People will tell you to hire for intelligence, but intelligence is overrated. Other hiring criteria are equally or more important.  <ul><li>Drive. Self-motivation will cause people to push and push until they succeed. </li><li>Curiosity. Anyone who loves what they do will be intensely curious about it.</li><li>Ethics. Ethics are hard to test for, but if you see any whiff of less than stellar ethics, avoid the candidate.</li></ul>

Criteria for hiring great people

You can see drive in a candidate's eyes and background.<ul><li>Look for what someone has done, not just been involved in or been part of. For example, they started a business in high school. They started and ran a nonprofit in high school.</li><li>If you can't find anything - if the candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives without achieving something distinct and notable, they probably aren't driven. You're not going to change them.</li></ul>

Drive

Someone who loves what they do will read about it, study it, talk to other people about it, immerse themselves in it and work like anything to stay current. Anyone who isn't curious doesn't love what they do.  And you should hire people who love what they do.

Curiosity

Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of conversion are quite low. Ministers and priests should give people another chance, not hiring managers at startups.<ul><li>One way to test for honesty is to see how they react when they don't know something.  They'll either say they don't know, or they'll talk nonsense and hope you won't notice. </li><li>If they're trying to deceive you during the hiring process, they'll deceive you once they're onboard.</li></ul>

Ethics

<ol><li>Have a written hiring process and ensure everyone has a paper copy of it. Many startups have a random hiring process and hire randomly.</li><li>Do basic skills tests. Ask them basic questions about how to do things in their domain. For a sales rep, have them sell you on your product all the way to a closed deal. For a marketing person, have them whiteboard out a launch for your new product. </li><li>Plan out and write down interview questions.</li><li>Pay attention to the little details during the interview process to show what the person will be like.</li><li>Pay attention to the small things during the reference calls.</li></ol>

How to run the hiring process

<ul><li>Know that while you're going to hate firing someone, you'll feel way better after the fact.</li><li>Realise that the great people on your team will be happy that you've done it as they knew the person wasn't working out. But watch how you fire people, as others will watch how you deal with people.</li><li>Realise that you're often doing the person a favour as you're releasing them from a role where they won't get promoted or valued.</li></ul>Be sure to value the people on your team as they are exceptional.

Fixing hiring mistakes

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

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Marc Andreessen: How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

"The Art Spirit", by Robert Henri is about creativity through the lens of an art student.  The book starts, "Art, when really understood, is a province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things - anything. Well, it is not an outside extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He opens ways for better understanding." Startups are interesting to others. They don't have to be painters to be artists. They can work in any medium.

Startups are like artists

It's not just how important the end product is but the actual craft of doing the work, inventing within the work. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways.

Learn how important the work is

The old masters did know how they compose their pictures. Do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them.  It's easy to fall in the footsteps of others, to do what they do because you think it's the right way. You may think if they've had success, you can copy that success. Yet, you have to find your own path to be successful.

Do what has not been done before

An art student must be a master from the start. He must be a master of his own tools. That mastership is not a destination. It is a process and constant practice. It is not enough to think of great things. What really matters is the work. To implement those ideas. Other's success seems like it happened in just a moment, but it takes years and years of patience.

Be a master of your own tools

If you don't have purpose that is shared between everyone, you will not do anything that is timeless. You must focus on building what you want to see in the world. When you have a passion for building for yourself, that' will draw other people to your cause and your team.

You cannot do anything without a shared sense of purpose 

Bill Walsh took a football team near the bottom and brought them to the top. He focused entirely on a new standard of performance. The most challenging transition for an entrepreneur is going from individual action to leading a team. First, start with an idea and a philosophy of purpose, then find people to help you implement it.

The Score Takes Care of Itself, by Bill Walsh

<ol><li>Start with a comprehensive recognition of reverence for identifying the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team's performance.</li><li>Be clear on your expectations of effort and execution of your standard.</li><li>Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area.</li><li>Teach your beliefs, values and your philosophy.</li><li>Teach connection and extension. You don't want independent contractors, you want people who feel connected that can expand the organization.</li><li>Make the expectations and metrics of competence.</li></ol>

Establish a standard of performance

<ol><li>Be yourself</li><li>Be committed to excellence</li><li>Be positive</li><li>Be prepared to recognize fortunate situations and act on them immediately. Good luck is a product of good planning.</li><li>Act professional. Push in your chairs, tuck in your shirts. If you build an organization that does that, you build an organization that cares about itself.</li><li>Be organized.</li><li>Be accountable</li><li>Be near-sighted and far-sighted.</li><li>Be firm</li><li>Be flexible</li><li>Believe in yourself</li><li>Be a leader. Ensure to show and not tell.</li></ol>

