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Table of Content

• Lecture 1 & 2 - Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)
• Lecture 3 - Before the Startup (Paul Graham)
• Lecture 4 - Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing (Adora Cheung)
• Lecture 5 - Competition is for Losers (Peter Thiel)
• Lecture 6 - Growth (Alex Schultz)
• Lecture 7 - How to Build Products Users Love (Kevin Hale)
• Lecture 8 - How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, Press
• Lecture 9 - How to Raise Money (Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad)
• Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)
• Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann)
• Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise (Aaron Levie)
• Lecture 13 - How to be a Great Founder (Reid Hoffman)
• Lecture 14 - How to Operate (Keith Rabois)
• Lecture 15 - How to Manage (Ben Horowitz)
• Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)
• Lecture 17 - Lecture 17 - How to Design Hardware Products (Hosain Rahman)
• Lecture 18 - Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups (Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy)
• Lecture 19 - Sales and Marketing; How to Talk to Investors (Tyler Bosmeny; YC Partners)
• Lecture 20 - Later-stage Advice (Sam Altman)

Lecture 1 & 2 - Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)

You may still fail. The outcome is something like idea x product x execution x team x luck, where luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand. Literally that much. But if you do really well in the four areas you can control, you have a good chance at at least some amount of success.

You should never start a startup just for the sake of doing so. There are much easier ways to become rich and everyone who starts a startup always says, always, that they couldn't have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be. You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it. The specific passion should come first, and the startup second.

1. Idea

It's uncool to spend a lot of time thinking about the idea for a startup. You're just supposed to start, throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and not even spend any time thinking about if it will be valuable if it works. And pivots are supposed to be great, the more pivots the better.

Great execution is at least ten times as important and a hundred times harder than a great idea.

If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something the founders themselves wanted, not a random made up idea

It includes the size and the growth of the market, the growth strategy for the company, the defensibility strategy, and so on. When you're evaluating an idea, you need to think through all these things, not just the product. If it works out, you're going to be working on this for ten years so it's worth some real up front time to think through the up front value and the defensibility of the business.

Long-term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. There is a huge advantage if you do it. Remember that the idea will expand and become more ambitious as you go. You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in your path to world domination, but you really want a nice kernel to start with. You want something that can develop in interesting ways.

The idea should come first and the startup should come second. Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea you feel compelled to explore. This is also the way to choose between ideas. If you have several ideas, work on the one that you think about most often when you're not trying to think about work.

Another way of looking at this is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented. It's difficult to get the amount of focus that large companies need unless the company feels like it has an important mission. And it's usually really hard to get that without a great founding idea. A related advantage of mission oriented ideas is that you yourself will be dedicated to them. It takes years and years, usually a decade, to build a great startup. If you don't love and believe in what you're building, you're likely to give up at some point along the way. There's no way I know of to get through the pain of a startup without the belief that the mission really matters. A lot of founders, especially students, believe that their startups will only take two to three years and then after that they'll work on what they're really passionate about. That almost never works. Good startups usually take ten years. A third advantage of mission oriented companies is that people outside the company are more willing to help you. You'll get more support on a hard, important project, than a derivative one.

The hardest part about coming up with great ideas, is that the best ideas often look terrible at the beginning. If they sounded really good, there would be too many people working on them.

You can't get a monopoly right away. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand. This is why some great startup ideas look really bad at the beginning. "Today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I'm going to get all of them, and in the future, almost everyone is going to use my product."

Here is the theme that is going to come up a lot: 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's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other. But keep in mind that if you do come up with a great idea, most people are going to think it's bad. You should be happy about that, it means they won't compete with you. This also another reason why it's not really dangerous to tell people your idea. The truly good ideas don't sound like they're worth stealing.

You need a market that's going to be big in 10 years. Most investors are obsessed with the market size today, and they don't think at all about how the market is going to evolve. One of the big advantages of these sorts of markets - these smaller, rapidly growing markets - is that customers are usually pretty desperate for a solution, and they'll put up with an imperfect, but rapidly improving product.

In general, its 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 very first version. If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something someone else needs, realize that you're at a big disadvantage, and get very very close to your customers. Try to work in their office, if you can, and if not, talk to them multiple times a day.

Another somewhat counterintuitive thing about good startup ideas is that they're almost always very easy to explain and very easy to understand. If it takes more then a sentence to explain what you're doing, that's almost always a sign that its too complicated. It should be a clearly articulated vision with a small number of words.

2. Product

To build a really great company, you first have to turn a great idea into a great product. This is really hard, but its crucially important, and fortunately its pretty fun.

One of the most important tasks for a founder is to make sure that the company builds a great product. Until you build a great product, nothing else matters. When really successful startup founders tell the story of their early days its almost always sitting in front of the computer working on their product, or talking to their customers. That's pretty much all the time. They do very little else, and you should be very skeptical if your time allocation is much different. Most other problems that founders are trying to solve, raising money, getting more press, hiring, business development, et cetera, these are significantly easier when you have a great product. Its really important to take care of that first. Step one is to build something that users love.

Find a small group of users, and make them love what you're doing.

One way that you know when this is working, is that you'll get growth by word of mouth. If you get something people love, people will tell their friends about it. This works for consumer product and enterprise products as well. When people really love something, they'll tell their friends about it, and you'll see organic growth. If you don't have some early organic growth, then probably your product isn't really good enough yet.

If you try to build a growth machine before you have a product that some people really love, you're almost certainly going to waste your time. Breakout companies almost always have a product that's so good, it grows by word of mouth.

Over the long run, great product win. Don't worry about your competitors raising a lot of money, or what they might do in the future. They probably aren't very good anyway. Very few startups die from competition. Most die because they themselves fail to make something users love, they spend their time on other things.

Its much much easier to make a great product if you have something simple. Even if your eventual plans are super complex, and hopefully they are, you can almost always start with a smaller subset of the problem then you think is the smallest, and its hard to build a great product, so you want to start with as little surface area as possible. Another reason that simple's good is because it forces you to do one thing extremely well and you have to do that to make something that people love.

You need some users to help with the feedback cycle, but the way you should get those users is manually—you should go recruit them by hand. Don't do things like buy Google ads in the early days, to get initial users. You don't need very many, you just need ones that will give you feedback everyday, and eventually love your product.

Understand that group extremely well, get extremely close to them. Listen to them and you'll almost always find out that they're very willing to give you feedback. Even if you're building the product for yourself, listen to outside users, and they'll tell you how to make a product they'll pay for. Do whatever you need to make them love you, and make them know what you're doing. Because they'll also be the advocates that help you get your next users.

You want to build an engine in the company that transforms feedback from users into product decisions. Then get it back in from of the users and repeat. Ask them what the like and don't like, and watch them use it. Ask them what they'd pay for. Ask them if they'd be really bummed if your company went away. Ask them what would make them recommend the product to their friends, and ask them if they'd recommended it to any yet.

Great founders don't put anyone between themselves and their users. The founders of these companies do things like sales and customer support themselves in the early days. Its critical to get this loop embedded in the culture.

You really need to use metrics to keep yourself honest on this. It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure. Startups live on growth, its the indicator of a great product.

Why to Start a Startup

Its important to know what reason is yours, because some of them only make sense in certain contexts, some of them will actually, like, lead you astray.

So the 4 common reasons, just to enumerate them, are:

• it's glamorous
• you'll get to be the boss
• you'll have flexibility, especially over your schedule
• and you'll have the chance to have bigger impact and make more money then you might by joining a later stage company

It's glamorous

There's an ugly side to being an entrepreneur, and more importantly, what you're actually spending your time on is just a lot of hard work. Let's be real, if you start a company its going to be extremely hard.

Why is it so stressful?

• A lot of responsibility. People in any career have a fear of failure, its kind of just like a dominant part of the part of the psychology. But when you're an entrepreneur, you have fear of failure on behalf of yourself and all of the people who decided to follow you. So that's really stressful.
• You're always on call. If something comes up—maybe not always at 3 in the morning, but for some startups that's true—but if something important comes up, you're going to deal with it.
• You're much more committed. So if you're at a startup and it's very stressful and things are not going well, you're unhappy, you can just leave. For a founder, you can leave, but it's very uncool and pretty much a black eye for the rest of your career.

Ben Horowitz likes to say the number one role of a CEO is managing your own psychology, it's absolutely true, make sure you do it.

You'll be the boss

Another reason, especially if you're had another job at another company, you start to develop this narrative, like the people running this company are idiots, they're making all these decisions and spending all their time in these stupid ways, I'm gonna start a company and I'm going to do it better. I'm going to set all the rules.

"People have this vision of being the CEO of a company they started and being on top of the pyramid. Some people are motivated by that, but that’s not at all what it’s like.

What it’s really like: everyone else is your boss – all of your employees, customers, partners, users, media are your boss. I’ve never had more bosses and needed to account for more people today.

The life of most CEOs is reporting to everyone else, at least that’s what it feels like to me and most CEOs I know. If you want to exercise power and authority over people, join the military or go into politics. Don’t be an entrepreneur." - Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote

The most common thing I have to spend my time on and my energy on as a CEO is dealing with the problems that other people are bringing to me, the other priorities that people create, and it's usually in the form of a conflict. People want to go in different directions or customers want different things. And I might have my own opinions on that, but the game I'm playing is who do I disappoint the least and just trying to navigate all these difficult situations.

And even on a day to day basis, I might come in on Monday and have all these grand plans for how I'm going to improve the company. But if an important employee is threatening to quit, that's my number one priority. That's what I'm spending my time on.

Flexibility

"If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you will actually get some flex time to be honest. You'll be able to work any 24 hours a day you want!" - Phil Libin

You're a role model of the company, and this is super important. So if you're an employee at a company, you might have some good weeks and you might have some bad weeks, some weeks when you're low energy and you might want to take a couple days off. That's really bad if you're an entrepreneur. Your team will really signal off of what you're bringing to the table. So if you take your foot off the gas, so will they.

You're always working anyways. If you're really passionate about an idea, it's going to pull you towards it. If you're working with great investors, you're working with great partners, they're going to be working really hard, they're going to want you to be working really hard.

Money and Impact

If you joined Facebook a couple years into its existence you've already made around $200M, this is a huge number and even if you joined Facebook as employee number 1000, so you joined like 2009, you still make $20M, that's a giant number and that's how you should be benchmarking when you're thinking about what you might make as an entrepreneur.

So why might joining a late stage company actually might have a lot of impact, you get this force multiplier: they have an existing mass of user base, if it's Facebook it's a billion users, if it's Google it's a billion users, they have existing infrastructures you get to build on, that's also increasingly true for a new startup like AWS and all these awesome independent service providers, but you usually get some micro-proprietary technology and they maintain it for you, it's a pretty great place to start. And you get to work with a team, it'll help you leverage your ideas into something great.

So what's the best reason

"You can't not do it"

• Passion: you're so passionate about it that you have to do it and you're going to do it anyways. This is really important because you'll need that passion to get through all of those hard parts of being an entrepreneur.
• Aptitude: the world needs you to do it. You're actually well suited for this problem in some way. If this isn't true, it may be a sign that your time is better spent somewhere else.

3. Team

Cofounders

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company. Everyone says you have to watch out for tension brewing among cofounders and you have to address is immediately. And choosing a random random cofounder, or choosing someone you don't have a long history with, choosing someone you're not friends with, so when things are really going wrong, you have this sort of past history to bind you together, usually ends up in disaster. If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company. If you work at Facebook or Google or something like that, it's almost as cofounder rich as Stanford.

You definitely need relentlessly resourceful cofounders. That model is James Bond. You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.

You want a tough and a calm cofounder. There are obvious things like smart, but everyone knows you want a smart cofounder, they don't prioritize things like tough and calm enough, especially if you feel like you yourself aren't, you need a cofounder who is.

Try not to hire

It sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have. Lots of employees ends up with things like a high burn rate, meaning you're losing a lot of money every month, complexity, slow decision making, the list goes on and it's nothing good. You want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.

At the beginning, you should only hire when you desperately need to. Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. And one of the reasons this is so bad, is that the cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high. These hires really matter, these people are what go on to define your company, and so you need people that believe in it almost as much as you do.

One of the remarkable observations about Airbnb is that if you talk to any of the first forty or so employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company. But by having an extremely high bar, by hiring slowly ensures that everyone believes in the mission, you can get that.

Get the best people

When you're in product mode that should be your number one priority. And when you're in fundraising mode, fundraising is your number one priority.

To get the very best people, they have a lot of great options and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone. It's this long process and so you have to convince them that your mission is the most important of anything that they're looking at. This is another case of why it's really important to get the product right before looking at anything else. The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it. Mediocre people at huge companies will cause some problems, but it won't kill the company. A single mediocre hire within the first five will often in fact kill a startup. "Mediocre engineers do not build great companies"

The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.

Experience matters for some roles and not for others. When you're hiring someone that is going to run a large part of your organization experience probably matters a lot. For most of the early hires that you make at a startup, experience probably doesn't matter that much and you should go for aptitude and belief in what you’re doing. Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before. So it's really worth thinking, is this a role where I care about experience or not. And you'll often find to don’t, especially in the early days.

There are 3 things I look for in a hire:

• Are they smart?
• Do they get things done?
• Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

And if I get an answer, if I can say yes to all three of these, I never regret it, it's almost always worked out. You can learn a lot about all three of these things in an interview but the very best way is working together, so ideally someone you've worked together with in the past and in that case you probably don't even need an interview.

You should ask specifically about projects that someone worked on in the past. You'll learn a lot more than you will with brainteasers. You want to call some people that these people have worked with in the past. And when you do, you don't just want to ask, How was so-and-so, you really want to dig in. Is this person in the top five percent of people you've ever worked with? What specifically did they do? Would you hire them again? Why aren't you trying to hire them again? You really have to press on these reference calls.

• Communication is so important in an early startup. If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.
• Manically determined: you want people that are just going to get it done.
• Would feel comfortable reporting to them, if the roles were reversed. You don't have to be friends with everybody, but you should at least enjoy working with them. And if you don't have that, you should at least deeply respect them.

You should aim to give about ten percent of the company to the first ten employees. They have to earn it over 4 years anyway, and if they're successful, they're going to contribute way more than that. They're going to increase the value of the company way more than that, and if they don't then they won't be around anyway.

For whatever reason founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity for investors. I think this is totally backwards. Employees will only add more value over time. Investors will usually write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much. Sometimes they do, but your employees are really the ones that build the company over years and years.

You've hired the best - now keep them around!

You have to make sure your employees are happy and feel valued. This is one of the reasons that equity grants are so important. People in the excitement of joining a startup don't think about it much, but as they come in day after day, year after year, if they feel they have been treated unfairly that will really start to grate on them and resentment will build.

Learning just a little bit of management skills, which first-time CEOs are usually terrible at, goes a long way. One of the speakers at YC this summer, who is now extremely successful, struggled early on and had his team turn over a few times. Someone asked him what his biggest struggle was and he said, turns out you shouldn't tell your employees they're fucking up every day unless you want them all to leave because they will.

As a founder, this is a very natural instinct. You think you can do everything the best and it’s easy to tell people when they’re not doing it well. So learning just a little bit here will prevent this massive team churn. It also doesn't come naturally to most founders to really praise their team. It took me a little while to learn this too. You have to let your team take credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.

Dan Pink talks about these three things that motivate people to do great work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on. You may have to move them into something else, something other than where they started. Really good people that can almost find some great place in the company, I have not seen that be a problem too often.

Fire fast

Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee. But it's so painful and so awful, that everyone gets it wrong the first few times.

You also wanna fire people who are creating office politics, and who are persistently negative. The rest of the company is always aware of employees doing things like this, and it's just this huge drag - it's completely toxic to the company.

If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone. It's not a case of a few screw-ups, it's a case where every time someone does something, you would have done the opposite yourself. You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision-makers. And, if someone's doing everything wrong, just like a consistent thing over like a period of many weeks or a month, you'll be aware of it.

If you have to choose between hiring a sub-optimal employee and losing your customers to a competitor, what do you do? If it's going to be one of the first five employees at a company I would lose those customers. The damage that it does to the company- it's better to lose some customers than to kill the company.

4. Execution

Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most critical. Many cofounders think they're just signing up to this beautiful idea and then they're going to go be on magazine covers and go to parties. But really what it’s about more than anything else, what being a cofounder really means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution and you can’t outsource this.

The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, manage the customers, are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There is no other way. You cannot hire a COO to do that while you go off to conferences. The company just needs to see you as this maniacal execution machine.

There’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people who are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what adds and creates value.

The CEO has 5 jobs: set the vision, raise money, evangelize, hire and manage, make sure the entire company executes.

Focus

Execution gets divided into two key questions: can you figure out what to do and can you get it done.

One of the hardest parts about being a founder is that there are a hundred important things competing for your attention every day. And you have to identify the right two or three, work on those, and then ignore, delegate, or defer the rest.

Founders get excited about starting new things. Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.

Most startups are nowhere near focused enough. They work really hard-maybe-but they don’t work really hard at the right things, so they'll still fail. One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying. You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

You can't be focused without good communication. Even if you have only four or five people at a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for people to be working on slightly different things.

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these. You should always know how you're doing against your metrics, you should have a weekly review meeting every week. So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things.

Intensity

Startups only work at a fairly intense level. A friend of mine says the secret to start up success is extreme focus and extreme dedication.

Startups are not the best choice for work life balance and that's sort of just the sad reality. There's a lot of great things about a startup, but this is not one of them. Startups are all-consuming in a way that is generally difficult to explain. You basically need to be willing to outwork your competitors.

The good news here is that a small amount of extra work on the right thing makes a huge difference. Just outworking their competitors by a little bit was what made them successful.

It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is to do both at a startup. You need to have a culture where the company has really high standards for everything everyone does, but you still move quickly.

Indecisiveness is a startup killer. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never make a decision. They're talking about you know I could do this thing, or I could do that other thing, and they're going back and forth and they never act. And what you actually need is this bias towards action. The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. But they get things done really quickly. Every time you talk to the best founders they've gotten new things done.

Speed is this huge premium. The best founders usually respond to e-mail the most quickly, make decisions most quickly, they're generally quick in all of these ways. And they had this do what ever it takes attitude.

Momentum

Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well. You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing. So always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup. If I can only tell founders one thing about how to run a company, it would be this.

It’s hard to figure out a growth engine because most companies grow in new ways, but there’s this thing: if you build a good product it will grow. So getting this product right at the beginning is the best way not to lose momentum later.

When there’s disagreement among the team about what to do, then you ask your users and you do whatever your users tell you. And you have to remind people: “hey, stuff’s not working right now we don’t actually hate each other, we just need to get back on track and everything will work.” If you just call it out, if you just acknowledge that, you’ll find that things get way better.

A good way to keep momentum is to establish an operating rhythm at the company early. Where you ship product and launch new features on a regular basis. Where you’re reviewing metrics every week with the entire company. This is actually one of the best things your board can do for you. Boards add value to business strategy only rarely. But very frequently you can use them as a forcing function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones.

Don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product. So remind your company of this, and this is sort of a founder’s role, is not to let the company get down because of the competitors in the press.

“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” - Henry Ford

Lecture 3 - Before the Startup (Paul Graham)

Advice that does not surprise you

You don't need people to give you advice that does not surprise you. If founders' existing intuition gave them the right answers, they would not need us. You can trust your instincts about people. Work with people you would generally like and respect and that you have known long enough to be sure about because there are a lot of people who are really good at seeming likable for a while.

Mechanics of starting a startup

It's not merely unnecessary for people to learn in detail about the mechanics of starting a startup, but possibly somewhat dangerous because another characteristic mistake of young founders starting startups is to go through the motions of starting a startup. They always want to know, what are the tricks for convincing investors? And we have to tell them the best way to convince investors is to start a startup that is actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so.

Gaming the system stops working

Starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Users are like sharks, sharks are too stupid to fool, you can't wave a red flag and fool it, it's like meat or no meat. You have to have what people want and you only prosper to the extent that you do. The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some extent with investors. If you’re really good at knowing what you’re talking about, you can fool investors, for one, maybe two rounds of funding.

So, stop looking for the trick.

Startups are all consuming

If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree that you cannot imagine and if it succeeds it will take over your life for a long time; for several years, at the very least, maybe a decade, maybe the rest of your working life. Every day shit happens within the Google empire that only the emperor can deal with and he, as the emperor, has to deal with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole backlog of shit accumulates, and he has to bear this, uncomplaining, because: number one, as the company’s daddy, he cannot show fear or weakness; and number two, if you’re a billionaire, you get zero, actually less than zero sympathy, if you complain about having a difficult life.

Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it's like a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably. While it's honestly the best thing—having kids—if you take away one thing from this lecture, remember this: There are a lot of things that are easier to do before you have kids than after, many of which will make you a better parent when you do have kids.

Should you start a startup at any age?

You can't tell. Meaning starting a startup will change you a lot if it works out. So what you’re trying to estimate is not just what you are, but what you could become. The hard part and the most important part was predicting how tough and ambitious they would become.

If you are absolutely terrified of starting a startup you probably shouldn’t do it. Unless you are one of those people who gets off on doing things you're afraid of. Otherwise if you are merely unsure of whether you are going to be able to do it, the only way to find out is to try.

So if you want to start a startup one day, what do you do now in college? There are only two things you need initially, an idea and cofounders.

The way to get start up ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas

If you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot of time before realizing they're no good.

The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas.

How do you turn your mind into the kind that has startup ideas unconsciously?

• learn about a lot of things that matter.
• work on problems that interest you.
• with people you like and or respect.

QnA

The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested and not because of some ulterior motive. At its best starting a startup is merely a ulterior motive for curiosity and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn.

Q: Do you see any value in business school for people who want to pursue entrepreneurship? A: Honestly the best way to learn on how to start a startup is just to just try to start it. You may not be successful but you will learn faster if you just do it.

Q: Management is a problem only if you are successful. What about those first two or three people? A: Ideally you are successful before you even hire two or three people. Ideally you don't even have two or three people for quite awhile. When you do the first hires in a startup they are almost like founders. They should be motivated by the same things, they can’t be people you have to manage. As a general rule you want people who are self motivated early on they should just be like founders.

Q: What are your reoccurring systems in your work and personal life that make you efficient? A: If you work on things you like, you don't have to force yourself to be efficient.

Q: If you hire people you like, you might get a monoculture and how do you deal with the blind spots that arise? A: Starting a startup is where many things will be going wrong. You can't expect it to be perfect. The advantage is of hiring people you know and like are far greater than the small disadvantage of having some monoculture. You look at it empirically, at all the most successful startups, someone just hires all their pals out of college.

Lecture 4 - Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing (Adora Cheung)

problem

• what is it solving? describe it in 1 sentence
• how does it relate to you? am i really passionate about the problem
• verify others have it

where to start?

• learn a lot, become an expert so people trust you
• identify customer segments
• storyboard ideal user experience, how people find out about you

what is v1?

• minimum viable product: smallest feature set to solve the problem
• simple product positioning: one-liner to describe functional benefits of what you do

first few users

• sphere of influence
• local & online communities
• niche influencers
• cold calls + emails
• press

customer feedback

• support email & phone number
• surveys, interviews
• quantitative: retention, ratings, Net Promoter Score
• qualitative: ask why why why
• beware of honesty curve: be wary of feedback from people you know and is the product is free or paid, the most honest feedback is from random paid users because they want to know if their money is worth it

v1 feature creep

• build fast, but optimise for now
• manual before automation: do it manually until it can be automated
• temporary brokeness > permanent paralysis: perfection is irrelevant in this stage, do not worry about the edge cases, over time they will build up, you'll want to build for that
• beware of frankenstein: don't build all features users ask for and make them happier, understand why they are asking, usually what they suggest is not the best idea

s is for stealth, and stupid

• someone will steal your idea
• there is a first-mover advantage
• just launch it already

ready for a lot of users?

• learn on channel at a time
• iterate working channels
• revisit failed channels

types of growth

• sticky: get existing users to come back and pay you more
• viral: when people talk about you
• paid: use money
• key = sustainability, good return on investment

sticky growth

• good experience wins
• Customer's Lifetime Value CLV + retention cohort analysis important
• repeat users buy more and more

viral growth

• WOW experience + good referral programs
• customer touch points: where can people refer other people
• program mechanics
• referral conversion flow

paid growth

• online ads: Search Engine Marketing SEM, Social Media Marketing SMM, etc.
• offline ads: flyers, newspaper ads, press releases, etc.
• b2b sales
• simple: Customer Lifetime Value CLV > Customer Acquisition Cost CAC
• advanced: CLV > CAC by segment
• key: payback time + sustainability

the art of pivoting: when to move on?

• bad growth
• bad retention
• bad economics
• key: have a growth plan when you start out: what's the optimistic but realistic way to grow this business?

Lecture 5 - Competition is for Losers (Peter Thiel)

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Lecture 6 - Growth (Alex Schultz)

When you want to start a startup also see how big the market could be

Retention Curve

Retention is the single most important thing for growth

This curve, ‘percent monthly active’ versus ‘number of days from acquisition’, if you end up with a retention curve that is asymptotic to a line parallel to the X-axis, you have a viable business and you have product market fit for some subset of market

If it doesn’t flatten out, don’t go into growth tactics, don’t do virality, don’t hire a growth hacker. Focus on getting product market fit, because in the end, as Sam said in the beginning of this course: idea, product, team, execution. If you don’t have a great product, there’s no point in executing more on growing it because it won’t grow. Number one problem I’ve seen, inside Facebook for new products, number one problem I’ve seen for startups, is they don’t actually have product market fit, when they think they do.

Different verticals need different terminal retention rates for them to have successful businesses.

• If you’re on ecommerce and you’re retaining on a monthly active basis, like 20 to 30% of your users, you’re going to do very well.
• If you’re on social media, and the first batch of people signing up to your product are not like, 80% retained, you’re not going to have a massive social media site.

What you need to do is have the tools to think, ‘who out there is comparable’ and how you can look at it and say, ‘am I anywhere close to what real success looks like in this vertical?’

Retention is the single most important thing for growth and retention comes from having a great idea and a great product to back up that idea, and great product market fit. The way we look at, whether a product has great retention or not, is whether or not the users who install it, actually stay on it long-term, when you normalize on a cohort basis, and I think that’s a really good methodology for looking at your product and say ‘okay the first 100, the first 1,000, the first 10,000 people I get on this, will they be retained in the long-run?

The North Star

Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go, and that person needs to be the person leading the company.

• Mark put out monthly active users, as the number both internally he held everyone to, and said we need everyone on Facebook, but that means everyone active on Facebook, not everyone signed up on Facebook, so monthly active people was the number internally, and it was also the number he published externally.
• If you’re a messaging application, sends is probably the single most important number. If people use you once a day, maybe that’s great, but you’re not really their primary messaging mechanism, so Jan published the sends number.
• Inside Airbnb, they talk about ‘nights booked’ and also published that in all of the infographics you see in side TechCrunch. They always benchmark themselves against how many nights booked they have compared to the largest hotel chains in the world.
• For eBay, it was gross merchandise volume. How much stuff did people actually buy through eBay? Everyone externally tends to judge eBay based on revenue. It actually has 10 times Gross Merchandise Volume going through the site.

When you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star, and you define as a leader. The second you have more than one person working on something, you cannot control what everyone else is doing. I promise you, having now hit 100 people I’m managing, I have no control. It’s all influence

The Magic Moment

• Facebook the magic moment, is that moment when you see your friend’s face, and everything we do on growth.
• Linkedin, Twitter, Whatsapp sign up: the number one thing all these services look to do, is show you the people you want to follow, connect to, send messages to, as quickly as possible, because in this vertical, this is what matters.
• eBay: Like when you see that collectible that you are missing, that is the real magic moment on eBay. When you’re listing your house, that first time you get paid, is your magic moment or when you list an item on eBay, the first time you get paid, is your magic moment.
• Airbnb: you find that first listing, that cool house you can stay in, and when you go through the door, that’s a magic moment.

Think about what the magic moment is for your product, and get people connected to it as fast as possible, because then you can move up where that blue line has asymptotic, and you can go from 60% retention to 70% retention easily if you can connect people with what makes them stick on your site.

Marginal User (Power User)

‘Oh, I’m getting too many notifications, I think that’s what we have to optimize for on notifications.’ Okay, are your power users leaving your site because they’re getting too many notifications? No. Then why would you optimize that? They’re probably grown-ups and they can use filters.

What you need to focus on is the marginal user. The one person who doesn’t get a notification in a given day, month, or year. Building an awesome product is all about think about the power user, right? Building an incredible product is definitely optimizing it for the people who use your product the most, but when it comes to driving growth, people who are already using your product are not the ones you have to worry about.

The resurrected and churned numbers for pretty much every product I’ve ever seen dominate the new user account once you reach a sensible point of growth a few years in. And all those users who are churning and resurrecting, had low friend counts, and didn’t find their friends so weren’t connected to the great stuff that was going on on Facebook. So the number one thing we needed to focus on, was getting them to those 10 friends, or whatever number of friends they needed.

Summary

What is that 1 metric, where if everyone in your company is thinking about it and driving their product towards that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up, you know in the long-run your company will be successful.

A lot of things end up being correlated. Pick the one that fits with you and know that you’re going to stick with for a long time. Just have a North Star, and know the magic moment that you know when a user experiences that, they will deliver on that metric for you on the North Star, and then think about the marginal user, don’t think about yourself. Those are, I think, the most important points when operating for growth.

Tactics

Internationalization

• Facebook started out as college-only, so every college that it was launched in was knocking down a barrier.
• When Facebook expanded beyond colleges to high schools, but that was a company-shaking moment where people questioned whether or not Facebook would survive.
• Then after, expanding from high schools to everyone, it was a shocking moment; that’s what spurred the growth up to 50 million, and then we hit a brick wall. Everyone had tapped out between 50 and 100 million users, and we were worried that it wasn’t possible. That was the point at which the growth team got set up. The 2 things we did, 1. We focused on that 10 friends in 14 days 2. Getting users to the magic moment.
• Even though we were late in internationalization we took the time to build it in a scalable way; we moved slow to move fast. What we did was draw all the strings on the site in FBT, which is our translation extraction script and then, we created the community translation platform. We got French translated in 12 hours. We managed to get, to this day, 104 languages translated by Facebook for Facebook, 70 of those are translated by the community. We took the time to build something, that would enable us to scale.

Virality

Books: "Viral Loop" & "Ogilvy on Advertising"

Fundamental

1. Payload: how many people can you hit with any given viral blast
2. Conversion rate
3. Frequency

Hotmail is the canonical example of brilliant viral marketing. Back when Hotmail launched, there were a bunch of mail companies that had been funded and were throwing huge amounts of money at traditional advertising. Back in that time, people couldn’t get free email clients; they had to be tied to their ISP. Hotmail and a couple other companies launched, and their clients were available wherever you went. You could log-in via library internet or school internet, and be able to get access to that. It was a really big value proposition for anyone who wanted to access it. Most of the companies went out there and did big TV campaigns, billboard campaigns, or newspaper campaigns; however, the Hotmail team didn’t have much funding as they did, so they had to scramble around to figure out how to do it. What they did was add that little link at the bottom of every email that said, ‘Sent from Hotmail. Get your free email here.’ Hotmail ended up being extremely viral because it had high frequency and high conversion rates:

• Payload was low: you email one person at a time, you’re not necessarily going to have a big payload.
• Frequency is high: you’re emailing the same people over and over, which means you’re going to hit those people once, twice, three times a day and really bring up the impressions
• Conversion rate was also really high: people didn’t like being tied to their ISP email.

Paypal is interesting because there are two sides to it, the buyer and the seller side. The other thing that is interesting is that its mechanism for viral growth is eBay. So you can use a lot of things for virality that may not look necessarily obviously viral. They were able to go viral because their conversion rate was high on the buyer and the seller side, not because their payload and frequency was high:

• Payload was low
• Frequency was low
• Conversation rate is super high: you send money to seller, and give free money to buyer for signing up

Facebook was purely viral via word of mouth. The interesting thing about Paypal and Hotmail, is to use them, the first person has to send an email to a person who wasn’t on the service. With Facebook, there is no native way to contact people who aren’t on the service. Everyone thinks that Facebook is a viral marketing success, but that’s actually not how it grew. It was word of mouth virality because it was an awesome product you wanted to tell your friends about.

Frequency and conversation rate are related. The more times you hit someone with the same Facebook ad, the less they’ll click. That’s why we have to, like creative exhaustion, rotate creatives on Facebook. Same with banner ads and news feed stories. The same is true with these emails. So if you send the same email to people over and over again with an invite, you will get a lower conversion rate. ‘The more you hit someone with the same message, the less they convert’ is fundamental across every online marketing channel.

The K Factor

So with virality, you get someone to contact import. Then the question is, how many of those people do you get to send imports? Then, to how many people? Then, how many click? How many sign up? And then how many of those import. So essentially you want people to sign up to your site to import their contacts. You want to then get them to send an invite to all of those contacts - ideally all of those contacts, not just some of them. Then you want a percentage of those to click and sign up. If you multiply all the percentages/numbers in every point in between the steps, this is essentially how you get to the point of ‘What is the K factor?’ For example:

• people get an invite per person who imports: 100
• 10% click: 10
• 50% sign up: 5
• only 10 to 20% import: 0.5 - 1
• K factor: 0.5 - 1.0 -> and you’re not going to be viral.

The real important thing is still to think about retention, not so much virality, and only do this after you have a large number of people retained on your product per person who signs up.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

1. Keyword research: Supply (what do people search for that’s related to your site), Demand (how many people search for it), Value (how valuable is it for you)
2. Links: the single most important thing is to get valuable links from high authority websites for you to rank in Google. Then you need to distribute that love inside your site by internally linking effectively
3. XML Sitemaps

ESPN: Email, SMS, Push Notification

Email is dead for people under 25 in my opinion. Young people don’t use email. They use WhatsApp, SMS, SnapChat, Facebook; they don’t use email. If you’re targeting an older audience, email is still pretty successful. Email still works for distribution, but realistically, email is not great for teenagers - even people at universities.

Email, SMS, and Push Notifications all behave the same way. They all have questions of deliverability. If someone gives you a hard bounce, retry once or twice and then stop trying because if you are someone who abuses people’s inboxes, the email companies spam folder you, and it’s very hard to get out. If you get caught in a spam house link, or anything like that, it’s very hard to get out. It’s really important with email that you are a high class citizen, and that you do good work with email because you want to have deliverability for the long run.

You actually spam your power users and give them notifications they don’t care about, making it really hard for them to opt out. Well, they start blocking you, and you can never push them once they’ve opted out of your Push Notifications. And it’s very hard to prompt them to turn them on once they’ve turned them off. Email, SMS, and Push Notifications is, you have to get them delivered. Beyond that, it’s a question of open rate, click rate.

The most effective email you can do is notifications. So what are you sending? What should you be notifying people of? This is a great place where we’re in the wrong mindset. As a Facebook user, I don’t want Facebook to email me about every ‘like’ I receive, because I receive a lot of them since I have a lot of Facebook friends. But as a new Facebook user, that first ‘like’ you receive is a magic moment

1. what notifications should we be sending
2. how can you create great triggered marketing campaigns
3. make sure you have deliverability

Lecture 7 - How to Build Products Users Love (Kevin Hale)

Growth is the interaction between two concepts or variables: conversion rate and churn. The gap between those two things pretty much indicates how fast you're going to grow.

The best way to get to $1 billion is to focus on the values that help you get that first dollar to acquire that first user. If you get that right, everything else will take care of itself.

The average successful company has raised $25.3 million, and sold for $196.8 million, for investor profits of 676%. (TechCrunch 2012)

"What's interesting about startups in terms of us wanting to create things that people love, is that love and unconditional feelings, are difficult things for us to do in real life. In startups, we have to do it at scale." So we decided to start off by asking, “How do relationships work in the real world and how can we apply them to the way we run our business and build our product that way?” 2 metaphors:

1. acquiring new users: as if we are trying to date them
2. existing users: as if they are a successful marriage.

First Impressions

First impressions are important for the start of any relationship because it's the one we tell over and over again, right? There’s something special about how we regard that origin story.

So something about first-time interactions means that the threshold was so much lower in terms of pass fail. So in software and for most products in Internet software that we use, first impressions are pretty obvious and there are things you see a lot of companies pay attention to in terms of what they send their marketing people to work on. All of those are opportunities to seduce

• the first email you ever get
• what happens when you got your first login
• the links, the advertisements, the very first time you interacted with customer support.
• homepage, landing pages, plans, pricing, login, signup
• first email, account creation, starting interface, first support ticket

"is this a quality item?"

• taken for granted for quality "atarimae hinshitsu" (e.g. a brush will paint)
• enchanting/aesthetic quality "miryokuteki hunshisu" (e.g. a brush will paint in a way that is pleasing to the viewer)

examples

Long Term Relationship

Everyone fights:

• money: cost/billing
• kids: users' clients
• sex: performance
• time: roadmap
• others: others

As we were building up the company, we realized that there's a big problem with how everyone starts up their company or builds up their engineering teams. There's a broken feedback loop there. People are divorced from the consequences of their actions. This is a result from the natural evolution of how most companies get founded, especially by technical cofounders.

• Before launch, it is a time of bliss, Nirvana, and opportunity. Nothing that you do is wrong. By your hand, which you feel is like God, every line you write and every code you write feels perfect; it's genius to you.
• The thing that happens is after launch, reality sets in, and all these other tasks come in to play; things that we have to deal with. Now what technical cofounders want to do is get back to that initial state, so what we often see is the company starts siloing off these other things that makes a startup company real, and have other people do them. In our minds these other tasks are inferior, and we have other people in the company do them.

Support Driven Development (SDD): It's a way of creating high-quality software, but it's super simple: creators = supporters. All you have to do is make everyone do customer support. What you end up having is you fix the feedback. The people who built the software are the ones supporting it, and you get all these nice benefits as a result.

Developers & Designers Give the Best Support

The reason that we often break up with one another is due to four major causes.

• criticism: "you never think about us"
• contempt: somebody is purposely trying to insult another person
• defensiveness
• stonewalling: shutting down. The act of not even getting back to the users is probably some of the biggest causes of churn in the early stages of startups

Developers & Designers Create Better Software

There's a direct correlation to how much time we spend directly exposed to users and how good our designs get

• direct exposure: interact in somewhat real time
• minimum every 6 weeks
• for at least 2 hours

2 ways to fix knowledge gap:

• get user to increase their knowledge
• get user to decrease the amount of knowledge that's needed to use the application

Often times as engineers or people who build and work on these products we think let's add new features. New features only means let's increase the knowledge gap. Possible solution is to help the customers to help themselves

• FAQ
• tooltips
• help link that leads to specific page
• redesign documentation over and over again, A/B test it constantly

There's almost no difference in growth, however the latter is actually much easier and cheaper to do:

• +1% conversion
• -1% churn

"I care about you"

In products and companies is by doing things like creating a blog or making a newsletter. The thing is we look at these rates and basically it was such a small percentage of our active users, most of them had no idea about the awesome things that we were doing for them

• blog, newsletter
• user feature request board
• handwritten thank you cards with some stickers
• "since you've been gone" feature: what changes since the last login. "Dude I love that 'Since you've been gone' thing. Even though I pay the same amount every single month, you guys are doing something for me almost every week. It's totally awesome; it makes me feel like I'm getting maximum value."

Market Dominance

1. Best Price: focus on logistics
2. Best Product: focus on R&D
3. Best Overall Solution: be customer intimate

"Best Overall Solution" is the only one that everyone can do at any stage of their company. It requires almost no money to get started with it. It usually just requires a little bit of humility and some manners. And as a result, you can achieve the success of any other people in of your market.

Q: So what do you do when you have a product with many different types of users? How do you build one product that all these users love? A: When you want to shoot for something witty, you have to get functionality right. So like the Japanese quality. If you don't have atarimae, don't try to do anything witty, because it'll backfire. So hands down our number one focus is to make everything as easy to use as possible; everything else was just polish.

Lecture 8 - How to Get Started, Doing Things that Don't Scale, Press

Just launched because at the beginning it's all about testing the idea, trying to get this thing off the ground, and figuring out if this was something people even wanted. And it's okay to hack things together at the beginning.

It also allows you to become an expert in your business, like driving helped us understand how the whole delivery process worked. We used that as an opportunity to talk to our customers, talk to restaurants. We would manually email every single new customer at the end of every night asking how their first delivery went, and how they heard about us. We would personalize all these emails

At the beginning it's all about getting the thing off the ground, and trying to find product-market fit.

1. Test your hypothesis
2. Launch fast
3. Do things that don't scale

Finding Your First Users

There's no silver bullet for user acquisition.

You've got no idea what the pain points of customers really are. You've never sold that before. You don't have any success stories to point to, or testimonials. Those first users are always going to be the hardest.

And so it's your responsibility as a founder to do whatever it takes to bring in your first users.

