should have a cofounder, yet is appears that there’s many examples of successful companies without one (eg Amazon, IKEA). I’m not sure if this appears in the document yet, but another piece of conventional wisedom I’ve heard is that you need to work on your startup full time or else (insert bad thing about you not being committed). But what about Nike, whose founder worked for 5 years as an accountant while he developed the business? My point is that a lot of the advice I’ve heard about startups in general is framed (intentionally or unintentionally) as a series of directives that will optimize your chances of success. Moreover, no other additional context is provided to help you frame the advice, such that you can tell whether or not it’s applicable or appropriate advice to follow. The lack of context coupled with the existence of so many blatant counterexamples and contradictions prevents the advice from being useful. (Note: I edited the last paragraph for clarity)
- owens99 8y agoThere are counter examples to everything, that doesn’t make it bad advice. Some people smoke cigarettes their whole life and live until old age without ever getting cancer. Should we conclude smoking does not cause cancer just because there are counter examples? As you said, the advice is meant to maximize the chance of success. It is still not sufficient or without exceptions. In the end, advice is only valuable if you put it through your own filter and use your own judgement to make the best decision.
- 8y ago
- suzairshah 8y agoThis is amazing, thanks for sharing
- charleswzx 8y agoYou're very welcome :)
- poirier 8y agoNice job on the formatting. Looks great with an auto-outline. Appreciate the share.
- charleswzx 8y agoVery welcome!
- midway 8y agoInteresting: The title was changed ('57-Page' was removed) while the comment which classified the prior title as close to click-bait was downvoted. I didn't know that users could change the title of their submission. How is this possible or is this actually a post by YC? If latter, a hint would be great that this might be YC promoted content and not actual user content.
- paintbox 8y agoIt is possible that an admin changed the title. Folks probably downvoted you because they deemed your tone unwelcome here.
- midway 8y ago> It is possible that an admin changed the title Still strange. Why should an admin change the submission of a random user if it doesn't breach any of HN's rules? Maybe because it's not a random submission by a random user? Guess I must be wrong but would love to hear what that admin who did the change has to say.
- vertex-four 8y agoAdmins change the title and even the link of a great many posts on HN, breaking rules or not, to “clarify” the topic.
- imhoguy 8y ago> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- charleswzx 8y agoHi there! I'm the OP. I'm not affiliated to YC, and I didn't even notice the change till you pointed it out. I haven't been contacted by an admin, so I'm just as in the dark as you are.
- distant_hat 8y agoThere's a huge amount of survivorship bias in all such lists. Startups that succeed get analyzed a lot, those that did pretty much the same things but failed don't. To be rigorous about it, you'd have to define things like what's a startup, what constitutes success, what constitutes failure, far more carefully.
- muzani 8y agoThat's the good thing about lists that come from VCs. They analyze both the successes and failures, as well as things like risk level. YC also does a great job of not falling into the trap of copying the last superstar.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoTrue but huge caveat: their idea of success and the founder’s idea of success may differ wildly. If a modest exit makes the founder a few million and the VC just gets a single digit multiple, that’s not the kind of success they’re going to gravitate towards in their analysis. They may not label it a failure but they won’t be trying to identify how to replicate more of those, even if it will have changed the founder’s life and family for generations.
- muzani 8y agoYes, that is true. But so far this one has done a good job at that. The first thing they do is even try to convince you that entrepreneurship isn't the most profitable path. The statistically best path is to work at an early stage company. But if you have a certain kind of insane resolve, then they'll guide you down it. I think 'partial' success does get celebrated though, sort of like Reddit. Again, this is something seed investors do far better than Series C investor types. The patterns are still pretty similar, as a good deal of this covers the path from idea to "ramen profitable".
- ummonk 8y ago> The first thing they do is even try to convince you that entrepreneurship isn't the most profitable path. The statistically best path is to work at an early stage company. That's just them, being self-interested since they need employees for their founders' startups more than they need new founders. Realistically, the most profitable path statistically is to work at a FLNG or decacorn.