Habits of a leader

<ol><li>Exbihit paralyzing patience.</li><li>Engage in massive delegating. </li><li>Act in a tedious, overly cautious manner.</li><li>Become best buddies with certain employees or play favouritism.</li><li>Spend excessive time socializing with superiors or subordinates</li><li>Fail to continue performance evaluations of long-time or tenured staff members.</li><li>Fail to actively participate in efforts to praise and acquire new hires.</li><li>Trust others to carry out your fundamental duties.</li><li>Find ways to get out from under the responsibilities of your position.</li><li>Promote a laid-back organisational environment.</li></ol>

What not to do

<ol><li>Praise is more valuable than blame.</li><li>Set expectations. Use every means before and after comment to tell troops what they're going to do and what they have done.</li><li>Discipline is based on pride in the profession of arms, meticulous attention to detail, and mutual respect and confidence.</li><li>Officers must assert themselves by example.</li><li>General officers must be seen in the front line during action.</li><li>There's a tendency for the chain of command to overload junior officers with excessive requirements in the way of training.</li></ol>

How General Patton ran his army during World War One

<ol><li>Formally celebrate and observe the momentous achievement and ensure everyone feels ownership of it.</li><li>Allow pats on the back for a limited time.</li><li>Be apprehensive about applause.</li><li>Develop a plan for your staff that gets them back into the mode of operation that produced success.</li><li>Address specific situations that need shoring up. </li><li>Be demanding. Do not relax.</li><li>Don't fall prey to overconfidence. Make change for the sake of change.</li><li>Make hard decisions immediately after success.</li><li>Never fall prey to the belief that getting to the top makes everything easy. It doesn't.</li><li>Mastery is a process, not a destination.</li></ol>

How to protect against the success disease

Keep a list of everything that you want to do every day and a list of things that you don't want to do. This will help to establish patterns for yourself. Every day for a week, wake up to this note. Check it throughout the day and before you fall asleep.For example:Do's<ul><li>Stay present.</li><li>Be vulnerable. Show people your mistakes and fears.</li><li>Drink only lemon water and red wine.</li><li>Exercise.</li></ul> Don't's<ul><li>Don't avoid eye contact.</li><li>Don't be late.</li><li>Don't set expectations for someone and not meet them.</li><li>Don't eat sugar.</li><li>Dont drink hard liquor or beer on weekdays.</li></ul>

Keep daily notes

How to Start a Business: A Startup Guide for Entrepreneurs

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The Startup Masterclass

Jack Dorsey at Startup School 2013. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals! https://www.startupschool.org/

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Jack Dorsey at Startup School 2013

Jack Dorsey at Startup School

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth.  Startups are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, that if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. This means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

Startup: A Primer

To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale.For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did, the barbershop couldn't accommodate them.

Scalability

It might seem that it would always be better to start a startup than an ordinary business. If you're going to start a company, why not start the type with the most potential? The catch is that this is a (fairly) efficient market. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have much competition. If you write software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll face ferocious competition, precisely because that's such a larger prize.

Ideas

Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. But unlike most people they had the technical expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as good as they could be, and to know how to improve them. Over the next few years, their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough. But as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched.

Solving Our Own Problem

That's one connection between startup ideas and technology. Rapid change in one area uncovers big, soluble problems in other areas. Sometimes the changes are advances, and what they change is solubility. That was the kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could afford. But in Google's case, the most important change was the growth of the web. What changed there was not solubility but bigness.

The Importance Of Technology Advancement

The real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have.The growth story has three phases:<ul><li>There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.</li><li>As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth.</li><li>Eventually, a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.</li></ul>

Being On The Right Path

The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent. Its length and slope determine how big the company will be.The slope is the company's growth rate. If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly.

The S Curve

The best thing to measure the growth rate is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make money, its revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users

How To Measure Growth: The Best Indicators

We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered and should be correspondingly alarmed.Programmers will recognize what we're doing here. We're turning starting a startup into an optimization problem.

Using Coding Skills To Hack A Startup Growth

Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right? Should you spend two days at a conference? Should you hire another programmer? Should you focus more on marketing? Should you spend time courting some big customer? Should you add x feature? Whatever gets you your target growth rate.

Don't Focus On Ten Things, Just One

The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.The constraint of growing at a certain rate can help define a startup.

Growth Works On Your Startup Pivoting

A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.Our intuitions are no guide here. What happens to fast-growing startups tends to surprise even the founders.

Compounding Growth

Considering how valuable a successful startup can become, anyone familiar with the concept of expected value would be surprised if the failure rate weren't high.