Don't focus on ROI, focus on growth. Those first two users are going to take a lot of handholding, a lot of personal love, and that's okay - that's essential for building a company

Don't giving your product for free. In general, cutting costs or giving the product away is an unsustainable strategy. You need to make sure that users value your product. And you know, people treat products that are free in a much different way than a paid product.

Turning Those Users Into Champion

A champion is a user who talks about and advocates for your product. Every company with a great growth strategy has users who are champions. The easiest way to turn a user into a champion is to the delight them with an experience they are going to remember, so something that's unusual or out of the ordinary – an exceptional experience.

Just talk to those users, spend a large chunk of your time talking to users. You should do it constantly, every single day, and as long as possible. In the early days, the product and the feature set you launch with is almost certainly not going to be the feature set that you scale with. So the quicker you talk to users and learn what they actually need, the faster you can get to that point.

• Run customer service yourself: there's going to be an instinct to quickly pass off, and that's because it's painful.
• Proactively reach out to current and churn customers: when a user actually leaves your service, you want to reach out and find out why, both because that personal outreach can make the difference between leaving and staying; sometimes people just need to know that you care and it's going to get better. And even if you can't bring them back, there's a chance that you can learn from the mistakes you made that caused them leave, and fix it so you don't churn users out in the future in the same way.
• Social media and communities: You need to know how people are talking about your brand. You need to try to make sure that when somebody does have a bad experience, and they're talking about it, that you make it right.

Problems are inevitable: You're not going to have the perfect product; things are going to break; things are going to go wrong. That's not important. What's important is to always make it right, to always go the extra mile and make that customer happy. One detractor who's had a terrible experience in your platform is enough to reverse the progress of 10 champions. That's all it takes, is one to say, "No you shouldn't use those guys for X reasons," to ruin a ton of momentum.

Finding Your Product Market Fit

And as engineers your instinct is building a platform that's beautiful, clean-code, and that scales. You don't want to write a duct tape code that's going to pile on technical debt. But you need to optimize for speed over scalability and clean code

A great rule of thumb is to only worry about the next order of magnitude, so when you have your tenth user, you shouldn't be wondering how you are going to serve one million users. You should be worried about how you're going to get to 100. When you're at 100, you should think about 1,000

Necessity is the mother of invention: you'll find a way to make it work, you will survive. Those bumps are just speed-bumps, and speed is so so important early.

Do things that don't scale as long as you possibly can. There's not some magical moment; it's not Series A, or it's not when you hit a certain revenue milestone that you stop doing things that don't scale. This is one of your biggest advantages as a company, and the moment you give it up, you're giving your competitors that are smaller and can still do these things, that advantage over you.

Press

Press should have targeted audience and goals, e.g. investors, customers, industry.

What is a story? e.g. product launches, fundraising, milestones/metrics, business overviews, stunts, hiring announcements, contributed articles.

Think about your story objectively, you don't have to be original, just original enough.

Mechanics of a story:

1. think of a story
2. get introduced
3. set a date (4-7 days in advance)
4. reach out
5. pitch
6. followup
7. launch your news

Getting press is work, make sure it's worth it, getting press doesn't mean you are successful, press is not a scalable user acquisition strategy.

If you decide press is worth it, keep contacts fresh, regular heartbeat of news, golden rule "pay it forward": you should help your fellow entrepreneurs get coverage because they'll help you get coverage.

Lecture 9 - How to Raise Money (Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad)

How to decide to invest?

So what makes us invest in a company is based on a whole bunch of characteristics. To invest in 700 companies that means we have physically talked to thousands of entrepreneurs and there is a whole bunch of things that just go through my head when I meet an entrepreneur.

Literally while you are talking to me in the first minute I am saying “Is this person a leader?” “Is this person rightful, focused, and obsessed by the product?” I am hoping—because usually the first question I ask is "What inspired you to create this product?"—I’m hoping that it’s based on a personal problem that that founder had and this product is the solution to that personal problem.

Then I am looking for communication skills, because if you are going to be a leader and hire a team, assuming your product is successful, you have to be a really good communicator and you have to be a born leader. Now some of that you may have to learn those traits of leadership but you better take charge and be able to be a leader.

Extreme outliers

Venture capital business is 100% a game of outliers, it is extreme outliers. So the conventional statistics are in the order of 4000 venture fundable companies a year that want to raise venture capital. About 200 of those will get funded by what is considered a top tier VC. About 15 of those will, someday, get to a 100m dollar in revenue. And those 15, for that year, will generate something on the order of 97% of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year. So venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You are either in one of the 15 or you’re not. Or you are in one of the 200, or you are not. And so the big thing that we're looking for, no matter which sort of particular criteria we talked about, they all have the characteristics that you are looking for the extreme outlier.

Invest in strength versus lack of weakness. And at first that is obvious, but it’s actually fairly subtle. Which is sort of the default way to do venture capital is to check boxes. So really good founder, really good idea, really good products, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. Okay this is reasonable, I’ll put money in it. What you find with those sort of checkbox deals, and they get done all the time, but what you find is that they often don’t have something that really makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.

On the other side of that, the companies that have the really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary lessons of venture capital is, if you don’t invest in the bases with serious flaws, you don't invest in most of the big winners. And we can go through example after example after example of that. But that would have ruled out almost all the big winners over time. So what we aspire to do is to invest in the startups that have a really extreme strength. Along an important dimension, that we would be willing to tolerate certain weaknesses.

What VC looks for in a company

When you first meet an investor, you’ve got to be able to say in one compelling sentence that you should practice like crazy, what your product does so that the investor that you are talking to can immediately picture the product in their own mind.

You have to be decisive, the only way to make progress is to make decisions. Procrastination is the devil in startups. So no matter what you do you got to keep that ship moving. If it's decisions to hire, decisions to fire, you got to make those quickly. All about building a great team. Once you have a great product then it’s all about execution and building a great team.

There might be a path to kind of, there’s enough cash flow it seemed compelling enough that I could do that. It turns out that those are exactly the kinds of businesses that investors love to invest in and it made it incredibly easy. Bootstrap for as long as you can. “Well, when are you going to raise money?” "I might not," and I go, "That is awesome." Never forget the bootstrap.

The key to success is be so good they can't ignore you. You are almost always better off making your business better than you are making your pitch better.

Raising venture capital is the easiest thing a startup founder is ever going to do. As compared to recruiting engineers, recruiting engineer number twenty. It’s far harder than raising venture capital. Selling to large enterprise is harder, getting viral growth going on a consumer business is harder, getting advertising revenue is harder. Almost everything you'll ever do is harder than raising venture capital

It’s often said that raising money is not actually a success, it's not actually a milestone for a company and I think that is true. And I think that is the underlying reason, it puts you in a position to do all the other harder things.

Relationship between risks and cash

Relationship between risk and raising cash, and then the relationship between risk and spending cash.

• founding team risks, are the founders going to be able to work together.
• product risk, can you build the product.
• technical risk, maybe you need a machine learning breakthrough or something. Are you going to have something to make it work, or are you going to be able to do that?
• launch risk, will the launch go well.
• market acceptance risk, you will have revenue risk.
• sales force, is that can you actually sell the product for enough money to actually pay for the cost of sales?
• cost of sales risk.
• viral growth risk.

So a startup at the very beginning is just this long list of risks, right, and the way I always think about running a startup is also how I think about raising money. Which is a process of peeling away layers of risk as you go. So you raise seed money in order to peel away the first 2 or 3 risks, the founding team risk, the product risk, maybe the initial watch risk. You raise the A round to peel away the next level of product risk, maybe you peel away some of the recruiting risk because you get your full engineering team built. Maybe you peel away some of your customer risk because you get your first five customers. So basically the way to think about it is, you are peeling away risk as you go, you are peeling away your risk by achieving milestones. And as you achieve milestones, you are both making progress in your business and you are justifying raising more capital.

Go through this because it is a systematic way to think about how the money gets raised and deployed. As compared so much of what's happening these days which is “Oh my god, let me raise as much money as I can, let me go build the fancy offices, let me go hire as many people as I can.” And just kind of hope for the best.

Don't ask people to sign an NDA. We rarely get asked any more because most founders have figured out that if you ask someone for a NDA at the front end of the relationship you are basically saying, I don't trust you. So the relationship between investors and founders involves lots of trust. The biggest mistake I see by far is not getting things in writing. When somebody makes the commitment to you, you type an email to them that confirms what they just said to you. Because a lot of investors have very short memories and they forget that they were going to finance you, that they were going to finance or they forget what the valuation was, that they were going to find a co-investor. You can get rid of all that controversy just by putting it in writing and when they try and get out of it you just resend the email and say excuse me. And hopefully they have replied to that email anyways so get it in writing. In meetings take notes and follow up on what’s important.

Process

• vote on great short executive summary
• phone call
• meeting
• background checks, back door background checks, get a good feeling about the company & market & commitment to invest

The most important thing at the seed stage is picking the right seed investors because they are going to lay the foundation for future fundraising events. They’re going to make the right introductions, there is an enormous difference in the quality of an introduction. So if you can get a really good introduction from an someone that the venture capitalist really trusts and respects, the likelihood that that is going to go well is so much higher than a lukewarm introduction from someone they don't know as well.

Maximum dilution

It seems like they are particularly rough for a Series A. You are probably going to sell somewhere between 20-30% of the company. Seed stage from what I have heard, it seems 10-15%.

It is important for the founder to say to themselves in the beginning "at what point does my ownership start to demotivate me?" Because if there is a 40% dilution in an Angel round, I have actually said to the founder "do you realize you have already doomed yourself?" You are going to own less than 5% of this company if you are a normal company. And so these guidelines are important. The 10-15% is because if you keep giving away more than that there is not enough left for you and the team. You are the ones doing all the work.

Finding phenomenal co-founders

• Airbnb: all 3 founders are as good as the other founder. That is very rare.
• Google: 2 founders, one of them is a little better than the other..
• Facebook: the anomaly is Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Yes he has an awesome team, but the Mark Zuckerberg phenomenon where is it one person, is the outlier

When you start a company, you have to go find somebody as good or better than you to be the co-founder. If you do that, your chance of success grow astronomically.

Sign you should not work with an investor

If you pick good investors who have good rolodexes and good domain expertise in what your company does, they are going to add a lot more value than the money. Those are the types of investors you should be looking for.

It really, really, really matters who your partner is. It really is like getting married, and it really is worth putting the same amount, maybe not the quite as much time and effort as picking your spouse, but it is worth spending significant time really understanding who you are about to be partnered with. That is way more important than did I get another five million in the valuation order, or another two million dollars in the check.

If we made the right decision, we are going to invest in every company they start. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. We actually do consider it a marriage.

Do you feel like you respect this person and do you feel like you have a lot to learn from this person? I came out with a much clearer picture of what I need to do and where I need to go. And that is such a great microcosm of what the next couple years are going to be like. If you feel like you would really want this person to be really involved in the company, even if they didn't have a checkbook that they brought with them, that is probably a really good sign. And if not, that is probably a really bad sign.

Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)

“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become the habits. Your habits become your values. And your values become your destiny.” If you don't have a good culture in the company you can’t pursue your destiny.

Why it matters? FASTER

• First principles
• Alignment
• Stability
• Trust
• Exclusion
• Retention

Core value worksheet

1. As the leader, what personal values are most important to you?
2. What are the most important values for business success?
3. What values will you look for in employees?
4. What could never be tolerated? (consider the opposite values)
5. Remember to incorporate your mission into your core value

Elements of high performing teams

1. Results
2. Accountability
3. Commitment
4. Conflict
5. Trust

Some best practices for culture

1. Incorporate your mission into your values
2. Performance = think harder, longer about values
3. Interview for culture fit
4. Evaluate performance on culture as well
5. Make it a daily habit

Airbnb

Companies around for a really long time had a clear mission. A clear sense of values, and they had a shared way of doing something that was unique to them and was really special. We started to realize that we needed to have intention, culture needs to be designed.

There will be rituals and behaviors that change, be different. But there have to be some things that never change. Some principles, some ideas that endure, that make you, you.

So when we hire people, the first thing to make sure it is that, if that is your mission, you need to champion your mission. You champion the mission by living the mission. Do you believe in it? Do you have stories about it? Do you use the product? Do you believe in the product?

1. They never tell you anything about culture. No one talks about culture and no one ever tells the need to have strong culture. So there's tons of articles about building a great product, there's tons of articles on growth and adaption, and a few things about culture. It’s a mystical thing that's soft and fuzzy.
2. The second problem is it is hard to measure. Things that are hard to measure often get discounted.
3. The third thing, the biggest problem, it doesn't pay off in the short term. If you wanted to start up a company and sell it in one year, the one thing I would tell you to do is fuck up the culture. Just hire people quickly. Culture makes you hire really slowly, makes you deliberate about your decisions that in the near term can slow progress. Putting an investment into the company short term.

The need to be very clear about what's unique to you that you stand for. Once you do that, you need to hire people that believe in that. You need to make sure you hire and fire based on these values. One thing we do is constantly repeat over and over again when we interview, we want to make sure they are world class and fit the culture. The first thing I used to ask people at the end of the interview, I would say if you can hire, this is a functional question, if you could hire anybody in the world, would you hire the person sitting across from you? If our vision is the best in the world, why aren’t we hiring the best in the world? Every single person is meant to hire a person better than the previous people. You are constantly raising the bar. we said no to a lot of really great people because we just didn't feel right about them being with us long term.

There's no such thing as a good or bad culture, it’s either a strong or weak culture. And a good culture for someone else may not be a good culture for you. Brand is really the connection of you with your customers and so if you have an incredibly strong culture, the brand will come through. Apple, before they had this huge renaissance, became the most valuable company in the world. They did the Think Different campaign, which is basically saying this is what we believe in. That if you buy an Apple computer, you're also saying I believe in this too. And there has to be a deeper core belief, and if that doesn’t happen, you’re a utility. And utilities get sold at commodity prices.

How do we make sure the hosts are reinforcing the culture of Airbnb? We realized hosts are like partners and they need to believe in the same culture we do. So now we have this program called the Super Host program where they have to demonstrate values to reach this kind of badge which gets the priority customer support and distribution. We are having this important host convention where we bring all the hosts in and will be talking about reinforcing our values. So the answer is, we were really late, but we now do it by reinforcing it every step of the way.

It's better to have a hundred people that love you than to have a million people that just sort of like you. If all you need do is get a hundred people to love you, is do things that don’t scale. So it's hard if you've got a million people, you can't you meet them all. You can meet a hundred people, you can spend time with them. All we had to do was get in with them and share a passion with our users. You work backwards from a hundred people, even one person.

With Airbnb you can click a button and put in your home and a professional photographer comes to your home and photographs it for free. We have five thousand photographers around the world and we have photographed hundreds of thousands of homes. So it is the probably one of the largest on-demand photography groups around. I believe this started with Joe and I, we were staying with this one host, in New York City and her house is amazing but her photos were terrible. So we asked, why you don’t put up better photos? This is before the life of the great cameras, 2008. She couldn’t figure out how to get photos from her phone onto her computer. She wasn’t a very technically savvy woman. And I just said, we will just take photos for you. Actually, I said, what if you could press a button and somebody would show up at your door to take professional photographs? She said that would be magic.

Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann)

Who we hire, what those people value. what we do every day. Why do we do it?

If you are aligned on a high-level about what the company is doing, if everyone really believes in the mission, that if everyone has really good access to information, and everyone has a good picture of the current state of the company, then that gets you a huge amount on the way there in terms of working productively together. And it forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you grow a startup. So as we have grown, we started off two people, we’re now a hundred seventy people, we’ve put a lot of thought into the tooling that goes around, transparency.

Ideally you should be involved in every single decision, in every single type of moment of the company, everything that happens, but obviously you can't. Or maybe you can if you're 2 people, but you certainly can't if you're 5 or 10. At that time, it comes very quickly, by a 150, it's completely hopeless. And so culture is the invariant that you want to maintain, as you get specifically involved in fewer and fewer decisions over time.

Building out the early team

The reason the first 10 people you hire, the decisions are so important that aren't just hiring those first 10 people, you are actually hiring a hundred people because you think each one of those people are going to bring along another 10 people with them. And thinking exactly what 90 people that you would like those first 10 people to bring on. It's going to be quite consequential for your company but really briefly I think it's about abstraction.

When we first hired people, we hired people that were more like ourselves. I often looked for 3 to 4 things that I really valued in people. I looked for people who worked hard, had high integrity, low ego. I looked for people who were creative, super curious, which meant they had all these interests. And I think that quirkiness is a calling card that we find, the people that are excited about many disciplines and extraordinary at once, tend to build really great products and are really great at collaborating.

We really want someone who wants to build something great. And they aren't arrogant about it, they want to take a risk and build something bigger than themselves. And that, in the beginning, is very easy to select for. If you were in our position, we were in this horrible office, nobody got paid. There was no external reason to stay except wanting to build something to join. In fact there was every reason not to. And that's something, looking back, that I really value. Because you always knew people were joining for the purest of reasons and in fact forgoing other job opportunities, market salary, a clean office, good equipment just for the chance to work here. To this day, I think a lot of those traits are seeded and embedded in the folks that we look at now.

No batch of 10 people will have as big of an influence on the company as those first 10 people. The other interesting thing they had in common, they were all really early in their career or undervalued in some way. Think about it, if someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they are probably working in a job and very happy about it. So we had to try to find people who were, in the case of our designer that we hired, he was eighteen and in high school and in Sweden at the time. As the case with our CTO, he was in college at the time. A lot of these people, they were early on in their careers, and the only way we could, you can relax one constraint, you can relax the fact that they are talented, or relax the fact that it's apparent that they are talented. And we, not consciously, we relaxed the latter.

Finding the right people, you have to think like a value investor right, you're looking for the human capital that's significantly valued by the market. You probably shouldn't look to hire your friends from Facebook, and Google, or whatever, they are already discovered, and if they want to join you, that's great. They are probably harder to convince.

• very genuine and straight: there are people that others want to work with. That there are others that people trust, that they are intellectually honest on how they approach problems.
• completing things: they are generally people who like to get things finished. There are a lot of people who are really excited about tons of things. Only some of those are excited about completing things.
• cared a great deal: it's offensive to them when something is just a little off. Everyone was always like, it was borderline insane how much they cared about tiny details like we used to. Every single API request that ever generated an error went to all of our inboxes and phoned all of us. Because it seemed terrible to get an error that didn't get a resolution from the users standpoint. Or we used to copy everyone else on outgoing email and point out slight grammar or spelling mistakes to each other. Because it would be horrible to ever send an email with a spelling mistake.

Identifying great fits

You have some sense of what makes them good at their job. And there are some areas where you can test that area. And there are some that you don't. And the ones where you don't are much more difficult. Before we talk to anyone, we try to figure out what exactly is world class in that discipline need.

Once you have someone in an interview process, you will build the process over time to screen quality. Be very very transparent on why you think it's a great idea, but you lay out in gory detail why it's going to be hard. And then the right people select in or they select out of that opportunity.

In the case of Stripe, we flew a guy out and we spent a weekend coding with him and looking over his shoulder. It was the only way we could tell and get ourselves confident if that guy was any good. And I think you can extend that to any roles you are not an expert in. In that I am no business development guru but when we hire for business development roles, we have a project that we have them talk about, how they would improve an existing project that Stripe has or which new projects they would go out and do.

For the first 10 people is to work with them as much as you can before committing to hire them. Once you hit a certain scale it's kind of impractical to put them on that side and be unskilled. Expensive from your side. But it's really worth it to the first 10 people.

Referencing, obviously, isn't easy to begin with. But it does provide really useful over time. And I think for name references people do want to be nice so you have to create an artificial scarcity by saying, where would you rank this person with people you worked with. You should aim to spend fifteen minutes on the phone with that person instead of letting them say, yeah this person is awesome.

Making early hires happy and effective

The one thing I would like to add to that is we always reminded people where we want to go with that someday. Because it's really easy to drop someone into a problem and they would think the whole world was this little problem in front of them.

As the company grows, I think that problem has to get a little more formalized. So we spend a lot of time thinking and constantly trying to refine what that person looked like from the day they came in, to their first interview, through 30 days after they joined. Do they have someone's name they know? Do they know who their manager is? Have they sat down people on their team? Do they know what the general arch of the company is? And what the top priorities are?

Then we also ask their peers and manager, hey is this person up to speed? Do you feel we did a good job at making them productive? If we haven't then thats a key that a. we should not be hiring any more people because we're not doing a good job bringing in new people and b. we need to retool that. What's their aspirations? What's their working style? How do they like to be recognized? Do they really prefer being in total silence? Are they a morning person or night person? Knowing those things, it just demonstrates that you care about them individually and collectively, what your goals are.

