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Not to be a dick, but Sam hasn't started a sustainable business; so keep that in mind when you read this advice. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman

Not to be a dick, but Sam hasn't started a sustainable business; so keep that in mind when you read this advice. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman: > In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. It was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.[11][12]

engineer_22 6y ago
Would you recommend another place that has all this information together?
- simonswords82 6y ago
  No because I didn't learn how to start a sustainable business from a book or online resource unfortunately. It was more a case of trying something, seeing if it worked, keeping it if it did and stopping it if it didn't. Aka trial and error. Problem with trial and error is that unless you're naturally gifted at running a business (I'm not) or lucky (I'm not) it takes a long time to learn all the lessons you need to learn to make a successful business. The best shortcut is a good mentor...but those are hard to find. Edit: Having said that, Reddit has a lot of smart people on it that are able to provide sensible guidance for specific business problems. Also: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-ebook/dp/B07ZLGQZYC https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-... <-- this was a great framework for running various areas of a business. Wish I had stumbled across it sooner than this year.
  - pontus 6y ago
    Thanks for the book suggestion, just bought a copy. Looks really great!
    - simonswords82 6y ago
      You're welcome, enjoy. It's super practical which I loved.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Having consumed a lot of startup advice and founder biopics, it seems the one constant critical success factor is good mentorship. I have no idea how to act on that nugget. All of my own attempts failed (clearly).
    - simonswords82 6y ago
      Do enough to prove yourself to somebody who has done more than you. Show them that you are on a path to success and they will want to push you over the finish line.
      - specialist 6y ago
        Huh. Now wish young me had seen that video.
mojuba 6y ago
I also never find the things he says very inspiring. Just rehashing the obvious mostly. Of course even the most obvious things might be useful to someone, but the bars for what Sam Altman says during what he calls a "lecture" should be higher than that.
- antaviana 6y ago
  Back in 2014 I found his lectures, and many of the other videos in the course very useful. Coincidentally, at the time of the course I was launching a software product and by applying some of the concepts learnt in the course it became something that is now bringing some $600K yearly in mostly passive income. So you do not need to go all the way in start up mode to get value from it. Reharshing the obvious is still great advice. We all have lots of blind spots.
  - simoncarter 6y ago
    What were some of those concepts that ended up being usefu?
    - antaviana 6y ago
      Possibly those that turned out to be most useful were the importance (and resilience) of integrations (Box guy), the quest to try to create monopolistic situations (Palantir guy), importance of a North star KPI (Facebook guy). But the course has lots of other concepts (understand your customers by doing things that don't scale, focus on what customers want, not on what competitors do, etc).
      - joshxyz 6y ago
        Thiel is an outlier for me imo, that guy is gangsta
  - ackbar03 6y ago
    Would you be willing to share roughly what space your product is in?
memset 6y ago
The page is a collection of video lectures, the majority of which are by guest lecturers, such as Patrick Collison and other founders or VCs. There is no written advice on this page, and only a small number of the videos feature Sam.
courtf 6y ago
These SV made-men, taken as a group, are Exhibit A for survivorship bias. Their primary talent is having been in the right place at the right time and they've spun an entire self-help industry out of it. If they hadn't gotten lucky early on, they'd just be dopey middle management parasites at some investment firm. These aren't they people that can build anything, they're just the middlemen between rich idiots and people with actual talents.
- tyu2 6y ago
  Right, but the point is those materials are not for starting a sustainable business, but a startup, a whole different thing as you understand. For sustainable business you probably don't want to listen to anyone involved in VC-funded startups, it's in their interest even to sabotage you.
  - pontus 6y ago
    The fact that some think there's a distinction between a startup and a sustainable business says a lot about SV. A startup should be sustainable too. There's a distinction between a quickly growing business or a slowly growing business for sure, and sometimes it makes sense to forgo the sustainable part in the short term in order to promote growth, but to think that a startup somehow should not aim to be sustainable leads to really perverse incentives.
    - nowherebeen 6y ago
      I think this concept was popularized by VCs like SoftBank. It also makes me wonder how much of a tech bubble we are in and what happens when it finally bursts.
      - Rastonbury 6y ago
        The appearance of being a bubble is inherent in the VC business model.. VCs know full well that 9/10 startups they fund are likely to fail, they make returns out of the 1/10. The median funded startup is a failure. People look at this an think "all this money and all this failure, its going to end badly, these investors are gonna get burnt!" yes some do, but even the most stellar firms have more misses than hits.
riazrizvi 6y ago
The Tropical MBA (https://www.tropicalmba.com https://www.tropicalmba.com) is a good podcast for startups. Those guys have started businesses from scratch, the advice is very practical.