The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk. Startups pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the returns when they do succeed are so high. But that's not the only reason investors like startups. An ordinary slower-growing business might have just as good a ratio of return to risk if both were lower. So why are VCs interested only in high-growth companies? The reason is that they get paid by getting their capital back, ideally after the startup IPOs, or failing that when it's acquired.

Why VCs Love Unicorns

The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because such investments are so easy to oversee. The founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors. Why do founders want to take the VCs' money? Growth, again. The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow. If you have such an idea and don't grow fast enough, competitors will. Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree.

Enriching The VCs

Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraising. They could grow the company on their own revenues, but the extra money and help supplied by VCs will let them grow even faster. Raising money lets you choose your growth rate.

Growth Is The Reason Startups Get Repeat Funding

If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology — because ideas for fast-growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change.Growth makes successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups.

Understand Growth

Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble, but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.

The Bottom Line

An important read for anyone thinking of starting up a company.

Startup = Growth

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

Don't Think Of An Idea

Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far, the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That modus operandi is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield a few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

Problems Should Be There For A Startup To Get Birth

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently.You have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.

At Least One User Who Needs Your Service

When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.You don't need the narrowness. It's depth you need; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth (and speed). But you almost always do get it. In practice, the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.

Identify The Immediate Need

How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company or just a niche product? Often you can't.How do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.

Big Idea Small Idea

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

The way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice."We can call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.That may not have been what you wanted to hear.

Live in The Future, Then Build What's Missing

You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend. If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one.For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year.

There Is No Recipe

Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing.What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later.

The Visionary

Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable.If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present-day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future.

Stuff That Annoys You

When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you.This means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.

Something Obvious That No One Saw

Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it.The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup — becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by spending time learning about the easy part.

Just Do It

The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain:(a) The inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software.(b) Since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.

The Great Mixup

Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question.Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.

You Are Not Late

A crowded market is actually a good sign because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions is good enough. A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously big and yet in which they have no competitors. So any startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a market with existing competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).

A Crowded Market

Thousands of programmers were in a position to see this idea of having a smooth and seamless process to make a payment; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments.Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.

Don't Avoid The Problem, Move Towards It

One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the example of the organic method. Organic ideas feel like inspirations. There are a lot of stories about successful startups that began when the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but "just knew" it was promising. When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.

Go For Organic Ideas

How to Get Startup Ideas

Well, you should have some superpowers. It's generally speaking useful to be a good product person. It's useful to have good skills in leadership, bringing networks in, persuading people, and it's useful to be able to -and this is kind of fundamental- recognize whether you are on track or not. Generally speaking, you have to have some things that are a unique edge to you, some things that are unique to the problem you are trying to solve, and some things that will help you get an edge. Because competitive differentiation and competitive edge are super important.

How to be a great founder

It's usually best to have two or three people you trust on a team rather than being a solo founder. It's not to say that solo founders don't actually play out successfully. But most often, two or three people are much better.If you have two or three founders, you have different skills you can compensate. In the diversity of problems you encounter as a founder, you can actually attack them.

The founding team

Great founders seek the networks that will be essential to their task. And they realize it's not just about, "I am superman, I can do this anywhere". In order to be successful, you have to go to where the strongest networks are for the particular kind of thing that I am doing.The reason why Silicon Valley startups are so successful is because of all of the great people you meet there.

The choice of location

It's very conventional to say you're a contrarian these days. So it's actually pretty easy to become contrarian. It's hard to be contrarian and right. When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about how is it that smart people disagree with you, from a position of intelligence. And that there is something that you know that they don't know that will actually play out to be true.

Being a contrarian

As a founder, should you be doing the work? Or should you be recruiting people and delegating the work? The answer to this is, actually, you need to do both. In fact, not only you need to do both, but you need to sometimes do one at 100% and sometimes the other at 100%.  And so what you will see, when you start thinking about what makes you a great founder, is you navigate these apparent paradoxes.

Delegating vs. doing the work

And the reason for this is that entrepreneurs are frequently given the advice to have a vision and stay firm against their adversity.<ul><li> 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. </li><li>The other piece of advice given with each equal vigor is to listen to data and listen to customers. Pivot, be flexible.</li></ul>Part of what being a great founder means is being both able to think about what it is you want to be doing, and also being smart enough that you are listening to criticism.

Be both flexible and persistent

Founders are thought of as being risk takers. Where everyone else cowers in fear, they boldly go out. You have to be a risk taker, you have to be thinking about how you make a really coherent risk because in fact the only really big opportunities happen to be ones that have more risks associated with them. On the other hand, when you are beginning to apply how you think about risks as an entrepreneur, you have to also think about how you essentially take this risk in an intelligent way that doesn't just go, "oh yeah, risk to the wind, who cares."