So from everything high level of how you are doing at your job to minor cultural issues, the more feedback you give them, the better they will do. Its unnatural to be telling people if they are doing a good or bad job. You don't do that in your normal life, hopefully you are restrained. But when you have employees that is what you owe them to do well.

Scaling to 100+

Make the teams feel as autonomous and nimble as possible within the constraints of the organization. That means over time we are trying to make it feel like a startup of many startups. Rather than this model setup with form policies cut horizontally through it. It's easier said than done, I don't think we are all the way there but one goal is that each team has control, to hold the resources that they need to get the goal done. They know what the most important thing is and how it's measured.

There is a huge amount of stuff here that is under management growth. Either your company fails really quickly or all of your problems become about management growth. One thing that tends to take people by surprise is how quickly the time horizons change. In your first month, you are largely thinking about things one month ahead. In one year, you are thinking a year ahead. After four years you are thinking four years ahead.

In the early days you have to hire people who are going to be productive. Essentially, you don't have the luxury of hiring people that look to be promising but they are not going to be up to speed for another year or two. They have to be able to work immediately. But after two or three years, then it becomes much more reasonable to make those investments.

Grow people up to leadership

In Stripe's case yes. A lot of the first ten people are in leadership roles now. I think that's one thing that corporations, it's an unnatural skill that they need to get good at. People don't exactly come out of the womb being good at management or at leadership. And being able to develop that in people and helping people progress as they spend a number of years at the company.

Convincing people to join a startup

There is the prospect of affecting this outcome, but nothing more than that potential.

No smart person you are hiring thinks you have a crystal ball into the future that only you have and that joining is a guaranteed thing.

Whereas if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make, the startup is a much better place to test that.

Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise (Aaron Levie)

What we ran into was a common problem that, really, any startup runs into. Really pronounced by our business model which was, for consumers we built a very robust, very reliable enterprise. We really brought a really insignificant product. So for consumers, what we were running into was we had all these features you could pay for but a lot of consumers didn't need all those features. And for enterprises, we really didn't have enough securities and we didn't have enough capabilities around how enterprises want to use their data. So we had more than what a consumer needed and not enough that an enterprise needed. So we found ourselves at the juncture. We found ourselves basically in this period where its very difficult to figure out what we wanted to do with the business. So we had to make this choice. We were at this path, where we had to choose which path to go down.

In the consumer space there are really only two business models that you can do. You can either have people pay for your application or you could provide advertising on the application.

The technology itself is complex, I don't know how many people have had to use enterprise software but it's generally really complicated. You try to figure out, why in God’s creation did a designer try to put forty-seven buttons on one page. You just can't even understand it and the reason is something we will get into in a second. But basically there is just no love or care for the design or user service. The software is just complex. And finally, if that wasn't bad enough, you have to figure out how you are going to sell this software.

The first is that most application companies are moving to the cloud. And the biggest thing is, if you are going to start a business management company, or a business intelligence company, even a contact management company years ago you had to have you idea implemented in every single customer location. No matter how many customers you sold to, no matter what region you were in, every customer had to put that in their datacenter. That was the flaw with on premise computing. You were doing all this work, you were creating so much redundancy, it was the slowing down the whole process of delivering and building software for the enterprise.

We could just put together tens of thousands of servers, put them on demand, and you can use whatever you want, when you want and we can do that. That obviously is the definition of Cloud Computing.

We are moving to a world of cheaper, on demand computing from a world of expensive computing. The benefit of starting a startup is the customers don't have the same friction,, they are going to go and adopt new technology. As soon as the computing becomes cheaper, its easier to adopt new solutions. Which means, their barrier for showing you in--the barrier is a lot lower which is great for startups.

And finally, the most profound shift of all, mobile devices. iPhones, iPads, Androids, Tablets, IT of these models have become a lot more user led. It's fundamentally important. In an IT world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization, with the CIO, with the spending power of that company. In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology. They’re bring it in in the sales team, they are bringing it in in the marketing team, they are brining it in in finance and you can build software around that user. Which means they can bring the enterprise in and you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security, better scalability.

There are nearly 3 billion people online. That means that every single enterprise is changing how they are going to give their own products to their customers. Which means that every industry changes. There are only two times, two moments of opportunity where a technology revolution will happen in an enterprise. The first is where raw materials change. So cost of computing goes down and they centralize and let people use it on demand. The second thing that can change, is the very people that these enterprises have to go after need new experiences at that enterprises product.

Advice

So the first one is spot technology disruptions. This is going to be true whether you are building consumer or enterprise. The rest are more enterprise, but this is just fundamental if you are going to build a tech company. You have to look for new enabling technologies, or major trends, like fundamental trends, that create a wide gap between how things are done and how they can be done.

Then next you really want to find asymmetries. You want to do things that incumbents can't or won't do because either the economics don't make sense for them, the economics are so unusual, or because technically they can't. I will give you two examples. So, if you are going to build software today for the enterprise that goes after an incumbent category, that has more of a suite? oriented approach. Then what you are going to want to do is build technology that is platform agnostic. What suite players will do is want everything to be integrated with itself, and theres more value with the vertical integration. But you want to go after a different access. Which you want your technology to work across all the platforms. That way you can work with so many different kinds of customers. You can be an ally to so many kinds of platforms, which a traditional incumbent is not able to do. That is technically infeasible because its architecture or its a fundamental component business model to not do that.

The next is you want to find the mostly crazy, but still reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem. So you need to find the customers that are at the edge of the business, their business model, their industry and find the unique characteristics of those customers. Leverage them as your early adopters.

Listen to your customers but don't always build exactly what they are telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software. Your customers are going to have a large number of requests. Your job is to instill those lists down into the ultimate product. This does not mean that you are not going to build exactly what they tell you to build. It is your job to listen to their problems, and translate those into what is going to build the best and simplest solution for them.

Lecture 13 - How to be a Great Founder (Reid Hoffman)

If you have two or three founders, you have different skills you can compensate. Because, by the way, everyone has weaknesses. You can compensate for each others weaknesses.

In order to be successful, I have to go to where the strongest networks are for the particular kind of thing that I am doing. And Silicon Valley, by the way, is super good at some kind of tasks, some places that you essentially try to solve certain types of problems.

How does a smart person actually disagree with me? Because if you can't think of a smart person who isn't just ignorant or just crazy or anything else, but is a smart person that is somewhat of an expert may think that your idea has some serious challenges than it actually isn't contrarian. In general, as a founder it's good to be contrarian in the real sense.

Well should I be doing the work? Or should I be recruiting people and delegating the work? And classically the answer to this is, actually in fact you need to do both. In fact, not only do you need to do both, you need to sometimes do one at 100% and sometimes the other at 100% and even though this is not so good at math, both at 100%.

Another one I frequently talk about is, you've got to be both flexible and persistent. And the reason for this is entrepreneurs are frequently given the advice to have a vision, stay firm against your adversity. Realize that you have this vision that is contrarian to what people think and just stay on track. Get through the difficult times and get there. The other piece of advice given with each equal vigor is listen to data, listen to customers. Pivot, be flexible. Part of the thing this comes out to be in terms of being a great founder is to say well, when should I be persistent and when should I be flexible.

Another one is, should I have belief or should I have fear? Should you essentially go, well I have this vision of the way the world should be and I should ignore everything else and I should just go with that. Well again, part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about where it is you want to be doing and want to be going, but also be smart enough that you are essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.

Normally entrepreneur founders are thought about as being the risk takers. Where everyone else cowers in fear at this notion of risk, they boldly go out. Now that's true, you have to be a risk taker, you have to be thinking about how do I make a really coherent risk because in fact the only really big opportunities, the only contrarian opportunities smart people disagree with you on happen to be ones that have more risks associated with them. On the other hand, part of the skill set, that when you are beginning to apply how you think about risks as an entrepreneur is how do I take intelligent risks? How do I take a focused risk, but if I'm right about that one thing then a bunch of other things break my way. And once I start doing that I try to figure out how to make my own shot possibility as high as possible? How do I minimize other risks?

Should I have this long term vision or should I be solving a local near term problem? Again the answer is both these paradoxes. And the question is, you should jump between them. You should always have a long term vision in mind because if you actually completely lose your directions eventually you will find yourself somewhere in field thats not a good path out of. But if you are not focused on solving the problem thats immediately in front of you you're hosed. So part of the question about how to put these things together is you say, okay short term- what's the thing I need to be doing today? Have I made progress today? have I made progress this week? But is it largely on path?

So how do you know you might be a great founder? Well you should have some super powers. It's generally speaking useful to be a good product person. It's useful to have good skills about leadership, bringing networks in, persuading people, and it's useful to be able to- and this is kind of fundamental, is recognized whether you are on track or not. To have that kind of belief but also paranoid about am I tracking against my investment thesis? And when you do that the right way and you are learning and you are assembling people and you are assembling that around you. That's generally speaking how you end up being a great founder.

There is not one skill set, there is an ability to learn and adapt. And an ability to constantly have a vision that's driving you but to be taking input from all sources and then to be creating networks all around you. And that's essentially what makes a great founder. So your ability to do that while crossing uneven ground in the fog, which is kind of the way entrepreneurs, did you always know this was going to work? No, unless you are crazy.

Lecture 14 - How to Operate (Keith Rabois)

You have been forging a product and now you are forging a company. And I would actually argue, forging a company is a lot harder than forging a product. Basic reason is people are irrational. We all know this. Either your parents, your significant other, your brother or sister, your teacher, somebody in your life is irrational. Building a company is basically like taking all the irrational people you know putting them in one building, and then living with them twelve hours a day at least. It's very challenging. Now there are some techniques for coping with that some people get good at it, some people don't. But that's really what operating is all about.

So basically what you are doing when building a company is building an engine. At first you have a drawing on a white board and you are architecting it, and it looks especially clean, beautiful, and pretty. But when you actually start translating it to practice it actually starts looking more like this and you're holding it together with duct tape. It takes a lot of effort from people to hold it together, that's why people work 80-100 hours a week. It's that heroic effort to keep this thing together because you don't actually, yet, have polished metal in place. Eventually you want to construct a very high performance machine. A machine that almost nobody really has to worry about every hour, every minute.

And his definition of what your job is, is to maximize the output of the organization. Your organization that you are responsible for, so the CEO’s (responsible for) everything and VP would be a part of the organization, and the organizations around you. So if you are a VPE, you are actually responsible for the performance of the product team and the marketing team because you have influence there. So this is how you measure people, and you want to focus on the output and not the input. The old adage about measuring motion and confusing progress. You are measuring only progress.

1. Triaging

So at first, when you start a company everything is going to feel like a mess. And it really should. If you have too much process, too much predictability, you are probably not innovating fast enough and creatively enough. So it should feel like everyday there is a new problem and what you are doing is fundamentally triaging. The more you simplify, the better people will perform. People can not understand and keep track of a long complicated set of initiatives. So you have to distill it down to one, two, or three things and use a framework they can repeat, they can repeat without thinking about, they can repeat to their friends, they can repeat at night. Don't accept the excuse of complexity.

2. Clarifying questions

Second thing editors do, is they ask you clarifying questions. When you present a paper to someone, what do they usually do? They find some ambiguity somewhere and ask, do you really mean this? Did you really mean that? Give me an example of this? That's what your job is. So you are in a meeting, people are going to look to you. And the real thing you do, is you ask a lot of questions. We try to narrow down to, what are the one two three four things that matter most to this company? And only focus on those things. So it allows us to be more decisive and we can make decisions rapidly. It allows us not to distract you from your day job which is actually building a company.

3. Allocate resources

Now the next thing you do is you allocate resources. The people who work with you, generally, should be coming up with their own initiatives. Your goal over time is to use less red ink every day.

4. Ensure consistent voice

The other thing that is very important that actually isn't as intuitive to a lot of people, is the job of an editor is to ensure consistent voice. Ideally, your company should feel, on your website, on PR releases, on your packaging if it's a physical product, anywhere on your recruiting pages it should feel like it was written by one person. That's extremely difficult to do. And at first you are going to be tempted to do that yourself, which is okay for a founder to do that him or herself initially. Over time you do not want to be doing all of the consistent voice editing by yourself. You want to train people so they can recognize differences in voice.

So I would look at every piece of copy in every department. Another part that is hardly ever, look at your recruiting website. It almost never has the same quality as your conversion funnel. I would look at customer support. Another classic area that is never up to the same quality. Treat customer support as a product so you actually have an engineering team and a design team that over time focuses on making that world class. Usually we have other executives at a scaled company. Most executives were trained differently at other companies and bring that with them. You have to crosstrain that. So if you hired a VP of engineering of Google its very different than a Design Leader from Apple. They don't actually learn anything the same way. So you are going to have to stitch that together some how. Either one or the other is going to have to learn the other style. Or you are going to have to create your own style and really teach that to your executives. So it shows up all the time. All you have to do is pick up the company's products and look for things that have a different voice and you can see it, visual voice, word choice, all over the map.

5. Delegating

Next complicated topic is delegating. So just like the other metaphor on editing is writers do most of the work in the world, editors are not writing most of the content in any publication. So that is true of your company, you shouldn't be doing most of the work. And the way you get out of most of the work, is you delegate. Now the problem with delegating is that you are actually responsible for everything. The CEO, founder, there is no excuse. There is no, there is that department over there, this person over there screwed up. You are always responsible for every single thing, especially when things go wrong. So how do you both delegate but not abdicate? It's a pretty tricky challenge, both are sins. You over delegate and you abdicate, or you micromanage, those are both sins.

The interesting implication, and this is pretty radical, is that any executive, any CEO, should not have one management style. Your management style should be dictated by your employee. So with one particular person, you may be very much a micromanager because they are quite low on this scale. And with another person,, you may be delegating a lot because they are quite mature on this scale. So it's actually a good thing if you do reference checks on somebody and half the people you call say they are a micromanager and the other half say they actually give me a lot of responsibility. That's a feature not a bug.

A more nuanced answer that I came up with, is how to make decisions. Delegating vs doing it yourself. You don't want to do it yourself too often. You basically sort your own level of conviction about a decision on a grate, extremely high or extremely low. There's times when you know something is a mistake and there's times when you wouldn't really do it that way but you have no idea whether it's the right or wrong answer. And then there is a consequence dimension. There are things that if you make the wrong decision are very catastrophic to your company and you will fail. There are things that are pretty low impact. At the end of the day they aren't really going to make a big difference, at least initially.

So what I basically believe is where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. And delegate completely, let people make mistakes and learn. On the other side, obviously where the consequences are dramatic and you have extremely high conviction that you are right, you actually can't let your junior colleague make a mistake. You're ultimately responsible for that mistake and it's really important. You just can't allow that to happen. Now the best way to do that is to actually explain your thinking why.

The next and most important thing you do is edit the team. So these are the people you work with. Nobody is going to have a perfect team and you certainly aren't going to start that way. So what I am going to try to do is maximize the probability of success in editing the team. The reason why is because most great people actually are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels. And you can only shoot through the unique barrels that you have. That's how the velocity of your company improves is having barrels. Then you stock them with ammunition, then you can do a lot. You go from one barrel company, which is mostly how you start, to a two barrel company and you get twice as many things done in a day, per week, per quarter. If you go to three barrels, great. If you go to four barrels, awesome. Barrels are very difficult to find. But when you have them, give them lots of equity. Promote them, take them to dinner every week, because they are virtually irreplaceable because they are also very culturally specific. So a barrel at one company may not be a barrel at another company.

Finding barrels

And that's actually what you want to do with every since employee, every single day, is expand the scope of responsibilities until it breaks. And it will break, everybody, I couldn't run the world, everybody has some level of complexity that they can handle. And what you want to do is keep expanding it until you see where it breaks and that's the role they should stay in. That level of sophistication. But some people will surprise you. There will be some people that you do not expect. With different backgrounds, without a lot of experience that can just handle enormously complicated tasks. So keep testing that and pushing the envelope.

The other signal to look for is once you've hired someone, with an open office, just watch who goes up to other people's desks. Particularly people they don't report to. If someone keeps going to some individual employees desk and they don't report them, it's a sign that they believe that person can help them. So if you see that consistently, those are your barrels. Just promote them, give them as much opportunity as you can.

Hiring

The other question everybody asks about people is when do you hire somebody above somebody. And when do you mentor somebody, and when do you replace somebody? And the way to think about this is that every company has their own growth rate, and every individual has their own growth rate. So always track the individual slope of employee and the company growth rate.

Insist on focus

So I am going to argue that you need to spend a lot of time focusing on people. Because it's so unnatural, it's so different than other companies where people wanted to do multiple things, especially as you get more senior, you definitely want to do more things and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing.

Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He would say, I will not talk to you about anything else besides than this one thing I assigned you. I don't want to hear about how great you are doing over here, just shut up, and Peter would run away. And then focus until you conquer this one problem. And the insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact problems for your company but they are difficult. You don't wake up in the morning with a solution, so you tend to procrastinate them. No one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it.

Metrics & transparency

You don't want to be making all these decisions yourself. You have to create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level you would make them yourself. So how do you create scale and leverage? The first thing I would recommend is to build a dashboard. You need to simplify the value proposition in the company's metrics for success on a whiteboard.

Transparency people talk a lot about, it's a goal everybody ascribes to but when push comes to shove, very few people actually adhere to it. So let me walk through a little bit of transparency and different stages of transparency. Metrics are the first step. So everyone in your company should have access to what's going on. Other things I like to do, is to take your board decks. As you get more formal, the board decks will get more complicated. And actually review every single slide with every single employee after the board meeting. You can strip out the compensation information if you really want to. But every other slide you should go through with every single employee and explain it. If you can remember some of the feedback you got from your board that is really cool to pass on.

So you want to measure things. You want to measure outputs, not inputs. And again, you should dictate this yourself. You should draft the dashboard yourself to tie this all together. One important concept is pairing indicators. Which is, if you measure one thing and only one thing, the company tends not to optimize to that. And often at the expense of something that is important. Cost is example of payments and financial services is risk. So you always want to create the opposite and measure both. And the people responsible for that team need to be measured on both.

Details

The final topic I want to talk about is details. And in my assigned reading there is a great book by Bill Walsh, called The Score Takes Care of Itself. And the basic point of the book is that if you get all the details right, you don't worry about how to build a billion dollar business, you don't worry about how to have a billion dollars in revenue, you don't worry about having a billion users.

And if every person on the team executes to the same level of performance, you will have a team that is performing at the highest possible level. And at the highest performance level, the team will play at their best. So how to relate this to a company may include a lot of details that do not matter, not seem that they matter superficially. Most people would agree that details matter when faced with the user. But what the real debate it is on things that don't face the use.

The office environment that people work in everyday dictates the culture that you are going to be in. A quality office that creates a good vibe that allows you to recruit people. Because recruits are very savvy about this. They walk into your office and they can tell a lot about the culture instantly. You can tell how people work together, how hard they are working, how distracted they are.

Ultimately I don't believe you can create a company without a lot of effort and that you need to lead by example.

If you think about all these people who are relentlessly resourceful and equally talented in a mass competitive ecosystem competing for talent, you learn to give people the best possible tools to do the best possible job. So rigorously asking, how do I make people more successful, what things do they not need to be working on, or distracting. And what things can I give them to make them more valuable per day? Then just break that down per day and solve that stuff yourself.

The VP of design is going to be the single best designer. The VP of product, is going to be the single best product person. And they are going to learn to manage later. The advantage of that is you don't demoralize people. Because everyone knows their boss is actually better at their job than they are. And they can learn stuff. And you can learn a little bit of the management techniques later, as opposed to promoting people who are just good people managers that don't have the discipline and skill.

What you actually do when you transition from an individual to a manager. It's hard. One of the first things people don't get right right away is their timing allocation. Actually, what I would recommend is doing what I call a calendar audit. And track what you spend your time on in a month. How much is editing, how much is writing, etc. And optimize it over time. You can get a mentor. Find someone who’s been a manager before that will work with you. Not your boss, because your boss has a set of complicated objectives including how much are we shipping. A mentor can just focus on you and making you more successful.

So the canonical advice sounds obvious but was radical back in 1982 when Andy wrote his book, is to have a one on one roughly every two weeks. Some people say every week, but I wouldn't go longer than two weeks. Every week can be ideal in many companies. The reason why there is another adage, you should only have five to seven direct reports. That actually derives on the concept of having a one on one every week. The director reports is so you can fit enough one on ones in your calendar a week and get other things done. I think one on ones once a week is ideal. I think the agenda should be crafted by the employee that reports the manager, not the manager. The one on one is mostly to benefit the employee. They should walk in with, these are the three things I want to talk about.