- nyrulez 8y agoI recently started out on this road as a solo founder [0], and out of all the given pieces of advice that YC gives, two things are the most conflicting for me: - This pressure to have a co-founder. I see that quoted as a major reasons for why startups go bust but also necessary for doing anything meaningful. I can imagine there being truth to both statements. I've seen startups go bust in my own network on both sides of the divide. But I feel there isn't enough advice out there for folks who are doing it Solo - that's still a valid design pattern for many startups in the past or present. - The whole idea of go big or go home - lot of the advice seems to assume you want to be really big one day. There doesn't seem to be enough advice for someone wanting to be a 10M-100M dollar business as their main milestone, not as a path to hit a billion dollar valuation. That kind of assumption results in very different kinds of design patterns, often borrowed from other billion dollar startups that may not make sense to your own little venture in the beginning. I wish startup advice wasn't universal as every author or speaker would like you to believe - there could be a system where it was doled out based on the current phase and situation, or at least recognizing the fact that there isn't one size fits all for something as varied as starting your own venture. [0] https://stockquanta.com https://stockquanta.com
- scottlocklin 8y agoYC advice isn't optimizing to help founders at all. It's optimizing for their business model. I don't know why people think otherwise. Do you think venture capitalists are your friends? Pretty sure they're not!
- nyrulez 8y agoThat's fascinating for me. It certainly comes across like "best for all parties" kind of advice, but only magnifies the need for clear separation of business advice that is fully aligned towards founders.
- scottlocklin 8y agoThe two things you cite are great examples of pieces of advice oriented to VCs rather than founders, and you should congratulate yourself for recognizing this. They want two cofounders to test for sociability like they say, but also because it lowers their risk (if one develops problems or is a loser, the other can step up), and actually increases their leverage over the founders. I mean, one founder can always be some stubborn type who says "no." It's easier to get to "yes" when you have two people making choices -this is basically an algorithm. The sociability thing is reasonable and a good test in many ways, but I know about as many solo founders who made it as I know founder-teams, so the advice is obviously wrong for some. Distribution is about what you see in big firms: plenty of Zucks and Bezoses out there to balance out the famous dyads. The "go for unicorn" thing should be familiar to you as a trend follower. I believe the old Turtle systems would have a majority of initiated trades as expected to lose money (aka start up failures -most of them fail!). You make up for the losing trades by doubling up and riding the winners. It's also vastly lower risk to do it this way than try to get a lot of medium sized deals/trades: the longer the trend rolls, the more you are certain the trend is real. The only way to make money on lots of little/medium moves is stat arb; a trading strategy where you can hedge, and VCs can't hedge. The founder's utility function is vastly different from that of a VC. VCs optimize their utility; not yours. You're just one of many dice they roll. If you want founder advice, get it from non-VC founders who succeeded at something, or people who have tried to do what you're doing. Otherwise: you are the product.
- TravelAndFood 8y ago"How do you tell which markets are growing fastest? Use instincts as a young student." Welp, I'm over 22, guess I'm never starting a company.
- objektif 8y agoI am not in the startup scene but why cant one of the best reason to start a company be to make more MONEY. Why is it always about changing the world and the universe needs me type of stuff. This is too SV cartoonish for me.
- mathgladiator 8y agoBecause most employees assume money is a given, and they align with a mission instead. It is also not socially acceptable to be in something just for the money unless it is wall street.
- objektif 8y agoWhat type of mission would that be? Selling ads, gathering your private data? Can we get real please? Time to stop villianizing WS, SV is just modern day WS with more greed. ( Sometimes more useful though. )
- tudelo 8y ago"It is also not socially acceptable to be in something just for the money unless it is wall street." I'm not sure if I can agree with that. In general that may be true, but I would have to say most people do something they don't like 'just for the money' at some point in their life. Something like working as a kid for minimum wage in a store. It's most likely that you are just working there for money.
- YazIAm 8y agoThe argument against this is that founding a startup, when factoring in the incredibly low success rate, may not be the best strategy to gain money. Joining an early stage startup (with equity) that's clearly on a growth path, or even working for a Google, Facebook, etc. is a much better bet for making money. Also, startups, where startup means creating a new unproven solution intended to achieve exponential growth, are unfathomably hard. It's hard (in my experience) to stay motivated in the face of startup hardships when one's primary objective is money.
- 8y ago
- thebentarrow 8y agoTY!
- Zigurd 8y agoThe Airbnb interview question “if u were diagnosed with 1 year left to live, would you work at airbnb?” sounds to me like "I want to date a stalker." No. No I don't. I don't want an insane employee who may go postal, either.