The risk takers

You should jump between them. You should always have a long-term vision in mind. But if you are not focused on solving the problem that's immediately in front of you, you're screwed. 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?"

Long-term vision vs solving a local near-term problem

It's a constantly changing problem to face when you are trying to found a company. 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 also 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.

How do you gather networks around you?

People frequently think product strategy is fundamental to startups- I have a product idea, that's a thing, I'm a founder. Actually, the next level down on strategy is usually product distribution, because no matter how good your product is, if it doesn't get the customers, you’re hosed.

Product distribution

That is actually pretty important in being able to judge a founder. Because if you don't have that level of clarity, you are not going to be able to assemble the network behind you. You are not going to be able to get investors, you are not going to be able to get employees. You have to be able to articulate a very clear mission about what you are doing.

The ability to say coherently what you are targeting

Lecture Transcript: http://www.genius.com/Reid-hoffman-lecture-13-how-to-be-a-great-founder-annotated So you've learned how to get started, how to raise money, how to build products, and how to grow. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Ventures, addresses many of the questions and confusions that might be cropping up - How to be a Great Founder. See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13 Discuss this lecture: http://www.startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64042

Lecture Transcript: http://www.genius.com/Reid-hoffman-lecture-13-how-to-be-a-great-founder-annotated

So you've learned how to get started, how to raise money, how to build products, and how to grow. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock Ventures, addresses many of the questions and confusions that might be cropping up - How to be a Great Founder.

See the slides and readings at http://www.startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13

Discuss this lecture: http://www.startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64042

How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 13)

How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup)

Startup ideas are rarely lightbulb moments. It's more like having an idea of something you could do that nobody else has done before, and it's probably a bad idea. Or, the idea seems way implausible, but you want to see what happens, for example, the beginning of Facebook.

Seeing ideas in retrospect

Good ideas are often not quite intuitive. The outcomes of startups are hard to predict. There's a tremendous amount of luck involved. An idea might have something to it, but it's not obvious.

The indeterminacy of ideas

Find someone you trust, and then find someone they trust. In other words, take recommendations from people. When you hire via the web, don't hire too fast. Paul Graham picked Robert Morris as a cofounder because he was his co-conspirator. Robert was an exceptional programmer. He could program as fast as he could type. When they needed more programmers, they recruited the smartest person Robert knew.

How to pick co-founders

Advise for startups are often counintuitive and not obvious. For example:<ul><li>Don't do things that scale at first. Don't try to do too much in the beginning. You should do things that don't scale, meaning in a sort of handmade artisanal way so you can learn a lot from it.</li><li>Do things very manually for your early customers. If you think you know the solution and build lots of stuff for it, you might be wrong because you don't know yet. Once you know what you should be building, then focus on scaling.</li><li>As long as you have a constant growth rate, it means exponential growth.</li></ul>

Startups are very counterintuitive

The hardest part of being a sole founder is morale.  When you start out, there are a million reasons why what you're doing isn't going to work. When you're a sole founder, there's no one to keep you going when things are going badly and no one to cheer you up.

Why being a sole founder is difficult

<ul><li>Most of the time, startup companies fail because of poor execution by the founders. </li><li>Startups seldom fail because of competition. </li><li>Startups are more likely to succeed if they start with a good founding team that knows one another well, can work together and can stand stress together.</li><li>Founders are not just smart people. More importantly, they have to be determined to succeed.</li><li>You don't have to be that creative if you care enough about users. You can just follow what makes users happy.</li></ul>

What makes startup companies succeed or fail

The risk of launching early is not so great as the risk of launching late. <ul><li>Launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as there are ten people who are glad that you launched because now they can do something that they couldn't do.</li><li>If you're not embarrassed with what you launched, you launched too late.</li></ul>

When to launch

<ul><li>Figure out not just what users think is wrong but what's actually wrong. What's missing in their life?</li><li>Ask them "What would you like to do that you can't?" They'll tend to give you an answer that's like a subset. </li><li>Try to find out what they really mean. Ask them, "What if you could do such-and-such?"</li></ul>

Best tips for a great user interview

If you don't pay attention to users, you will make up some idea in your head that you will call your vision, and then you will spend time thinking about your vision by yourself and build some elaborate thing without talking to users. You are better off finding someone with a problem that they will pay you to fix and then see if you can find more people like that.