- simonswords82 6y ago
  Thank you I'll have a look.
lonesomewhistle 6y ago
I’d take a look at the material and his writings before making that kind of judgement. Besides being smart, he seems to have a lot more humility than most of the people who give advice about startups, and he’s seen an unusually high number of startups throughout the process so he is in a great position to observe what works and what doesn’t. I’d much rather hear what he has to say than someone with one successful exit, mostly because I’ve come to trust his mind observational skill and his humble demeanor over the years. Most of these videos had counterintuitive information that I was happy to have heard before getting started — especially since I came from a completely different industry. They won’t tell you near everything you need to know to get started, but nothing will so as far as these things go I found them to be very helpful.
- augustt 6y ago
  Maybe I'm not seeing the right material but when I watch stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc from him, all I hear are mind-numbing platitudes. Having a "sensible business model" might have been my favorite piece of advice from that one.
- simonswords82 6y ago
  Very happy for you to disagree with me friend. My mentor is super successful, one of the smartest people I've worked with...he's never started a business. I don't think he could. Just because you understand the theory doesn't mean you can start a business. That's all I'm hoping to point out. I wish to take nothing away from Sam's success. In purely monetary terms Sam is infinitely more successful than I might ever be.
- vincentmarle 6y ago
  > he seems to have a lot more humility than most Sorry, are you talking about the same Sam Altman who wrote about "life advice" when he turned 30? https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades... Or the Sam Altman who tells us: - How to invest in Startups https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups - How to be successful https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful - etc. Sam Altman is a PG wannabe, but without the actual insights and experience
aerosmile 6y ago
That's factually wrong. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, and within YC, he initiated YC Continuity (just to name one of the many initiatives that continue to live on). So if you're specifically evaluating him on finding the PMF within his own projects, I think you're not giving him enough credit. If we were to evaluate him against his investment record, the score looks even better - he's clearly a wealthy guy, and it appears that most of his pre-OpenAI money comes from this area. This is significant, since if he can spot a good startup early on, then supposedly his thoughts on early stage startups are likely valuable. You might go ahead and trivialize those data points, but the reality is that's a 100x better resume than the majority of people whose blog posts form a basis for daily discussions here on HN. Why hate on Sam specifically?
- shallowthought 6y ago
  I mean, Sam Altman seems like a great guy. I hope everyone learned a lot from this comment, as we always do from people agreeing with each other.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't post like this to HN regardless of whom you're attacking. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: the parent comment originally read "Because he's a moron masquerading as a genius" and went downhill fast from there. Pulling tricks like that edit will get you banned here. Please don't do anything like that again.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - joshxyz 6y ago
    Hol up
programmerslave 6y ago
Yup I agree with this. Sam Altman is no Paul graham, it he’s trying to fill the void that Paul graham left. His platitudes are generic, not insightful or original. But he has to put out “content”
- aerosmile 6y ago
  In all fairness, if you do find someone whose content is as good as PG's, please share!
anonymouse008 6y ago
“Seek advice from those who have become who you want to be” There may be elements of Altman people admire beyond the sustainable business - but your criticism is fair.
- simonswords82 6y ago
  Great quote and I totally agree but Sam is definitely capable of delivering value to business even if he hasn't started one from scatch
flemhans 6y ago
He made it further than most; you refer to him by 'Sam'. So listen to him.
Rastonbury 6y ago
He's made investment decisions in successful companies and knows dozens of founders who have "made it". Despite not doing it himself, his experience is almost as good as it gets as an expert. If anything, having a decent track record across several companies means he's more aware of the patterns required for success than a unicorn founder who's only started one company due to suvivorship bias and path dependence. As an investor, he's also incentivized to dish out solid advice to his portfolio companies and also to companies that are potential investments.
- codingdave 6y ago
  To be clear, he is incentivized to dish out advice that is good for the investors. That is not always the same thing as good for the founders. A solid, sustainable, bootstrapped, slow-growth company is great for founders. But you won't find advice on how to do that. On the contrary, you'll often find it dismissed as "not a startup".
  - Rastonbury 6y ago
    You don't raise money if you don't want to be a VC funded hypergrowth company. If you don't aim that high no one funds you anyway. It's a difference in definitions, for their definitions see Paul Graham's startup = growth But yeah once you take the money and you need that exit, you're going to have a hard time. It's up to the founder to decide from the beginning

engineer_22 6y ago

Would you recommend another place that has all this information together?