Lecture 15 - How to Manage (Ben Horowitz)

Do You Demote Or Fire?

So, first business example, you've got an executive, and do you demote or do you fire him? This comes from an actual conversation, an actual real life situation that I was working on with a CEO. The basic situation was this: he had a great executive he had hired. He was working harder than anybody else in the company and was doing everything he was supposed to. Everybody liked him because he worked so hard and was a generally a smart person, but he was in over his head knowledge-wise. He did not have the knowledge and the skills to do what the company needed him to do or really compete against the competition. So he couldn't actually keep him in the job, but he was a great guy. So the question is, should I fire this person or can I just move him into a lower role and bring in a person above him. That would be cool. Let's look at how you make that decision.

You are, in this case, the CEO. It's really hard if somebody comes to work every day at 6AM, is working until 10PM, and is working harder than anybody in the company. It's really hard to just say, "Well sorry, nice effort but you don't get an A for an effort. You get an F because I fired you."

Nobody wants to have that conversation. A demotion is kind of neat because from a CEO's point of view, he can keep him in the company. He works so hard. He's a great example of somebody who gives great effort. He's got a lot of friends in the company, so from a cultural stand point it's a win/win because he gets to stay. Then I can bring in somebody who can solve my problem but I don't have to create another problem.

If you think about it from the executive's perspective, it's like, "I don't want to be demoted but I really don't want to be fired because if I get fired, that’s a way harder more complicated thing to explain to my next employer that I got demoted. Getting demoted is, well I didn't really get demoted. I got a new job, a smaller title."

“Ok. So you're an engineer in your company. How do you feel about somebody who used to be the head of sales who brought in with 1.5%? What do your engineers get? Do they get 0.1% of the company? 0.2%? What are they getting at this point? How are they going to feel about somebody who is NOT the Head of Sales with one point five percent of the company?" And he was like, " Uh oh." And I was like, “Yeah! Uh oh. Because how fair is that? Are you going to take the equity away? Are you up to do that? Are you up to go back and take back his compensation? How productive do you think he'll be if you take away his compensation?

Secondly, will people give him the same respect now that you've demoted him? Because they knew him as this and now he's that. "I knew you when you were Head of Sales now you're the Regional Manager and you're telling me what the f*** to do? You're telling me I need to make that call? It seems to me you got demoted. Who are you to talk to me? I am the up and comer. I am going to be the next VP of Sales at the company."

When you look at the end, you may think you are dealing with one person. You may think that this is a demotion or a firing of one person. What does it mean according to that one person? But what you are really doing is saying, what does it mean to fail on the job? Particularly the highest paid, the highest compensated job in the company from an equity standpoint. And then, what's required to maintain your equity? Is it good enough to put in an effort or do you have to get a result? In different situations at different levels, the answers will be different. If this had been a person who was not an Executive brought in from the outside, but someone you promoted past where they should have been and didn't ever get that equity, maybe you make a different decision but you have to understand what it's going to mean to everybody, not just the person you're talking to.

An Excellent Employee Asks You for a Raise

Example two: An excellent employee asks for a raise. A good employee, this isn't like the last employee. First thing you think is they're really good, they asked me for a raise, they didn't ask me for no reason. They asked me because they think they deserve it. I want to retain them. I want to be fair! They've done a great job. I know that if I give them this raise, it's going to be all love coming my way. If I give you a raise we're good. You got a raise! It's awesome.

From your perspective you know what you want to do when somebody asks you for a raise. What about from their perspective? How would they take it if you gave them the raise. You have to remember, for them to get to point where they ask you for a raise, they did not wake up one morning and say, "I am going in and asking him for a raise." This is something they've thought about a lot. They've compared their other options. They may have an offer from another company. It’s something their spouse probably has been talking to them about. It's a serious thing. If you give it to them, they're very likely to feel very good about it.

However, you knew there was going to be a however, you have to think about it from the point of view of the employee who did not ask for a raise. They may be doing a better job than the employee who did ask for the raise and in their mind they are going, “Ok, so I didn't ask for a raise and I didn't get a raise. They asked for a raise and they got a raise. What does that mean?" One, you're not really evaluating people's performance. You're just going, whoever asks, gets. That means I either need to be the guy who asked for the raise, though that's not how I feel. I do my work and I don't necessarily want to ask for a raise. Or I just need to quit and go to a company that actually evaluates performance. You can really make the person who doesn't get the raise feel pretty pissed about it Don't think that when someone is walking through your company doing the "Shmoney Dance," that other people aren't going to notice. They are going to be fired up about that raise. You can say it is highly confidential that I am giving you this raise. It's not confidential.

The cultural conclusion is that everybody in your company is going to feel that they now have a fiduciary responsibility to their family to ask for a raise all the time because if they don't, they may be missing out on a raise that they would have otherwise gotten. Talk to any experienced CEO and they will tell you this is true. If you give out raises when people just ask you for them, you will have a lot of people asking you for raises. That is called encouraging behavior.

What do you do? The right answer is you have to be formal to save your own culture. I know this is always this is the thing that causes people running startups fits because it's like, " Well I don't want a lot of formalities. I don't want a lot of process. I want it to be organic. We want to do yoga. We want to only smoke organic weed."

But the process actually protects the culture because what it does it says, look we're going to look at all inputs. We are going to have a formal way of saying anybody who wants a raise, come talk to me. I'm not going to give you a raise but I am happy to hear your story. I'm going to talk to all the people you work with so I get like a understanding. I am going to evaluate all the work that you've done, so I know where I actually rate and what my actual opinion is. I am going to do it periodically, I'm not going to do it daily. If I were fast moving I would do it every six months or even once a quarter. At the end of that process I will tell you what your raise is, I will tell you if you're getting one or if you're not getting one, but I'm not going to do things off cycle. I'm not going to do things when asked. There is one process and that's it.

Having a process gets people to be more comfortable because they don't have to always be on edge about, “Am I asking for what I deserve? Or am I getting aced out because of who I am, what I look like? I am not buddy buddy. I'm not at the golf course with you or I'm not doing whatever you like to do? I don't have to worry about any of that because I know your process. You're going to evaluate everybody and then you are going to give them what's fair." That's a much better way to handle that and it means that you're actually understanding what everybody thinks, not just the people you are talking to at the moment.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the most important thing that you can learn, and one of the hardest things to do, is you have to discipline yourself to see your company through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners, through the eyes of the people you are not talking to and who are not in the room.

QnA

Q: If you have to fire or demote an executive, how do you have the conversation and then how do you explain it to everyone else?

A: Generally when you hire people, you try to hire the very best. You hire people who are qualified to do the job. The reason they fail on the job is you made some mistake in the hiring process and you didn't match them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the number one reason why this fails and so that's generally a good place to start. To say look, here's how we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision. It is what it is. We're going to have to move on.

Q: Putting yourself in other people's shoes is very important. Can you give us some tips?

A: Putting yourself in other people’s shoes is difficult in management. It's hard in daily life. It's even harder in management because it's the stress at the moment. If a great employee is asking you for a raise, it is very hard for not to respond because you do not want to lose them and they are not asking you for a raise randomly, they are asking you for a reason. If you don't have a process in place to go stop back out, you have to pause yourself. If somebody comes to you with something that you know is important, you want to feel like you have all the answers. Right now you guys are asking me questions and if I don't know the answer I will make something up because I want you guys to think I am smart.

The most important thing is to pause. If you know something is really important and you haven't thought it through, just to say, "I am taking this really seriously but I have to pause because I have to think it through from all perspectives. I’m going to come back." I end up doing that a lot just because there are a lot of things that you run into that you have never seen before. Most CEO's, including myself, learn this the hard way. You go ok, I'm going sneak away with this. Nobody's going to see me give them the raise. I'm going to do it and it’s going to be all under the covers. Confidentiality baby. Then it blows up in your face three weeks later and you're like, "Oh my God. What have I done?" Or three months later or even a year later. Then once it's a year later, it's a huge problem.

You've taken what was a little emotional problem and you've turned it into a forest fire. We call it a Kimchi problem. The deeper you bury it the hotter it gets. It's a Korean joke. It takes practice. It’s very difficult to do. My friend Bill Campbell, this is his big skill. People always trying to describe him to me and I’m like that is not him at all. That’s not what he’s good at. He’s good at seeing the company through the eyes of the employees. If you are good at that, you will very likely be an elite leader.

Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)

Who to interview

You need the answer to the question: who is my user and where am I going to find them? Who the most important person to this this app is? There are actually a lot of groups that aren't necessarily obvious users but who are potentially critical to your app's success.

When you are at the very beginning of a startup, when you have this idea that you think is awesome, you want to have the broadest group you possibly can.

You don't just want to talk to one type of person. You want to get familiar with the various kind of people who could be contributing.

Questions to Avoid

The main thing you're trying to do when running this first set of interviews is not necessarily ask questions about optimizing user flow. Or questions about the specifics of any of that stuff. That can be distracting because users think they know what they want. You get the horseless carriage effect where you're asked for a faster horse instead of asked to design the actual solution to the problem.

So you want to stay as far away from features as possible because the things they tell you feel overwhelmingly real. When you have a real user asking you for a feature, it's very hard to say no to them because here's a real person who really has this problem. They're saying, "Build me this feature." But as you start to talk to lots of people and really get a sense for what their problems are, you figure out if this is actually a promising area or not.

Ideas Validation

The question is now, once you have this idea, is this enough? Is this something people would actually switch to? There are two ways to validate that. One, if you are quick at programming you can literally just go build it, throw it out into the world, and see what happens. When that works, it's an excellent way to approach the problem. But a lot of the time that one little thing that's a bit better might take you three months to actually build. So you want to go out and validate that idea further before you start building it.

You might take that idea and draw diagrams of what it would look like. Draw the work flow and put that in front of people. The one thing you really don't want to do is ask them about a great idea for a feature. Ask them, "Are you excited about it?" Because the feedback you get from users if you tell them about a feature and ask them, "Is this feature good?" is often, "Oh yeah that's great." When you actually build it, you find out that while they thought it was a clever idea, no one actually cares to switch and get it. So the one question you can't ask is, "Is this feature actually good or not?"

If you are selling, it's great. Sales is the cure-all for this problem. Get people to give you their credit card and I guarantee you they are actually interested in the feature. It's one of the most validating things that you can do for a product. Go out there and actually get customers to commit to pay you up front. It clarifies whether or not they're really excited about your product. If you're not 5 dollars excited about it, you're probably not very excited about it.

Users vs NonUsers

What people who didn't use our service cared about was completely different than the people who were using our service. We focused on this stuff because this was the stuff that was so bad that people weren't even willing to use our service. Most of it we hadn't actually thought about it because our user base happened to be well educated and knew about all their options. Reaching out to them meant that they probably already tried all four services and actually had an opinion. It's great when you can get users who are that informed and understand the space that well.

We talked to all the people who weren't using us or our competitors. In many ways, those were the most important people. Talking to your competitors is a a short term win, unless your software is like Google, which is a search engine which everyone uses, then there may be no non-users to convert. In the case of gaming broadcasting, almost everyone is a non-user. The majority of people you are competing with are non-users. They are people who have never used your service before and what they say is actually the most important. What they say is the thing that blocks you from expanding the size of the market with your features.

It's astonishing because most people had actually never had that experience. They had never talked to someone and said, "It would be really great if your product had feature X" and then a month later your product actually has feature X, or at the very least a feature that addresses the problem that they brought up. The people we converted first to our product were the people that we talked to about user research. They were the ones who were the most impressed. Which is fun. It really worked, because we picked people who were representative.

We spent tons of time looking through Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and in-house analytics tools. Figuring out how people were trying to use the service, where our traffic came from, completion rates on flows. You can learn things from that. I'm not telling you not to look at your data. But it doesn't tell you what the problems are you need to address. We would invent these ideas at Justin.tv without talking to someone and then nine times out of ten, that idea would turn out to be bad. That’s actually one of the disappointing things about doing user interviews and getting user feedback, which is why I think so many people don't do it. You're going to get negative news about your favorite feature most of the time. You're going to have this great idea and you're going to talk to users and it’s going to turn out that nobody actually wants it. They are actually concerned about a completely different set of things and they don't care about what you thought was important at all. That’s a little bit sad, but think about how sad you'd be in four months when you launch that feature and it turns out no one actually wants to use it.

Common Mistakes

The most common mistake is showing people your product. Don't show them your product. It’s like telling them about a feature. You want to learn what's already in their heads. You want avoid putting things there. The other thing is asking about your pet feature direction. If you think you want to add subscriptions to your product, going and asking people, "Would you pay for a subscription? Would you use this feature?".

Another big mistake people make is talking to who is available rather than talking to who they need to talk to. Because if you just talk to who's easy to talk to, you're not getting the best data. The fortunate side there is almost everyone is flattered to be asked what they think, so they will actually talk to you and tell you things.

If you just go to them and say, "I talked to the users. I figured it out. We have to build this," it's really hard because people don't trust you. There's something magic about showing them the interview though. I recommend recording interviews. It also stops you from taking notes in the middle, which is a little bit disruptive. It makes it hard for you to actually engage in the conversation. You can then play that recording for people. They don't have to be there for the entirety of all the interviews, but when you want to make a point about what what you should be building and why, you can play the interview back for the rest of the company. It's like magic, the influence it has on people's thoughts, on what is the right thing to build.

You don't want to do interviews over email if you can avoid it, because interviews over email are non-interactive. The most interesting learnings come from the, “Interesting. Tell me more." The instant you hit this vein, they will say something that you didn't expect. And then you should drop into detective mode. Detective mode is, "Huh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more about that?" People don't like silence, so they'll keep talking to feel the void. The best part about doing an interview over Skype or doing it in person is that you have that interactive feedback. You can actually pull a lot more out of people. Email interviews are basically useless. In person or over Skype interviews are also easy to record. Make sure you ask them if it's ok to record. It's not polite to record people without their consent, but if they are willing to give you a user interview, they'll probably willing for you to record it as well.

Given that we had very limited resources, we focused on the people using competing products. We knew that they were already interested in the behavior that we needed and they were willing to do it at all. Therefore all we had to do was convince them to switch, which is much easier to do than to create a new behavior. We did that because we had to get some quick wins. That meant focusing on the short-term, on getting the people in right now. That turned out to be good in general.

Lecture 17 - Lecture 17 - How to Design Hardware Products (Hosain Rahman)

Exploration

The exploration phase is very much like a building and tinkering process. A lot of it is driven by demo Fridays where people have an opportunity to showcase their work. We find that's a great way to pull it together, pull it into a form where others can consume it and give feedback. It's a really it is a show and tell. Obviously hackathons are a big part of it. There's lots of data that gets driven. It's lead by our Strategic Development Team, which is traditionally called an R&D Team. There is participation from product and engineering, both hardware and software. But they're sort of taking a back seat and they're looking at what these explorations are. The Executives at the company at this phase are more of a signing board. They’re there to poke and prod and tell people, “Hey think about this." Or "Did you try that? How does that work?"

In this phase, in order to move to the next threshold, we think, "Would I give this guy 50 grand?" It's like an angel investment. Would I give this guy 50 grand to go explore this and see if there's is there something to do? And our CTO is the final decision maker. He gets to pick internally and say, "You know what? I like all the feedback. This is the one I want to go chase down and see what happens."

Early Validation

Then we get into the validation phase. This where gets really interesting. It's still led by R&D but they're really poking at the idea and saying, “How does this work? We have leadership meetings with the broader cross functional team. I have to show results. I have to go through a scientific process to outline why this works. Why is it going to happen?" This is when we start formulating an important tool in the company, which is what we call WHYS. Defining the WHY of what we are doing. WHY does this exist? What problem does it solve?

At this point it's still an R&D lead, but this is when our industrial design team and a few project guys come in and think, "Ok how can I pull this concept into something physical, if it's hardware? How is that going to interact with the rest of the pieces of the system?" Our product experience team is still driving a lot of the core values and the story boarding, but it starts to become a lot more real, when we start thinking, "Ok, how we will build this? How expensive is this going to be? What's the budget going to be?" At that point, we start to really validate if we can actually build it. Do we have wait three years for batteries to be there? Do we have to wait for this other innovation to happen? Do we have to wait from a budget perspective? Is there a business viability? Then we start to really sketch briefs. This where I come in and make the final decision. "There’s really a there there. And we can now take this to the next level and get into play."

Concept Phase

Then we go into the concept phase. This is when the responsibilities shift from the R&D folks to what we call the product experience team. The way we think about product experience at Jawbone is what everyone thinks of as conventional design. So from industrial design to software design to audio design to anything that touches that experience. We have writers on that team. Story tellers. We have ID people like Eve who are Genius creators. We have amazing app level designers, graphic designers, everything. It's all one team and we call that product experience. Their job is to unify us as one organization. That's when they take hold and start to really drive the WHYS. They think about what's possible. There's a lot of innovation and creativity in the actual implementation of how we're going to build and create a product. We start to say what the most important things in that product are. What are the most important problems we're going to solve? We call them "Hero Experiences." What are we going to do? What is the bar that would be acceptable?

At this point we start to really resolve the WHYS, which I will show you again in a minute. Why is this different from the competition? From the category? Where does it go? We don't like to do one off things. We have to see a broader vision. This is part of the creation experience. We look at where do we think the world is moving and think about how this is going to be a stepping stone to that ultimate end vision. That’s where the road map starts to get flushed out. Again, I have the ability here to be the final decision maker with my team and say, "Yup. We're going to move this to this next phase."

Planning

After this stage it shifts from that Product Experience Team to our Product Managers, who are really defining the business plan. When is it going to launch, when is it going to get into the retail calendar, what is the software release cycle. They are prototyping. They're starting to make a lot of those tradeoffs. "Ok we wanted to build this. We can't do that but here's what we can do. We want to be this way. We want these functional experiences. We are going to sacrifice battery life, whatever it is." That's when we start to really pull those decisions and start to look at it. It's a big juggling act at that point.

The product guys are driving that. That's when again, we look at and synthesize all of what we put together and we say, "Ok. Does it actually cross enough things off our list? Does it meet that minimum viability?" Because we always start with, as you can tell, this very big wish list of what's possible and what we can do. Then we start to wheel it down and ask, "Does this cross enough of the value threshold that we think it's worth pursuing?"

Development

Now can we actually move it into the development phase where again Product Management Team continues to lead it. But now you're starting to really get deep. This is where engineering comes in and is really starting to sign off on building it. Here's the time schedule and how we ship. The Product Team is looking at how we should go deeper. How can we increase engagement? What are the little innovations? What are the tuning? What are the things that we need to do to make all that happen?

The Framework

How do we think about it at a broader level? What is the framework for how we think about these user signature experiences? Well we start to think of these WHYS. Which is an articulation of the problem that we are solving. And then the themes around how these become actionable concepts. Then we build these cross functional pods that take a person from the Product Experience Team, a person from Hardware Engineering, a person from Software Engineering, a person from the Data Team, and we put them together. This is the pod that owns that theme or that track and they continue to build that out against the hero features and the inside features.

Why's

It comes down to a very simple question for us: "What is the user problem that we solve through this experiment?" Whether it's in hardware, software, data, platform, whatever it is, once we solve it, people can't live without it. They may have an absolutely burring need to solve this problem and they can't. Either they are looking for a solution or you never thought you needed it but now you can't live without it. Again, Jambox is great example of that. We talked to some people when were were thinking about making that product.

We don't think of ourselves as a hardware team or a software team or a data company. We think of ourselves as an experiences company. It's not just about this physical device or that feature. It's about the system. It's about how the pieces come together. So when we start to define these WHYS, they become the problem statement. We say, "Ok how do we use a piece of hardware? How do we use a service in the cloud? How do we use an application? A sound? A button? How do we solve this user experience problem that we have and what’s the right distribution across that system? Where should you attack the problem? Where do we need to innovate and where do we need to pull it together" That's a big, big, big part of the thinking that helps us in doing.

When we think about these experiences, it's really about the context of why it's magical to the user. Like I said, the system is a flagship and then it has to go to a level of emotional connection where you feel that without it you're lost. I am going to go home and get it if I don't have it. Those are the principals that govern all these things. We have to keep asking ourselves those questions. Is it doing that? We pull this all together to create an experience framework. This is essentially a brief for your engineering team. for your design team, and they can go back and say, "What are we doing and why are we doing it? How does that work? How do we create it?"

