Words of Wisdom from Sam Altman
by Scott Edward Walker on October 11th, 2014To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.” Each week (or two), we post our favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics. This week, we present Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator and the co-founder and CEO of Loopt.
In this interesting initial lecture from his Stanford course “How to Start a Startup,” Sam shares the following solid nuggets for entrepreneurs:
- “You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem and…you think starting a company is the best way to solve it.” (at 3:20)
- “Most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot.” (at 4:40)
- “I myself used to believe ideas didn’t matter that much, but I’m very sure that’s wrong now.” (at 5:01)
- “Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is really valuable and totally missing in most startups today.” (at 5:31)
- “The idea should come first, and the startup should come second.” (at 6:16)
- “The best companies are almost always mission-oriented.” (at 6:41)
- “If you don’t love and believe in what you’re building, you will likely give-up at some point along the way.” (at 7:11)
- “When it comes to starting startups, in many ways it’s easier to start a hard startup than easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand.” (at 7:40)
- “You need conviction in your own beliefs and a willingness to ignore others’ naysaying. The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There is ‘right’ on one side of it and ‘crazy’ on the other.” (at 9:23)
- “The truly good ideas don’t sound like they’re worth stealing….You want to sound crazy, but actually be right.” (at 9:46)
- “You cannot create a market that doesn’t want to exist. You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.” (at 11:30)
- “You want a market that is going to grow really quickly; it may seem small today – it may be small today. But you know, and other people don’t, that it’s going to grow really fast.” (at 11:52)
- “Why is this the perfect time for this particular idea and to start this particular company?” (at 12:23)
- “In general, it’s best if you’re building something that you yourself need. You’ll understand it much better than if you have to understand it by talking to a customer to build the first version.” (at 12:45)
- “Another somewhat counter-intuitive thing about good startup ideas is that they’re almost always very easy to explain and very easy to understand. If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you’re doing, it’s almost always a sign that it’s too complicated.” (at 13:07)
- “If you could just learn to think of the market first, you will have a big leg-up on most people starting startups.” (at 14:50)
- “Until you build a great product almost nothing else matters.” (at 15:48)
- “Step one is to build something that users love.” (at 16:16)
- “It’s better to build something that a small number of users love than a large number of users like.” (at 17:05)
- “A great product is the secret to long-term growth hacking. You should get that right before you worry about anything else.” (at 19:46)
- “Very few startups die from competition. Most die because they themselves fail to make something users love…” (at 20:14)
- “The word ‘fanatical’ comes-up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product.” (at 21:22)
I hope you enjoy it. Cheers, Scott