simonswords82 6y ago
No because I didn't learn how to start a sustainable business from a book or online resource unfortunately. It was more a case of trying something, seeing if it worked, keeping it if it did and stopping it if it didn't. Aka trial and error. Problem with trial and error is that unless you're naturally gifted at running a business (I'm not) or lucky (I'm not) it takes a long time to learn all the lessons you need to learn to make a successful business. The best shortcut is a good mentor...but those are hard to find. Edit: Having said that, Reddit has a lot of smart people on it that are able to provide sensible guidance for specific business problems. Also: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-ebook/dp/B07ZLGQZYC https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-... <-- this was a great framework for running various areas of a business. Wish I had stumbled across it sooner than this year.
- pontus 6y ago
  Thanks for the book suggestion, just bought a copy. Looks really great!
  - simonswords82 6y ago
    You're welcome, enjoy. It's super practical which I loved.
- specialist 6y ago
  Having consumed a lot of startup advice and founder biopics, it seems the one constant critical success factor is good mentorship. I have no idea how to act on that nugget. All of my own attempts failed (clearly).
  - simonswords82 6y ago
    Do enough to prove yourself to somebody who has done more than you. Show them that you are on a path to success and they will want to push you over the finish line.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Huh. Now wish young me had seen that video.

mojuba 6y ago

I also never find the things he says very inspiring. Just rehashing the obvious mostly. Of course even the most obvious things might be useful to someone, but the bars for what Sam Altman says during what he calls a "lecture" should be higher than that.

antaviana 6y ago
Back in 2014 I found his lectures, and many of the other videos in the course very useful. Coincidentally, at the time of the course I was launching a software product and by applying some of the concepts learnt in the course it became something that is now bringing some $600K yearly in mostly passive income. So you do not need to go all the way in start up mode to get value from it. Reharshing the obvious is still great advice. We all have lots of blind spots.
- simoncarter 6y ago
  What were some of those concepts that ended up being usefu?
  - antaviana 6y ago
    Possibly those that turned out to be most useful were the importance (and resilience) of integrations (Box guy), the quest to try to create monopolistic situations (Palantir guy), importance of a North star KPI (Facebook guy). But the course has lots of other concepts (understand your customers by doing things that don't scale, focus on what customers want, not on what competitors do, etc).
    - joshxyz 6y ago
      Thiel is an outlier for me imo, that guy is gangsta
- ackbar03 6y ago
  Would you be willing to share roughly what space your product is in?

memset 6y ago

The page is a collection of video lectures, the majority of which are by guest lecturers, such as Patrick Collison and other founders or VCs. There is no written advice on this page, and only a small number of the videos feature Sam.

courtf 6y ago

These SV made-men, taken as a group, are Exhibit A for survivorship bias. Their primary talent is having been in the right place at the right time and they've spun an entire self-help industry out of it. If they hadn't gotten lucky early on, they'd just be dopey middle management parasites at some investment firm. These aren't they people that can build anything, they're just the middlemen between rich idiots and people with actual talents.

tyu2 6y ago
Right, but the point is those materials are not for starting a sustainable business, but a startup, a whole different thing as you understand. For sustainable business you probably don't want to listen to anyone involved in VC-funded startups, it's in their interest even to sabotage you.
- pontus 6y ago
  The fact that some think there's a distinction between a startup and a sustainable business says a lot about SV. A startup should be sustainable too. There's a distinction between a quickly growing business or a slowly growing business for sure, and sometimes it makes sense to forgo the sustainable part in the short term in order to promote growth, but to think that a startup somehow should not aim to be sustainable leads to really perverse incentives.
  - nowherebeen 6y ago
    I think this concept was popularized by VCs like SoftBank. It also makes me wonder how much of a tech bubble we are in and what happens when it finally bursts.
    - Rastonbury 6y ago
      The appearance of being a bubble is inherent in the VC business model.. VCs know full well that 9/10 startups they fund are likely to fail, they make returns out of the 1/10. The median funded startup is a failure. People look at this an think "all this money and all this failure, its going to end badly, these investors are gonna get burnt!" yes some do, but even the most stellar firms have more misses than hits.

riazrizvi 6y ago

The Tropical MBA (https://www.tropicalmba.com https://www.tropicalmba.com) is a good podcast for startups. Those guys have started businesses from scratch, the advice is very practical.