Q&A

Q: Should we start focusing on one small thing or should it focus on the system itself? A: A system is a mindset. It's not actually a system. There are simple systems. There are complex ones. A plane is a very complex system. A car is a very complex system. There are other products we make that are much simpler. A phone is a complex system. An application you should think of as a system. Storage. The front end experience. What you're doing is connecting. That’s all a system. So that’s more what of what I mean about systems. For us, a system is hardware, software, and data but I think within anything there's always a system. It’s more just thinking about how the tradeoffs work across all the different pieces that work together.

Lecture 18 - Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups (Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy)

Documents

Your startup is going to be a separate legal entity. You probably already know this but the primary purpose for forming a separate legal entity is to protect yourselves from personal liability. If your company ever gets sued, it's not your money in your bank account that the person can take. It's the corporation's.

A note on paperwork. You're creating documents. These are really important documents that are going to be setting what the company does and what the company is. It's really important that you actually keep these signed documents in a safe place. It sounds so basic but we get so many founders saying, "Oh, these are just some documents." They have no idea what they are or where there are. So really, really make sure that you keep them in a safe place. Let's be honest, filing documents is not the glamorous part of running a startup. The times where this is crucial are going to be high stress times in the startup's life. It's likely when the company is raising a big Series A or if the company is being acquired. The company will have to go through due diligence and there will be lawyers asking for all this stuff. If you don't have it and you don't know where it is, you're making a stressful situation even more stressful.

Equity Allocation

If your company stock is high, how to divide the pie. You have to talk about this with your co-founders. Why is this important? If you're a solo-founder this isn't important. If you are a team of two or more, then this issue is absolutely critical.

The first thing that you need to know is that execution has greater value than the idea. What do I mean by that? A lot of Founder Teams give way too much credit and therefore a lot of the company's equity to the person who came up with the idea for the company. Ideas are obviously very important but they have zero value. Who's ever heard of a billion dollar payment for just an idea? Value is created when the whole Founder team works together to execute on an idea. You need to resist the urge to give a disproportionate amount of stock to the Founder who is credited with coming up with the idea for the company.

The next thing you want to think about is if the stock should be allocated equally among the founders. From our perspective the simple answer is probably yes. Stock allocation doesn't have to be exactly equal, but if it's very disproportionate, that's a huge read flag for us. We wonder what conversation is not happening among the Founder team when the ownership isn't equal. For example, is one Founder secretly thinking that this whole startup thing is temporary? Has one Founder overinflated the work that he or she has already done on the company? Or overinflated his or her education or prior experience? Do the founders really trust each other? Have they been honest with each other about their exceptions for the startup and for the future? When ownership is disproportionate, we worry that the founders are not in sync with one another.

Thirdly, it's really important to look forward in the startup. Said another way, all the founders have to be in it one hundred percent. Are they all in it for the long haul? If the expectation at your startup is that each Founder is in it one hundred percent, for the long haul, then everything that happened before the formation of the company shouldn't matter. It doesn't matter who thought of the idea, who did the coding, who built the prototype, or which one has an MBA. It will feel better to the whole team if the allocation is equal because the whole team is necessary for execution. The take away on this point: in the top YC companies, which we call those with the highest valuations, there are zero instances where the founders have a significantly disproportionate equity split.

Purchasing

I'm not going to go into detail about the 83(b) election, but it affects your individual taxes and it affects the company’s taxes. It can have a big impact. The main things here are sign the paper work, sign the Stock Purchase Agreements, sign the 83(b) Election, and make sure that you actually have proof that you sent that in. If you don't have the proof it just goes into a black hole at the IRS. Investors and acquirers will walk away from a deal if you can't prove that.

Vesting

Vesting means that you get full ownership of your stock over a specific period of time. We're talking about the stock that Kirsty just said. You bought your stock of your company and you own it and you get to vote, but if you leave before this vesting period is over, then the company can get those unvested shares back. When your hear restricted stock, it means that the stock is subject to vesting. The IRS speak for this is, "Shares that are subject to forfeiture."

What should a typical vesting period be? In Silicon Valley the so called standard vesting period is four years with a one year cliff. This means that after one year, the Founder vests in or fully owns twenty-five percent of the shares. Then the remaining shares vest monthly over the next three years. Here's an example. Founder buys stock on Christmas day, let's say, and then quits the company on the following Thanksgiving. So before the year has passed. In that case the Founder leaves with zero shares, because the cliff period hasn't been met. If the Founder quits the day after the next Christmas, so a year and day later, he or she is vesting in twenty-five percent of the shares. In that case the one year cliff has been met.

What happens to the shares when a Founder stops working at the company? The company can repurchase those shares. In the example I just gave where the Founder quit a year and a day after purchasing the shares, seventy-five percent of the shares are still invested and the company will repurchase that full seventy-five percent of the shares from the Founder. How? They just write the Founder a check. That's how the Founder brought it. It's the same price per share that the Founder paid, so it's simply giving the Founder his or her money back.

Investors want to see all founders, even solo founders, incentivized to stay with at the company for a long time. The other reason that solo founders should put vesting on their shares is to set an example for employees. You can imagine it would be inappropriate for a Founder to tell an employee that he or she has to have four year vesting on his or her shares but the founder doesn't think he or she needs any on their own shares. It's a culture point. A founder who has vesting on his or her shares then sets the tone for the company by saying, "We're all in it for the long hall. We are all vesting on our shares. We're doing this together."

Vesting aligns incentives among the founders if they all have to stick it out and grow the company before they get any of that company. Investors don't want put money in a company where the founders can quit whenever they feel like it and still have a big equity ownership stake in that company.

Fundraising

In terms of logistics, in very simple terms there are two ways to raise money. Either the price is set for the money that comes in or the price isn't set. By price we mean the valuation of the company. Rounds can actually be called anything. People can name them whatever they want, but generally when you hear the term seed round, it mean that the price has not been set. Anything that's a Series A or Series B is something where the price has been set.

Not setting the price is the most straight forward, fast route to getting money. The way that this is done is through convertible notes or safes. Again, this is a two way transaction. It's a piece of paper that says, for example, that an investor is paying one hundred thousand dollars now and in return has the right to receive stock at a future date when the price is set by investors in a priced round. It’s important to note that at the time that paperwork is set, that investor is not a shareholder and therefore doesn't have any voting rights in the company.

Of course investors want something in return for putting in money at the earliest, riskiest stage of the company's life. This is where the concept of a valuation cap comes in, which I'm sure many of you heard mentioned before. The documents for an unpriced round set a cap for the conversion into shares that's not the current valuation of the company. It's an upper bound on the valuation used in future to calculate how many shares that investor is going to get.

For example, take an investor that invests 100,000 dollars on a safe with a 5,000,000 dollar cap. If a year later the company raises a priced round with a valuation of 20,000,000 dollars, then the early investor would have a much lower price per share. About 1/4. Therefore their 100,000 dollars would buy them approximately 4 times more shares than an investor that was coming and putting in a 100,000 in that Series A priced round. That's where they get their reward for being in early. Again, this is a situation where you need to make sure you have the signed documents.

The first thing is to understand your future dilution. So, if you raise, let's say 2,000,000 dollars on safes with a valuation cap of 6,000,00 dollars, then when those safes convert into equity, those early investors are going own about 25% of the company. And that's going to be an addition to the investors that are coming in at that priced round who may want to own twenty percent of the company. So you're already at that point given away 45% of the company. So is this really what you want? And you know the answer might be yes. Remember that some money on a low valuation cap is infinitely better than no money at all. And if those term that you can get then, then take that money. But it's just something to be aware of and to follow through the whole process so that you can see where this is going to lead you down the road.

The other thing to keep in mind is that investors should be sophisticated. They have enough money to be able to invest. They understand that investing in startups is a risky business. We see so many companies say, "Oh yeah. My uncle put money in or my neighbor put money in." They've put in five or ten thousand dollars each. Often those are the investors that cause the most problems going forward because they don't understand how this is a long term gain. They get to the point where they're sitting thinking, "Hmm. I could actually do with that money back because I need a new kitchen." Or, "This startup investing is not actually as exciting as all the TV shows and movies made it out to be." That causes problems for the company. They're asking for their money back. Be aware that you should be raising money from people who are sophisticated and know what they're doing. The term that you'll hear that refers to these people are that they are accredited investors.

The main point here is keep it simple. Raise your money using standard documents. Make sure that you have people who understand what they are getting into and understand what you're getting into in terms of future dilution.

Investor Requests

Don't assume that just because you have agreed on the valuation of the price, that all the other stuff doesn't matter. It does matter. You need to know how these terms are going to impact your company in the long run. We're going to go over 4 common investor requests.

The first one is a board seat. Some investors will ask for seat on your company’s board of directors. The investor usually wants to be a director either because he or she wants to keep tabs on their money or because he or she really thinks they can help you run your business. You have to be careful about adding an investor to your board. In most cases you want to say no. Otherwise make sure it's a person who is really going to add value. Having money is very valuable but someone who helps with strategy and direction is priceless. So choose wisely.

The other things is advisers. They are so many people who want to give advice to startups. Few people actually give good advice. Once an investor has given your company money, that person should be a de facto adviser but without any official title and more importantly without the company having to give anything extra in return for the advice.

Next we're going to talk about pro-rata rights. Very simply, pro-rata rights are the right to maintain your percentage ownership in a company by buying more shares in the company in the future. Pro-rata rights are a way to avoid dilution. Dilution in this context means owning less and less of the company each time the company sells more stock to other investors. Pro-rata rights are a very common request from investors. They are not necessarily a bad thing, but as a founder you absolutely need to know how pro-rata rights work. Especially because the corollary to an investor having pro-rata rights to avoid dilution is that founders typically suffer greater dilution.

The final thing is information rights. Investors almost always want contractual information rights to get certain information about your company. Giving periodic information and status updates is not a bad thing. At YC we encourage companies to give monthly updates to their investors because it's a great opportunity to ask for help with introductions or help with hiring. That kind of thing. You have to be really careful about overreach. Any investor saying they want a monthly budget or weekly update, that's not ok.

Company Expenses

Business expenses are the cost of carrying out your business. Paying employees, paying rent for an office, hosting costs, the cost of acquiring customers, that kind of thing. Business expenses are important because they get deducted on the company's tax return to offset any revenues that are made to lower the taxes that the company pays. On the flip side, if the company incurs a a non-business expense that is not deductible on the tax return, that can increase the profits of the company that have to pay tax on them.

The company will have its own bank account, out of which the company's expenses should be paid. Um, again think about this from a, from a large company, if you were working at Google, you would not use a Google credit card to buy a tooth brush and tooth paste.

Remember that the investors gave you this money. They trusted you with a huge amount of money. They want you to use that money to make the company a success. It's not your money for you to spend how you please. Believe me, we've had some horror stories of founders who've take that approach. We had one founder who took investor money and went to Vegas. By his Facebook photos, boy did he have a good time. Needless to say he's no longer with the company. This is stealing from investors.

The concept of business expenses can get a little bit blurry, especially in the early days when you're working in your apartment twenty four hours a day. The way to think about it is, "If an investor asked me what I'd spent their money on and I had to give them a line by line break down, would I be embarrassed about any of those lines?" If you would, it's probably not a business expense.

The other thing to bear in mind is that you're busy running your company at ninety miles an hour, so you don't have to necessarily think about the book keeping and accounting at that point. However, it's crucial to keep the receipts so when you do engage a book keeper or a CPA to prepare your tax returns, they can figure out what are business expenses and what aren't business expenses. They're going need your help as a founder to do this. The way make your involvement as small as possible is to keep those documents in a safe place, so you can easily refer to them.

Doing Business

As prestigious as we think the title founder is, you're really just a company employee and founders have to be paid. Working for free is against the law and founders should not let their company take on this liability. You wouldn't work for free anywhere else, so why is your startup an exception? Companies have to pay payroll taxes. We had a YC company that completely blocked their payroll taxes for three years. It was huge expensive disaster and in extreme cases, people can actually go to jail for that. Fortunately not in this case, but it's bad. The moral of this story is set up a payroll service. This is something that is worth spending your money on. Don't go overboard on lavish salaries. Minimum wage. This is still a startup and you have to run lean.

Now I am going to mention founder break ups. First, what is a founder break up? In this context, I'm talking about one founder on the team being asked to leave the company. founders are employees, so that means your co-founders are firing you. Why are we talking about break ups in founder compensation? At YC we have seen a ton of founder break ups and we know that the break ups get extra ugly when the founders haven't paid themselves. Why? Unpaid wages become leverage for the fired founder to get something that he or she wants from the company. Typically that is vesting acceleration. The fired founder says, "Hey. My lawyer says you broke the law by not paying me. If you pay me and you give me some shares that I am actually not really entitled to, I'll sign a release and make all this ugliness go away." If you're the remaining co-founders, you're probably like, "Sounds like a good deal." Now you have a disgruntled person who owns a piece of your company and, even worse, the remaining workers are working for that ex-founder. They are building all the value in the company and the ex-founder who got fired is sitting there with all their shares going, “That’s right. Make it valuable."

Hiring Employees

The first thing you need to do is figure out if the person is an employee or a contractor. There are subtle differences to this classification. this is important to get right because the IRS takes a big interest in this. If they think you got it wrong they will come after you with fines.

Both an employee and a contractor will require documents that assign any IP that they create to the company. That's obviously really important. The form of the document is very different for each type of person and the method of payments are very different. Generally a contractor will be able to set their own work hours and location and they will be given a project where there is an end result. How they actually get to that will not be set. They'll be using their own equipment and they won't really have any say in the day to day running of the company or the strategy going forward. A contractor will sign a consulting agreement. When the company pays them, the company doesn't hold any taxes on their behalf. That responsibility is on the individual. At the end of the year, the company will provide what's called a form 1099 to the individual and to the IRS, which they use to prepare their personal tax returns.

The opposite side of this is an employee. An employee will also sign some form of IP assignment agreement, but when the company pays them, the company will withhold taxes from their salary. The company is responsible for paying those taxes to the relevant state or federal authorities. At the end of the year the employee receives a W2 form, which will then be used to prepare their personal tax returns.

The founders need to be paid. So do employees. It isn't enough to just say, "Well, I am paying them in stock. That can be their compensation." They need to be paid at least minimum wage.

Founders are not payroll experts and nobody expects you to be one. This is all about the basics. You absolutely must use a payroll service provider who will look after this for you. Services like Zen Payroll are focused on startups. They help you get this set up in the easiest way possible so you can go back and concentrate on what you do best. In the example that Carolyn gave just a few minutes ago, if that company had actually set themselves up with a payroll service provider, all of that heartache would have gone away because it would have been looked after for them. They were trying to save money by not doing it and look where it got them.

Firing Employees

Somebody at YC once said, "You're not a real founder until you've had to fire somebody." Why is that? Because firing people is really hard. It's hard for a lot of reasons, including that founders tend to hire their friends. They tend to hire former co-workers or they get close to their employees because working at a startup is really intense. But in every company there's going to be an employee that doesn't work out and firing this employee makes a founder a real professional because he or she has to do what is right for the company instead of what is easy. Best practices for how to fire someone:

1, fire quickly. Don't let a bad employee linger. It's so easy to put off a difficult conversation but there is only downside to procrastination. If a toxic employee stays around too long, good employees may quit. If the employee is actually screwing up the job, you may lose business or users.

2 , communicate effectively. Don't rationalize. Don't make excuses. Don't equivocate about why you are firing the employee. Make clear direct statements. Don't apologize. "We're letting you go," not, "I'm so sorry your sales didn't take off this quarter, blah, blah, blah." Fire the employee face to face and ideally with a third party present.

3, pay all wages and accrued vacation immediately. This is a legal requirement that we don't debate or negotiate.

4, cut off access to digital systems. Once an employee is out the door, cut off physical and digital access. Control information in the cloud. Change passwords. We had a situation at YC where one founder had access to the company's GitHub account and held the password hostage when his co-founders try to fire him.

5, if the terminated employee has any invested shares, the company should repurchase them right away. The takeaway here is that, surprising as this may sound, one of the hallmarks of a really effective founder is how well he or she handles employee terminations.

Key Take-Aways

Equity ownership is really important, so make sure you are thinking about the future rather than the 3 months of the history of the company. Stock doesn't buy itself, so make sure you do the paperwork.

Make sure you actually know about the financing documents that you're signing. It's not enough to just say, "I'll take your hundred K."

You and the employees need to be paid.

Everybody needs to assign IP to the company. If the company does not own that IP, there is no value in the company.

If an employee must be fired, do it quickly and professionally.

At any time you should know the cash position, you should know your burn rate, you should know when that cash is going to run out so you can talk to your investors. You do have to take that seriously.

Q&A

Q: How would you advise searching for an accountant and when in the process do you need one?

A: There are two different things. There is a book keeper and there is a CPA, an accountant. Generally book keepers will categorize all your expenses and CPAs will prepare your tax returns. In the very early days it's probably fine for the founders to just be able to see the bank statements and see those expenses coming out. Tax returns have to be prepared annually, so at some point in that first year of the company's life, some service is going to need to be engaged to do that. It's not worth the founders time to do it. Finding one is tough. The best is through recommendations. With any kind of specialist, a CPA or an accountant or a lawyer, it's always best to use people who are used to dealing with startups. Not your aunt who lives in Minnesota and doesn't actually know how startups work.

Q: What should be my budget for incorporating, for the lawyer, for getting the deal to buy for my effort seed rounds?

A: When you actually need to hire a lawyer depends on what business you are starting and how complicated it is. Do you have a lot of privacy policies, is HIPPA involved? You mentioned raising your seed round, how much money are you raising? Who are the investors? What kind of terms are in the term sheet? Sometimes that dictates whether or not you need to get legal counsel.

Lecture 19 - Sales and Marketing; How to Talk to Investors (Tyler Bosmeny; YC Partners)

Sales & Marketing

First I want to start about how I used to perceive sales. A lot of people see sales as having mystique around it. It's people who are articulate and impossibly charming. They have these killer closing lines that they use. This is how I saw sales. I think this is how a lot of founders I talk to see sales because they say things to me like, "You know, we're just going to work on the product and build a great product and then when it's finally finished, we're going hire the sales people." What I've learned is that when it comes to "hiring the sales people," as a founder, the reality is that it's you. Paul Graham likes to talk about how there's two things you should be doing at any point in time when you're starting your company. You should be either talking to your users or building your product. The talking to your users part, that's selling. This is intimidating to some people because they're like, "I've never done sales, and I wouldn't even know where to begin." It turns out that as a founder you have some unique advantages that make it possible for you to be really, really good at sales. One of those is your passion for the product and what you're building. The second is your knowledge of the industry and the problem that you're solving. Those two things actually totally trump sales experience from what I've seen.

The first thing that everybody knows about sales is it's a funnel. You have these different stages of the funnel and you move your customers through it. A pretty common category is the prospecting category. We were trying to figure out who's even interested. Then you're having a lot of conversations, which is the second level of the funnel. Then you're finding out who's really serious and you want to close them and sign the deal. Then you're in the promised land of revenue. I thought it would be interesting to talk about each stage and a couple of strategies that we've used at Clever that have worked well, so that these aren't abstract but hopefully lessons you can use at your start up.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the process of figuring out who will even take your call. There's this guy at Everett Rogers who has created a technology life cycle adoption curve. He describes it as a bell curve where you have innovators who will try new things, early adopters, mid-stage adopters, late adopters, and laggers. One of the things that was really helpful for me in understanding sales at an early start up is he's quantified the tail of this bell curve. This part over here are innovators, those are your potential customers. It might seem discouraging that only 2.5% of companies are your potential customers or would even consider buying from a startup that has no users and no revenue, but I found the opposite. I found it extremely helpful to have this frame of mind because when only 2.5% of companies will even take your call or consider using your product, you realize what a numbers game this becomes. If you want to reach that 2.5% and you want to get some early sales, you're hopefully starting to realize you have to do a lot of calling. You have to talk to a lot of people.

There are three methods that I have found to be most successful in prospecting and getting these people. One is your personal network. That's obvious. I'm not going to spend any time there. Another one is conferences, which is surprising to a lot of people. The one that people are most familiar with is cold email. When I say conferences, people think I am talking about CES or E3. The kind of conferences where sales happen look more like this. In the early days we would go to a lot of these because you've got to go to where your users are. If you're selling to CIO's and there happens to be a gathering of them at a hotel in Milwaukee, guess what? That's where you should be. So we went to conferences like these. We got the attendee list in advance. We'd email every single person in advance and try set up meetings so when we got there every single minute of that trip was was well spent. It was huge in Clever's early days. This is where met all of our earliest customers.