The importance of paying attention to users

Geoff Ralston interviews YC founder Paul Graham and draws out startup wisdom. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals! https://www.startupschool.org/

A Conversation with Paul Graham - Moderated by Geoff Ralston

A question that lingers in the minds of many working professionals, either experienced or freshers, is whether they should build their own startup or not.A study by Harvard has shown that there are three primary reasons people venture into startups:<ul><li>Many times, it's driven by a zest to really solve a problem that is faced by the future founder itself.</li><li>Sometimes, a major gap is discovered in an industry/sector that the future founder feels he can cover and make money.</li><li>The third reason is love for a particular industry/sector and motivation to grow aggressively..</li></ul>

Building One's Own Startup

Starting up due to Love for a particular industry is often the outcome of creative thinkers, who start their own firm, with the key investment being their creativity.Startup founders are divided into two buckets: Billionaires 1 & 2.

The Two Buckets Of Founders

These are the ones who experiment right from their college days. Most of the time, they connect to the third reason for building a startup- creativity. They love a specific industry and really want to make their mark on it. The biggest advantage college students have is that of low liabilities and tons of resources.A downside is that it's often the first time that they are building anything, and as such, they often make a lot of mistakes, which might hamper the growth or development of their service/product.

Billionaires 1

These are folks who have worked in a particular industry for at least 3-4 years and have identified a gap, which forms the genesis of their startup vision. The gap can be something small, like optimization of a particular sales/marketing/manufacturing process, or building an entirely different operating and business model for the same industry.These folks are quite well suited for a startup, having prior professional experience, knowledge of how things work, soft skills, team building, management, etc.

Billionaires 2

Across all the three reasons and two buckets, a thing that's common is the endpoint. The startup works or it doesn’t. In either case, the founder benefits a lot. For he is someone who has learned real-life lessons, has donned multiple hats, has built a team, a product, a business stream, managed the branding, marketing, etc. These are all the things the founding team is actually expected to do and with this experience, any founder becomes a valuable asset to the organization.

The Endpoint

The question, should you start up, is highly qualitative in nature. Is the problem statement you identified big enough? Do you have any liabilities? Would you be the one who can wear multiple hats for at least 1 year of the startup? Do you have co-founders who are with you on your vision? Do you have enough money in the bank that can sustain you for at least 6months? Do you have industry knowledge of the problem you are solving? A founder needs to be honest about the above questions and gauge independently the feasibility.

The Main Question

We have met folks who are in their 40s and 50s who regret not working on a startup in their 20s. There are folks in their 20s who think they should build a startup once their life is settled off, probably in their late 30s or 40s. And then there are 19-year-olds who think they should start up after some experience. There is no right or wrong age, it's just a moment and the scenarios that help in making the decision.

myPluto helps small teams, young entrepreneurs and ,aspiring product managers to navigate the development of their first product in a structured manner.

Why Should You Startup?

Introversion and a poor ability to recognize people make networking an absolute minefield for introverts. You’re going to have a somewhat painful conversation with someone you don’t know, groping for some sort of common ground, or you’re going to have an even more awkward conversation with someone you’ve already talked to.

Networking doesn't work well for introverts

When famous, You lose the ability to filter out who you want to talk to, but at least everyone starts the conversation with some context; you’re outsourcing the extroversion to them.Fame is hard, and it has other costs. But there’s a second alternative: be micro-famous. Microfame is the best kind of fame because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right people).

Micro-Famous > Famous

Focus on the micro, not the fame. Micro-fame just means your friends-of-friends have a nonzero chance of knowing who you are and striking up a conversation with you about something mutually interesting.To an introvert, this is nirvana:<ul><li>You don’t have to introduce yourself to anyone.</li><li>You don’t have to conversationally grope around for something to talk about.</li><li>Your conversational partners are pre-selected for having shared obscure interests.</li></ul>

How to be micro-famous ?

There are a couple of problems with this, one of which is that plenty of normal people do this, too, just for broader interests: there’s a difference of kind, not degree, between someone who only wants to talk about weather, sports, and national politics on the one hand, and someone who only wants to talk about computational biology.But a side effect of the writing-as-networking strategy is that writing about your other interests gets other people interested.

We’re pretentiously writing off social interactions with people who don’t share our nerdy interests

Networking is painful, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to enjoy it. Unfortunately for me, networking is effective: most good opportunities come from personal connections. We can see all kinds…

Writing is Networking for Introverts | by Byrne Hobart

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Read like a Pro.

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Startup = Growth

How to Get Startup Ideas

How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup)

A Conversation with Paul Graham - Moderated by Geoff Ralston

Why Should You Startup?

Writing is Networking for Introverts | by Byrne Hobart

A Dozen Things You Need To Know Before Starting Your Creative Business

The 3 Stages of Failure in Life and Work

It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.