simonswords82 6y ago
Thank you I'll have a look.

lonesomewhistle 6y ago

I’d take a look at the material and his writings before making that kind of judgement. Besides being smart, he seems to have a lot more humility than most of the people who give advice about startups, and he’s seen an unusually high number of startups throughout the process so he is in a great position to observe what works and what doesn’t. I’d much rather hear what he has to say than someone with one successful exit, mostly because I’ve come to trust his mind observational skill and his humble demeanor over the years. Most of these videos had counterintuitive information that I was happy to have heard before getting started — especially since I came from a completely different industry. They won’t tell you near everything you need to know to get started, but nothing will so as far as these things go I found them to be very helpful.

augustt 6y ago
Maybe I'm not seeing the right material but when I watch stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJKucu6HJc from him, all I hear are mind-numbing platitudes. Having a "sensible business model" might have been my favorite piece of advice from that one.
simonswords82 6y ago
Very happy for you to disagree with me friend. My mentor is super successful, one of the smartest people I've worked with...he's never started a business. I don't think he could. Just because you understand the theory doesn't mean you can start a business. That's all I'm hoping to point out. I wish to take nothing away from Sam's success. In purely monetary terms Sam is infinitely more successful than I might ever be.
vincentmarle 6y ago
> he seems to have a lot more humility than most Sorry, are you talking about the same Sam Altman who wrote about "life advice" when he turned 30? https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades-are-short https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades... Or the Sam Altman who tells us: - How to invest in Startups https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-invest-in-startups - How to be successful https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful - etc. Sam Altman is a PG wannabe, but without the actual insights and experience

aerosmile 6y ago

That's factually wrong. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, and within YC, he initiated YC Continuity (just to name one of the many initiatives that continue to live on). So if you're specifically evaluating him on finding the PMF within his own projects, I think you're not giving him enough credit. If we were to evaluate him against his investment record, the score looks even better - he's clearly a wealthy guy, and it appears that most of his pre-OpenAI money comes from this area. This is significant, since if he can spot a good startup early on, then supposedly his thoughts on early stage startups are likely valuable. You might go ahead and trivialize those data points, but the reality is that's a 100x better resume than the majority of people whose blog posts form a basis for daily discussions here on HN. Why hate on Sam specifically?

shallowthought 6y ago
I mean, Sam Altman seems like a great guy. I hope everyone learned a lot from this comment, as we always do from people agreeing with each other.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post like this to HN regardless of whom you're attacking. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: the parent comment originally read "Because he's a moron masquerading as a genius" and went downhill fast from there. Pulling tricks like that edit will get you banned here. Please don't do anything like that again.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- joshxyz 6y ago
  Hol up

programmerslave 6y ago

Yup I agree with this. Sam Altman is no Paul graham, it he’s trying to fill the void that Paul graham left. His platitudes are generic, not insightful or original. But he has to put out “content”

aerosmile 6y ago
In all fairness, if you do find someone whose content is as good as PG's, please share!

anonymouse008 6y ago

“Seek advice from those who have become who you want to be” There may be elements of Altman people admire beyond the sustainable business - but your criticism is fair.

simonswords82 6y ago
Great quote and I totally agree but Sam is definitely capable of delivering value to business even if he hasn't started one from scatch

flemhans 6y ago

He made it further than most; you refer to him by 'Sam'. So listen to him.

Rastonbury 6y ago

He's made investment decisions in successful companies and knows dozens of founders who have "made it". Despite not doing it himself, his experience is almost as good as it gets as an expert. If anything, having a decent track record across several companies means he's more aware of the patterns required for success than a unicorn founder who's only started one company due to suvivorship bias and path dependence. As an investor, he's also incentivized to dish out solid advice to his portfolio companies and also to companies that are potential investments.

codingdave 6y ago
To be clear, he is incentivized to dish out advice that is good for the investors. That is not always the same thing as good for the founders. A solid, sustainable, bootstrapped, slow-growth company is great for founders. But you won't find advice on how to do that. On the contrary, you'll often find it dismissed as "not a startup".
- Rastonbury 6y ago
  You don't raise money if you don't want to be a VC funded hypergrowth company. If you don't aim that high no one funds you anyway. It's a difference in definitions, for their definitions see Paul Graham's startup = growth But yeah once you take the money and you need that exit, you're going to have a hard time. It's up to the founder to decide from the beginning