The second thing I mentioned is cold email. A lot of people don't know how to write cold emails. It's actually easy and the key is not to write a lot. Your email should be concise. This is an email template that I used early on. You're welcome to copy it but it's really short. Here's who I am. Here's what I'm building. I'd love to talk to you about this. Could we find time tomorrow? It's really easy and you can customize this for every business you want to sell to. Find out who the right person is to send it to and you can send out quite a few of these.

Cold Email

Then you have to get them to take your call. This is another place where a lot of founders have questions about what to actually do. The biggest thing to take away, in fact if you ONLY take away one thing from this presentation today this should be it, is when you get them on the phone, remember to shut up. That's really surprising to people. So many founders, when I help them with their first sales pitch, would finally get somebody on the phone who wanted to talk to them about their product and they'd be so proud of this thing that they'd been building for the last three months that all they wanted to do was get on the phone and talk about every feature and talk about why it's the greatest thing in the world. I have that temptation too. It's just part of being really proud of something.

It turns out that if you watch the best sales people, the top one percent, or you have a chance to listen in on a call with some of those people, the most surprising thing is how little talking they do. In fact I've seen calls where the sales person told me their goal was to only spend 30 percent of the call talking and have 70 percent of the call be the other person. They would ask a lot of questions. They'd say things like, "Why did you even agree to take my call today?" "This problem that we're talking about solving for you, how do you solve it today?" "What would your ideal solution look like?" They're not doing the talking. They're doing everything they can to find out what this person needs and hopefully understand their problem even better than they do. That's what really great sales is. This is something I drill into everybody at Clever. It's a really important part of sales. If any of you use UberConference, they have this amazing feature where when you hang up a call it sends you an email automatically and tells you how much you talked versus how much the other person talked. Looking at one of those emails, I can tell immediately how likely the sale is based on how much talking we were doing. Do a lot of listening. Really understand their problem.

Religious Follow Up

The other part of this stage that surprises a lot of people is you have to follow up. Here's a lot of different steps that you go through: emailing somebody, not getting a response and emailing them back. Calling them, leaving a voice mail. Having a pricing call. There are probably sixty things on this slide that could be steps for closing a deal. These aren't random things -- this was the second deal Clever ever signed. These are all the different steps that we had to do in order to get this done. You can see there's a lot of really embarrassing things up there. I emailed somebody and they didn't respond. I emailed them again and they didn't respond. I emailed them again. This was from somebody who wanted to buy our product. Isn't that crazy? That surprises a lot of people. I see so many founders who think they have a great call with someone and send an email, but don't hear back. They say, "Oh that person might not be interested." Well guess what? This is what it looks like in the best case. You really have to have kind this unhuman and unreasonable willingness to follow up and drive things to closure.

I qualify with that with one thing which is to say when starting a company your time is extremely valuable because it's your only resource. You couldn't possibly do this for every single person who might buy your product. Your goal should be to get people to a yes or no as quickly as you can. Where you die is if you have a thousand maybes and sometimes I talk to founders who say, "Oh yeah I have this great pipeline of a hundred people who have expressed interest in our product." The maybes are what kill you. If you can get to a yes or a no, in some ways a no is even better than a maybe because it allows you to move on and focus somebody who might be a yes.

Closing Traps Redlines

This final step is something if you haven't done before it might seem hard but it's actually really simple. It's called red lining. You'll send over an agreement and their lawyers will mark it up. Your lawyers will also mark it up and you kind of go back and forth. If you're part of YC this is really easy because YC has standard template agreements that they give you so you can just use those. But if you weren't part of YC you have to figure this out on your own.

One of the things that I am really excited about is as part of this presentation, YC has agreed to open source their deal documents. The documents that YC founders use are going to be available to everybody. So this should never be a barrier to anyone who wants to do sales for their start up. You've got some great documents. The other place where so many smart people go wrong is they don't remember what their goal is. Your goal is to sign some deals, get some reference customers, get some validation, and get some revenue. If you don't do that, your startup is toast.

In light of that it's really surprising how many smart people will want to do ten rounds of document review over the most minor points because of pride. Whatever. Make sure the agreement is the way you want it but then sign and move on. I've seen founders spend month quibbling over some indemnification clauses. Their business would have been way better off if they'd just signed the deal and moved on to the next one. That's one trap you can fall into.

Closing Trap: 1 More Feature

Another trap that I see founders struggle with a lot is they're talking to a company who says, "I will use your product but I just need one more feature." Or they say, "You know I'd love to use your product but it doesn't have this one feature. So we're just not ready." To most people, especially if you're ambitious, when somebody says that to you, what you want to think is, "Oh. I can build that feature and then they're going to use my product." The problem is it almost never works that way. Somebody telling you that they want to use your product but it's missing this one feature, I would almost map that to a pass in your mind. Nine times out of ten if you actually build that feature and go back to them, there will be one more feature or some other reason that they're not using the product.

If somebody says to you, "There's this one thing that's preventing us from using your product." I would do one of two things. One say, "Well that's great! Let's sign an agreement and we'll put in the agreement that we're going to build this feature." In which case, if you build it you're off to the races. More commonly, what we did at Clever was we would say, "That's great. We're going to wait to see if we hear that demand from more customers." Once you have a lot of customers requesting it, then you should build it. Then you don't have to worry about doing something that's a one off, which is what you really want to avoid.

Closing Trap: Free Trials

The other trap I would highly recommend you try to avoid is the free trial trap. The customer says, "Can I get a free trial?" You can't blame them that’s a totally reasonable thing to ask for. The problem is when you are starting a startup you need revenue. You need validation. You need users. You need commitment. Free trials get you none of those things. You do all this work and if you end up with a free trial, unfortunately you haven't made as much progress as you think, it's actually terrible. You think you've made progress but at the end of the free trial you’re going to have to sell them all over again. The way I handle this that has worked really well is that when somebody says, "Can I get a free trial?" you say, "We don't do free trials. We do annual agreements and what we'll do is for the first 30 or 60 days, if for any reason you're not happy, you can opt out." That's a way to get you the things that you need while giving them the comfort that they might need to take a chance on a startup. That minor change actually makes a night and day difference when you're thinking about these things.

Looking Forward

You're on your way to your first sales. Early on, you can think of sales as just like any other thing at a startup. You don't have to do things at scale. In fact you can purposely do unscalable things to try and get early customers. That's the fun part. The other thing that is important to keep in mind is once you've done this enough, what you should start thinking about is what aspects of this are repeatable. What aspects are we going to scale further? Christoph Janz wrote this really great blog post online about the 5 ways to build a 100m dollar company. He talks about how he can have 1k customers buy a product that costs a 100k dollars. Or he can have 10k customers buy a product that costs 10k dollars. Or he can have a 100k customers by a product that costs 1k dollars. Even though you don't need to know on day one which bucket you're going to fall into, most companies do fall into one of these buckets. If you want to be in the elephant category of 100k dollar product, you're going to have a really high touch sales cycle. That's Salesforce. That's Workday. If you think that you're going to be a rabbit and sell products for a thousand dollars a year and your sales process involves flying out to see them, and eight demos, and three months of redlining, then you probably have to rethink something.

I see a lot of startups who want to be rabbits that don't think about how to do it in a scalable way. That's one area where you can get under water or it just forces you to increase your prices. This is how I think about different businesses. It will be helpful for you when you get started and once you've done sales to say, "Ok, where am I?" The corollary to that is, "How do I have to price my product to be a viable business?"

Talking to Investors

The main reason is the best way you can make your pitch better is to improve your company. If you - if you have traction and your product is doing well - these conversations are like the investors want to see you succeed. If you remember anything, it's make your company better and the pitch will be easier.

30 second pitch

The 30 second pitch is so simple. It's three sentences. You can take your time. You can breathe when you do this. You don't have to get that much information out. The first is one sentence on what your company does. Everyone I meet for the first time screws this up. You have to be able to do it in a way that is simple and straight forward, that requires no further questioning on my part. You have to assume I know nothing. Literally nothing about anything. This is how you make it super simple. What we tell people is apply the Mom test. If in one sentence you cannot tell your mom what you do, then rework the sentence. There is a one sentence explanation that your mom or your dad is going to understand. So really, really start there. It's ok if you use basic language. It's ok if you say, "Hey we're Airbnb and we allow you to rent out the extra room in your house." That's simple! You don't have to say, "We're Airbnb and we're a marketplace for space." I don't know what that is! That's going to require more time. Use simple language, it's very important.

The second is in a multi-billion dollar market, it's pretty simple to do this. You know Airbnb might say, "How big is the hotel market? How big is the vacation rental market? How big is the online hotel booking market?" These are simple numbers to look up on Google. It makes an investor understand, "Oh wait. If we're big, if we really blow this company up, it could be worth billions of dollars." Don't skip this up. Second sentence. How big is your market?

Third sentence, how much traction do you have? Ideally this sentence is saying something on the order of, "We launched in January and we're growing 30 percent month over month. We have this number of sales. This amount of revenue. This number of users." Very simple. If you can't speak to traction because you're prelaunch, you need to convince the investor that you're moving extremely quickly. "The team started working in January. By March we launched a Beta. By April we launched our product." Convince the investor that you guys are moving fast and that this isn't some long slog. You guys aren't thinking about this like a big corporation. You're thinking about it like a startup where you can move fast and make mistakes.

That’s all you have to do in 30 seconds. Three sentences. From that basis you should be able to start a conversation about your company. From that basis I understand exactly what you do. You have no idea how valuable it is to be able to explain to someone what you do in 30 seconds. Internalize that. If you take nothing else away, that's going to help you.

2 minute pitch

Now you got someone you actually have to convince of something. Maybe even someone you have to ask for money. So I like to add four additional components. And these also go by very quick. The first is unique insight. Now if you talk to VC's they'll say stuff like, "What's your secret sauce? What's your competitive advantage? What's unique insight?" It's all the same thing. When I think about unique insight, what I think about is here's your opportunity to tell me something that I don't know. Here's your opportunity to tell me something that the biggest players in the market you're trying to enter don't understand. Or don't do well. This is the AHA moment and you better have it down in two sentences. The AHA moment. So you got to crystalize all the reasons why you guys are going kill the competitors or the really intelligent thought that got this business started in two sentences. And I need to AHA. You can see whether it's happening when you're saying it. That's why I like two sentences so you get in and out fast. So if I look at you and I'm like, "Uh." Then it's ok. You nailed it. If I look at you and I'm like, "I already knew that." Then you didn't nail it. If I looked at you and I just don't understand what you're talking about you definitely didn't nail it. So practice that unique insight. In your two minute pitch that's all you’re going to get - you're only going to get two sentences to get that out there. So it can't be complicated. And that's basically the theme of this whole thing right? It cannot be complicated.

Next - how do you make money? You know your business model. I see so many founders run away from this question because they think things like if I say advertising people are going to be like "Oh that's stupid." Just say it! Don't run away. If it's advertising - say advertising. Facebook's a massive advertising business. So is Google. If it's direct sales - it's direct sales. If it's you know a game and you're selling in app add ups - like that's fine. Just say it. Don't run away from the sentence. It only has to be one sentence long. Where founders get tricked on how you will make money is they say, "Well - we're going to run advertising. Maybe some virtual goods. We're going to figure out how to this. And maybe this. And maybe this." Well now you're saying nothing. Now you've told me you have no idea how you monetize this. This was a check mark that I just wanted to write. And then I am going to monetize it - instead I am writing a bug question mark. So do the thing that everyone else your industry does to monetize 95 percent of the time - say it and move on. Like it's totally ok. No one’s going to hold your feet to the fire and say three years later you didn't monetize this way. But it's much better to be clear and concise than it is to start spouting out every single way your company can make money.

Then next one is team. I think that this answer is actually really clear. I think you're trying to do two things. If your team has done something particularly impressive - you need to call that out. "We were the founders of PayPal." Probably want to say that. "We were the founders of Amazon." Probably want to say that. So if you guys have done something that is made investors money. You want to say that. If not, then please don't go on about the awards your team has one or the PhDs - I don't care. I don't care. What we want to hear is how many founders. Hopefully between two and four. We want to here is how many them are technical? How many engineers versus business people. Hopefully it's fifty/ fifty of more engineers. We want to hear is that how long have you guys known each other? We don't want to hear that you guys met a founders dating an even three days ago. Ideally you've known each other either personally or professional for at least six months. We want hear is that you're all working full time. It's really helpful. We're all committed to this business. And what we wanna hear is how you met. That's it. You can get in and out of that two sentences very easy. Your only way to build credentials is if you have accomplished something. And with an investor, typically if you accomplished something that's made someone some money. So don't try to over inflate yourself if you don't have that stat on your resume. Move on. The more you talk about a bad thing - the worse it looks.

So the last one is the big ask. When it comes to this, you have to figure out whether this is a conversation involves fundraising or not. What I tell people is like this is the time where you kind have to know what you're talking about. This is a time where you have to know are you raising on convertible note. Are you raising on a safe. You have to know what the cap of that safe is. You have to know how much money you're raising. You have to know what the minimum check size is. These are things where if you don't know these things, investors going be like, "These guys aren't serious. Or they haven’t done their homework." So where's the rest of this whole thing you shouldn't use any jargon. This part you shouldn't just be like "Oh we're just raising some money." Now is time to actually use a little bit of that jargon. If you don't know that jargon - Google search it. Like it's real simple. You'll guys learn it fast. That's it. That's all your pitch. Done. Game over. Now you let them talk.

When to Fundraise

When to fundraise? This is important. You've got this little growth graph here. Investors like to invest based on traction. It is literally always better to raise money when you have more traction than less. Often times though, you will be in a situation where you're just starting or you just launched. What you need to do is you need to think about how you flip the equation. Your entire mindset should be: you are the ones asking investors for money and therefore they are strong and you are weak. How do you create a scenario where you are strong and they are weak? That's where you want to be fundraising. First, how do you know that you're strong? If investors are asking to give you money, you're strong. That might be a good time to start fundraising. If investors aren't asking about giving you money, are you talking to people about your start up? Or are you running super stealth? If you're talking to people about your start up and you're getting the word out, either through the press or just through talking to your friends or people you know doing startups, that's a good way to start feeding that.

The second this is, have you created a plan so that you can launch and grow without needing to raise a bunch of money? 95% of the startups that I meet can get a product to market with a very little bit of money. Never put the investor in the ultimate position of power. "We can't do anything until you give us money." You always want to flip it around. You always want it to be, "This thing's moving. We all left our jobs. We're all working full time and it's moving. If you want to jump on, great. If not, there are a lot of angel investors." That's the attitude you want to have. That's the confidence you want to have. If you need money early, always plan on needing less money. Always be able to show that you've got a fully committed team that's working fast. That's going to be how you gain an advantage when you can't show traction. If you can show an investor that you haven’t launched yet but you've done eight months of work in one month or two months and you've got a great team that have all quit their jobs and they're totally committed, then you get some advantage back. You don't get all of the advantage unless you have launched and are growing.

Finally how to set up investor meetings. This is really, really simple but I'm surprised at how many companies don't get this right. The first is you want a warm introduction from another entrepreneur preferably. Or a previous investor of yours. That's where you want to start. If someone who's past on your company as an investor offers you to make introductions that's kryptonite. Don't touch that. So first warm introduction. Very simple. You don't want to cold call these people. You don't want to bum rush these people. The person - the credibility of the person who is introducing you to an investor is big part on whether the investor will take that meeting.

Second, think in parallel. So many people that I meet will run the fundraising the super slow process. We met with one guy this we. We're going to schedule a meeting with another guy next week. Another guy three weeks from now. When you're fundraising you're on. It's a sprint. It's not a marathon. So you want to schedule all of your meetings during the same week. It's extremely hard to do but here's one trick that I love - tell when you're emailing investors you getting those warm intros the investors email you back you say, "Hey we would love to set up a meeting but we're building like crazy for the next two weeks. So can we set it in that third week?" Right? So then you've emailed everyone that. Right? So everyone schedules that meeting three weeks out. It's better for them because their calendars open. It's better for you because you've got all you meetings in one week. And also what did you do? You hinted, "Hey. I am not desperate for the money. We're building. Like I can meet you in three weeks but we're building. We're busy." Like it's signally all of the right things. So, that's the best way to kind of go about how you're gonna do that. The last thing is one team member should be investing in fundraising full time. It shouldn't be something that takes over the whole company. Because it's very, very distracting.

After the Meeting

After the meeting the first just like Tyler said in the sales things follow up. This is important. Anything other than a check or wired funds is a no. So they we got to keep talking to partners - I assume that's a no. And so you do want to put some pressure. The way you can do that is get deal heat. A deal heat is just a term that means there's a demand to be in your round. This is the easiest way and important way to drive a price, etc. Do diligence on investors, So let's say you have that five hundred thousand to raise for your seed round on the 8.5 million like we used as an example, Do diligence on the investors - If you do find - I do the diligence on Dalton and I found that hey he's actually not great investor, I can get Millan or Mike Maples or whoever to actually fill the rest of the round. It's uprising to us how money entrepreneurs don't do this. You would - it’s like you would actually spend a lot of time hiring somebody - you’re selling a part of your company to somebody you should know who you're selling it to to make sure they're the type of people you think they are. And then last - know when to stop. So some founders get so good a fundraising they just want to it all the time because it’s much easier to do than actually building the company.

Fundraising does not equal success. Nobody realizes that. We'll say this now but I am sure that everyone will still equate fundraising with success and read about someone’s fundraising and assume that means they're successful.

My intuition about why this is true is because a lot of smart people applied to good schools and to good jobs and they think fundraising is just another application that they can check off. Building a company is much more ambiguous.

Lecture 20 - Later-stage Advice (Sam Altman)

These are the topics we're going to talk about. Again, these are not writing code or talking to users, which means with a few exceptions that I'll try to note, you can ignore them until after you have product market fit. For most companies, these things become important between months 12 and 24. Write these down somewhere and look back them when you get there.

Management

Establish A Structure

In the beginning of a company, there is no management. This actually works really well. Before 20 and 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to founder. It's totally flat. That's really good. That's what you want because at that stage, it's the optimal structure for productivity.

What tricks people is when lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine at 20 employees is disastrous at 30. You want to be aware that this transition will happen. You don't actually need to make the structure complicated. In fact, you shouldn't. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is and for everyone to have exactly one manager. Every manager should know their direct reports.

You ideally want to cluster people in teams that make sense but the most important thing is that there is a clear reporting structure and that everyone knows what it is. Clarity and simplicity are the most important things here. Failing to do this correctly is really bad. Because it works in the early days to have no structure at all, it feels cool to have no structure. Many companies are like, "We're going to try this crazy new management theory and have no structure." You want to innovate on your product and your business model.

Management structure is not where I would recommend trying to innovate. Don't make the mistake of having nothing, but don't make the other mistake of having something super complicated. A lot of people fall into this trap. They think people feel cool if they're someone’s manager and if they're just an employee, they don't feel cool. So people come up with convoluted circular matrices management structures where you report to this person for this thing, and this person for that thing, and this person for that thing, while this person reports to you for this thing. That's a mistake.

Building a Great Product >> Building a Great Company

This is the first instance of an important shift in the founder’s job. Before product market fit, your number job is to build a great product. As the company grows past 25 employees, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company and it stays there for the rest of your time. This is probably the biggest shift in being a founder.

Failure Cases

1. Being Afraid To Hire Senior People

In the early days of a startup, hiring senior people is usually mistake. You just want people that get stuff done, and the willingness to work hard and aptitude matters more than experience. As the company starts to scale, and at about this time when you have to put in place the basic management structure - it is actually valuable to have senior people on the team. Executives that have built companies before. Almost all founders after the first time they hire a really great executive, and that executive takes over big pieces of the business and just makes them happen - the founder says, "Wow! I wish I had done that earlier!" But everybody makes this mistake and waits to long to do this. So don't be afraid to hire senior executives.

2. Hero Mode - Extreme Leading By Example

I will use the example of saying someone that runs the customer service team. Someone who runs the customer service team -- they want to lead by example. This starts from a good place. It's the extreme of leading by example. It's saying, “You know what? I want my team to work really hard rather than tell them to work hard I'm going to set an example. I'm going to work 18 hours a day. I'm going to show people how to get a lot of tickets done." But then company starts growing. They have the normal discomfort of assigning a lot of work to other people. So the company starts growing and the ticket volume keeps going up. Now they're have to do like 19 hours a day, and then 20 hours a day. It’s just obviously not working. But they won't stop and hire people because they're like, "If I stop even for one day we're going to get behind on tickets." The only way to get out of hero mode in this case is to say, "You know what? We're going to get behind on tickets for two or three weeks 'cause I am going to go off and I am going to hire three more support team members. I've calculated based off our growth rate that this is going to last this long. Next time I'm not going to make the same mistake. I'll get ahead of it and hire again."

3. Bad Delegation - Not Giving Enough Responsibility

Most founders have not managed people before and certainly have not managed managers. The bad way you delegate is you say, "Hey, employee, we need to do this big thing. You go off and research it. Come back to me with all the data and the tradeoffs. I'll make a decision and tell it to you and then you go off and implement." That's how most founders delegate. That does not make people feel good and it certainly doesn't scale. A subtle difference but really important is to say, “Hey - you're really smart. That's why I hired you. You go off. Here the things to think about. Here's what I think. But you make this decision. I totally trust you. And let me know what you decide." That's how delegation actually works. Steve Jobs was able to get away with the former, and make every decision himself and people just put up with it. Every founder thinks they're the next Steve Jobs. A lot of people try this. For 99.9 percent of people, this second method here works a lot better.

4. Personal Not Developing A Personal Tracking & Productivity System

When you are working on product, you don't actually need to be that organized in terms of how you run the company and how you talk to people about what they're working on. But if you fail to get your own personal organization system right - where you can keep track in some way of what you need to and what everybody else is doing and what you need to follow up with them on - that will come back to bite you. Developing this early as the company begins to scale is really important.

Codify How You Do Things

Codify Why You Do Things (Cultural Values)

Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders they wish that they had done early: simply writing down how you do things and why you do things. These two things - the how and the why - are really important. In the early days, you just tell everyone. "Employee, when you're sitting around having lunch or dinner, you know this is how we think about building product. This is how we push to production. You know, this is how we handle customer supper."

Codify How You Do Things

As you get bigger you can't keep doing that. If you don't do it, someone else is just going to say it. But if you write it down and put it up on a Wiki or whatever that every employee reads, you as the founder get to basically write the law. And if you write this down it will become law in the company. And if you make everyone read this - as the company hires a hundred and then a thousand employees - people will read this and say, "Alright. That's how we do things."

If you don't do it, it will all be random oral transition of whatever the hiring manager or their best friend that they make it their first week in at the company tells them. So writing down how you do things and the why -- the why is the cultural values. Brian Chest talked about this really well. Every founder I know wishes they written down both of these - the how and the why- earlier to just establish it as the company grows. And then this becomes what happens. It's one of the highest leverage things you can do that people don't.

HR

HR is another thing that most people correctly ignore in the first phase of start up because, again, it's not writing code. It's not talking to users. But it’s a huge mistake they continue to ignore it. The reason I think most founders ignore it is they have in their mind this idea of like TV sitcom HR, you know. Awfulness. But it doesn't have to slow you down. Actually it speeds you up.

Performance Feedback - Simple And Frequent

Most founders will say out of one side of their mouth, "People are our most important asset." And the other side, "We don't want any HR." So what they mean is that we don't HR - we don't want the bad kind TV HR. What good HR means is a few things. A clear structure. Which we already talked about you know a path for people about how they can evolve their careers. Most important, one of the most important things is "Performance Feedback." Again, this happens organically early on. People know how they're doing. As the company gets to 25, 30, 45 people - that gets lost and it doesn't have to be complex. It can be super simple. But there should be a way that it happens and it should be frequent. People need hear pretty quickly how they're doing. It should tell if they are doing badly to where you get them out of the company. Or if they're doing well it should. There should be a clear path to how this ties to compensation. That’s the next thing.

Compensation Bands Tied To Performance

In the early days of a startup, people compensation is whatever they negotiate with the founder and it's all over the place. As you grow - it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these "Compensation Bands". So a mid-level engineer is in this range. A senior engineer is this range. Here's how you move from this to this. It keeps things really fair. Someday everyone will find out everyone else's comp. If it's all over the place, it will be complete meltdown disaster. If you put these bands in place early you will at least be fail. It will also save you a lot of crazy negotiation.

Equity - Be Generous

One thing that I think is really important when it comes to HR is equity. Most people get this right now for the early employees. They give a lot of equity. But you should continue to give a lot of equity all the way through. And this is one place that you investors will always give you bad advice. I think - not YC. But all other investors give bad advice here. Most do. You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees. Now this dilutes everyone.

This dilutes you as the founder and the investors equally. For some reason founder usually understand this as good. Investors are very short-sighted and don’t want to dilute themselves so they'll like fight you over every equity grant. But, we've seen a lot of data at YC now and the most successful companies - and the ones where the investors do the best - end up given a lot of stock out to employees. Year after year... After year.

Stock and Vesting

"You should think about for the next ten years you're going to be given out 3- 5 percent of the company every year 'cause you just get bigger and bigger. So the individual grants gets smaller but in actuality it's a lot of stock. This is really important to do if you value your people you should be doing this. Specifically, you need to do this with refresher grants. And you should get a plan in place for this early. You never want an employee in a place where they vested 3 out of their four years in stock and they start thinking about leaving. So you should ALWAYS stay in front of peoples vesting schedules. And you know how they plan early where you have refresher grants in place.

There are a lot of new structures that people have been using here. I personally like six year big grants - but six years of vesting. 'Cause I think these companies take a while to build. There's pyramid vesting where you back weight someone’s grant. In year four they get a lot more of the vesting than year one. There's a concept - different names for it, but something like continuous forward vesting where people's grants are automatically re-upped. Every year. At the same number of share. Whatever you decide, get an option management system in place at about this point. The normal way people do this is just someone keeps an Excel spreadsheet. I have seen mistakes that have cost employees or companies tens of millions of dollars because they didn't get this right.There's really good option management systems or software and you should get those in place around this point.

50 Employees Requirements

Common examples are that you have to start "Sexual Harassment Training and Diversity Training". There's a bunch of others as well. But just put a little pen in your mind that when you cross 50 employees there's a new set of HR rules that you have to comply with.

Monitoring Your Team For Burnout

It's up to product market fit. It's just a sprint. Now it becomes marathon. At this point you actually don't want people to work a 100 hours a week forever. You want them to go on vacation. You want them to have new challenges and do new things. And if you let the whole company get burned out all at once - that is often a company ending thing.

Hiring Process

Another thing that most founders regret is they don't hire - as soon as everything is working, you should hire a "full time recruiter". If you do this early - that's bad 'cause you'll hire too fast. That usually implodes. But most founders get behind the ball on this. There are a lot of sort of hiring process tips.

Think About Diversity Early

Here’s one that you do need to think about before the 12 to 24 month mark. Which is "Diversity on the team." The most common place this comes up honestly is people that hire you know all guys on their engineering team for the first 15 or 20 people. And at that point you get a culture in place that sort of takes on a life of its own. Most founders that I've spoken to that have made this mistake regret it. They wish they had hired some diversity of perspective on the team earlier on. Engineering teams are not the only place where it comes up. But that's where you see it the most often, and if you get this right early, you’ll be able to grow the team much more quickly over the long term.

Growth Of Your Early Employees

The other thing to think about is what happens to your early employees. So a common situation that happens is the company past the early employees. You know the company - you hire a engineer who's a really great engineer but then as the engineering team grows, you need a VP of engineering. The early engineer wants to be the VP of engineering. You can't do that, but you don't want the early employee to leave. They are an important part of the culture. They know a lot. People love them. So I think you want you be very proactive about this. You want to think about, "What's the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows?" And then just talk to them about it. Very directly. Be up front, you know. Sit them down and say, "I want to see where you want to see your career go inside of this company."

Company Productivity

This is something that you don't need to think in the early days because small teams are just naturally productive most of the time. But as you grow, it - the productivity - goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort. Because it's sort of one these connections between nodes. Every pair of people add communication overhead. If you don't start thinking about the systems that you're going to put in place when the company is 25-50 people to stay productive as you grow - things will grind into a halt faster than you can imagine.

Alignment

The second word that matters most to keep the company productive as it grows is "Alignment". The reason companies become unproductive is people are either not on the same page and you know don't know what the same priorities are. Or they actively working against each other. Which is obviously worse. But if you can keep the entire aligned in the same direction, you have won well over half of the battle. The way to start with this is just a very clear road map and goals. Everyone in the company should know what the road map for the next three or six months or a year - depending on where the company is in its life cycle.

You know a classic test that I love to give - is if I walk into a company getting - beginning to struggle with these scaling issues - I'll ask the founders, "Like, if I walked around and pulled 10 random employees and asked them what the top three goals for the company are right now - would they all say the same thing?" And 100 percent of the time the founder says, “Yes. Of course they would."

Then I'll go do it and 100 percent of the time, no two employees even say the same three top three goals in order. The founders can never believe it. Because they're like, "Well I announced it in all hands like three months what are goals were going to be. And how can they not remember?" But it's really important to keep reiterating the message about the road map and the goals. Almost no founder does this enough. And if you do it, you know the company will say, "You know, alright. These are our goals. We understand them and we're going to get them. “ Self-organize around that. But if people don't know what the road map of the goals are, it won't happen.

We already talked about figuring out your values early but I want to reiterate that. 'Cause that'll also really help company make the right decision. If everyone knows what the framework to decide it - they'll make hopefully the same decisions if they're smart people.

Be Run By Product, Not Process

You want to continue to be run by great products and not process for its own sake. This is a fine, fine line. Because you do need to put some process in place. But you never want to put process in place that rewards the process. The focus has to always be on great product. One easy way to do this that a lot of companies try is they just say, "We're gonna ship something every day."

Transparency And Rhythm In Communication

Most founders wait way too long on these but having a management meeting every week of just the people that report directly to the founder and the CEO - critical. All hands meeting - not quite sure how often is optimal for those. At least once a month. Where you go through the results and the road map of the entire company. Really important. Then doing a plan every quarter of what we're going to get done over the next three months and how that fits into our goals for the year - also becomes really important.

I put "Offsite" up there, because people don't do those nearly enough. A surprising number of the successful companies we've been involved with do a lot of off-sites. Where they take their best people for a weekend to a cabin in the woods or somewhere and just talk about what we want to be when we grow up. What are most important things to be doing? What are we not doing that we should be doing? But get people out of the office and out of the day today. Everyone I know that does thinks they're well worth the time.

The Goal

So the goal in all of this productivity planning is that you're trying to build a company that creates a lot of value over a long period of time. And the long period of time is what's important here. You can avoid all of this and with the authority of the founder - make sure the company ships a great next version. But that won't work for version 10. It won't work for version 11. The single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows. If you look at the examples of this - most companies fail here. Most companies do one great thing where the founder just pushes to get it done and then don't innovate that well on follow on products. It really takes founders that think about how I am going to do this second thing - this really hard thing to get something like an apple that can turn out great products for 30 or 40 years. Or longer.

Mechanics

This is definitely just to put on a list and remember these things for later

• Clean books, Accounting Firm, Audits
• Collect your legal documents - easy to fix now if you're missing something
• FF stock for the B round
• IP, Trademarks, Patents
  • Month 11, Provisional, International
  • Trademarks, US and international
  • Domains, misspellings, and all TLDs
• Financial Planning & Analysis
• Consider hiring a full-time fundraiser
• Tax structuring

Your Psychology

It gets worse. Not better. As the company grows you continue to osculate. The highs are better but the lows keep getting worse. And you really want to think about this early on and just be aware that this is going to happen. And try to, try to manage your own psychology through the expanding swing that it's going through.

Ignore the Haters

Another thing that happens as you begin to be successful as you go from being someone that most people rooted for - kind of the underdog, to someone that a lot of people hating on. You see this first in internet commenters who will be like, "I can't believe this shitty company raised money. It fucking sucks. It's like awful. And it only bothers you a little bit. But then journalists that you kind of care about it start writing this and it just goes on and on. This also will go on and on as you get more and more successful. You just have to make peace with this early. But if you don't it will bother you all the way through.

Long Term Commitment; Long Term Strategy

This is also a good time to start thing about how long of a journey this is going to be. Very few founders think long term. Most founders think kind of a year in advance and they think, "You know what? In three years I am going to sell my company and either I am going to become a VC or sit on the beach or something." Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building - the ones that do have a huge advantage. They're in a a very rare flight class. So this is a good time to sit around with your co-founders and decide, "You know what - we're going to work on this for a very long time and we're gonna build a strategy that assumes that we're going to be doing this for the next ten years." Just thinking that way alone, it's probably a very high leverage thing you can do for success.

Monitor Burnout

Take vacation. Another common thing that we see is founders will run their business for three or four years without ever taking more of a day of vacation. And that works for a year or two years or something like that. It really leads to a nasty burn out.

Focus

Losing focus is another way that founders get off track. This is a symptom of burnout. When you get really burned out on running business you want to do easier things or sort of more gratifying things. You want to go to conferences and have people tell you how great you are. You know what to do all these things that are not actually building a business. And the most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund is that they are incredible focused during YC on their company - and then after, they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies. They go to conferences. Whatever. Focus is what made you successful in the first place. There are a lot of reasons people lose focus. But fight against that really, really hard.

Ignore Acquisition Interest

This is a special case of focus. As you start to do well - you will start to get a bunch of potential acquires sniffing around. And it's very gratifying. You're like, "Wow! I can be so rich." And I'll be so cool. And MNA negotiations feel really fun. This is one of the biggest killers of companies. Is that they entertain acquisition conversations. You distract yourself. You get demoralized if it doesn't happen. If an offer does come in - it's really low. You've already mentally thought that you're done and so you take the offer. As a general rule don't start any acquisition conversation unless you're willing to sell for a pretty low number. Don't ever just check it hoping that you're going to have the one miracle high offer. If that's going to happen you’ll know because they'll just make you a big offer before you can meet them. But this is big company killer.

Startups Fail When Founders Quit

And then - just a reminder to everybody - that things that kills startups at some level is the founders giving up. So sometimes you should quit but if you mismanage your own psychology and you quit when you shouldn’t, that is what kills companies. That is the final cause of death for most of these startups. And so if you can manage your own Psychology in a way that you don't quit - don't get to a place where you need to quit or give up on the startup. You'll be in a far far better place.

Marketing & PR

• Start thinking about this once your product is working - don't ignore it
• Don't outsource the key messaging, founders have to figure out what the message of the company is going to bet
• Repeat the key messages again and again
• Get to know key journalists, biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm

Deals

1. Build a great product, nothing else matters
2. Develop a person connection with anyone you're trying to do any sort of big deal with, care about them and what they're going to get out of this
3. Have a competitive dynamic, have a competitive situation, this is a basic principal of negotiation
4. Be persistent, go beyond your comfort point here most of the time as a founder
5. Ask for what you want, if you want something in a deal - just ask for it

Q&A

Q: how you square the device of diversity being important with earlier speakers saying that you want people that are very similar.

A: The difference is that what you want is diversity of backgrounds. But you don't want diversity of vision. Like where companies get in trouble is when they have people that think very differently about what the company should be doing or don't work well together. You don't want that. You do want hire people that you know and that you trust and that you can work with, but if everyone on the team comes from exactly the same background you do end up developing somewhat of a monoculture. Which often causes problems down the road. Not always. Some companies have been successful with that. So what we tell people is hire people that you know and that you've worked with before. But try to hire people that complementary and aligned towards the same goal. Not people that are exactly the same. 'Cause you just get a better skill set.

Q: How to keep track productivity systems?

A: I keep one piece of paper with my goals for sort of three to twelve month time frame. And I look at that every day. And then separately I keep one page for every day of my short term goals for that day. And so if I need to do something in like a week I just flip forward seven pages and I write down. And then I also keep a list of every person and what they're working on and what I need to tell them and what I need to talk to them about. What we talked about last time. So every time I sit down with someone I kind of the full state and a list of things for that person that works really well.

Q: Any advice for how to fail gracefully?

A: Most startups fail and Silicon Valley almost goes too far on how it loves failure. Failure still sucks. You should still try not to fail. And this whole like thing of like "Ahh failure is great!" I don't agree with, but it will happen to most people most of the time and it's a very forgiving environment. As long as you are up front about it and ethical and don't let anyone get into bad situation. So if you're failing, first of all you should tell your investors, and second of all, you should not totally run out of money. What you don't want is blow up which a bunch of depths that the company owe and everyone showing up to work one day and the door being locked.

You'll know when you're failing and you'll know the company - things just aren't going to work. And you should just tell you investors, "Like hey. Sorry. This isn't going to work." No one will be surprised. Like I expect to lose my - or I'm willing to lose my money on every investment I ever I make. I know that happens most of the time and the winners pay for it you know still with a factor of a hundred. And so it's ok, No one - people will be very understanding and supportive. But you want to tell people early. You don't want to surprise them. And you want - you don't want to like let your employees get shocked when they know they don't have job. You want shut the company down in a graceful way. Help them find jobs. Make sure you give the two or four weeks of severance payment so they're not suffering a cash flow problem. All that stuff is pretty important.

Q: How many immigrant founders have we seen in YCombinator?

A: In the last batch - I think it probably went up for this next batch. In our last batch 41% of the founders we founded we're born outside the US. From 30 different countries. So it's a pretty big percentage.

Q: Apart from the Valley where do I think are other good places to start a startup

A: I still think the Valley is the best by a very significant margin. But I think it's finally maybe beginning to weaken a little bit because the costs have just gotten out of control. To be clear - if I was going to start a company I still wouldn't think about it. I still will pick Silicon Valley. And think if you look at the data of companies of over the last few years that is to wins by a lot. But Seattle, LA - Lots of places outside the US - I think all of these makes sense.

Q: When should the founders think about hiring a professional CEO?

A: Never. You - if you look at the most successful companies in tech they are run by their founders for a very long time. Sometimes forever. Sometimes they even hire professional CEO and realize that is not going to like build a great company and so Larry Page came to be CEO again. I think if you don't want to be the long term CEO of a company - you probably shouldn't start one. I am not totally sure about that. I think there are exceptions. But generally that the transition that I talked about today if you go from build ing a great product to building a great company being a founder for nine of the ten years is going to be about building that great company and if you're not excited about doing that - I think you should think hard about it.

Q: Is there a way to get involved with YC before getting funded?

A: No and intestinally not. I say the one thing you can do is if you work at a YC company and then later apply - I think probably like - well not probably that definitely if you get a good recommendation from those founders will help with YC. So you know, working at a YC company helps but there's not much you can do to help. And that's intention. Like there is no pre start up in a way that there is premed. You should just focus on whatever doing and then when you start a start up - there are `things like YC and others that are structured to help you. Most of the founders we fund we don't know at all before we do it. You know you really don't need to get to know us or get involved. We're all good that way.

Q: The question is what criteria to pick startups and has it gotten harder? Has it changed?

A: The two things that we need to see are good founders and a good idea. And without both of those we won't fund the company. But that hasn't changed. That is always been the case. The applicant pool to YC has grown quite a bit. But most of - a lot of the growth is people who shouldn't be starting start up anyone that are just doing it 'cause it is sort of the cool thing now. So you know if you're really passionate about an idea and the idea is good and you are smart and you get things done and your we executing - I still think you have a very reasonable shot at YC even though the headline number is bigger.

Q: if there's a market that you’re excited about but don’t a lot about yet what should you do?

A: Two schools of thought on this. One is to just jump right in. Learn it as you go. That's worked a lot of times. The other is go work at another company in the space or do something in the market for a year or two years. I lean slightly towards the second but as long as you are willing to really learn and really study and to get uncomfortably close to your users - either case would work. And I don't even thinks that it’s that much of a disadvantage. I think all things being equal go spend a couple of years learning about it in detail but I don't think you have to.

Q: do I think investors are going to fund less YC companies as we grow.

A: No. Definitely not. Like certainly the trend in this is the other way. We have more and more investors saying that half their portfolio is not YC companies and they look forward to the day where it's three quarters. No I don't think that’s a problem at all. I think that so not on my top hundred problem list. The opposite of that maybe.

Q: When should a group of founders raise a seed round or Series A?

A: In general it's nice to wait until you have the idea figured out and initial signs of promise before you raise money. Raising money puts some pressure on the company. And once you've raised money you can't be in this exploratory phase indefinitely. You end up having to rush and so like if you haven’t raised money and your idea is not working you can fall around and pivot until you really hit on the thing that’s working. But if you've raised money and your idea doesn’t work - You're in this oh shit moment. And you have to pivot and you pivot to whatever vaguely plausible idea is. And that’s bad. So I think if you can wait to raise any outside capital more than say like a hundred or 200 thousand dollars even necessary - but ideally not even that. Until things are working or at least pointed in the direction of working you're way better off.