23 Top Start-up Tips from Sam Altman President of Y Combinator
1. “Word of warning about choosing to start a start-up: It Sucks”
2. Most big companies start something fundamentally new (one acceptable definition of new is 10X better
3. One way you know when this is working, is that you’ll get growth by word of mouth
4. It’s better to first make a product a small number of users love than large number of users like
5. In the best case you yourself are the target user. In the second best case, you understand the target user extremely well.
6. It's easier to do something new and hard rather than something derivative and easy
7. There are at least a thousand times more people who have good ideas than people who are willing to do the kind of work it takes to turn a great idea into a great company
8. If the idea is good, it likely won’t sound like it’s worth stealing
9. Growth solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth
10. No first time founder knows what he or she is doing. Ask for help and you will be better off. Find a mentor
11. You need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about — nothing else will sustain you for ten years
12. Try to get “ramen profitability” — i.e., make enough money so that founders can live on raman — as soon as you can. Then you control your own destiny
13. 99% of startups die from suicide not murder
14. You certainly don’t need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination
15. Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea that you feel compelled to explore
16. If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about when you’re not trying to think about work
17. Everything will feel broken all the time — the diversity and magnitude of all disasters will surprise you. Your job is to fix them with a smile on your face and reassure you team that it’ll all be ok
18. Another way of looking at this is that the best companies are almost always mission-oriented
19. You can basically change everything in a startup but the market
20. If you can just learn to think about the market first, you will have a big leg up on most people starting startups
21. Find ways to get 90% of the value with 10% of effort. Market doesn’t care how hard you work
22. Ideas in general need to be clear to spread. Complex ideas are almost always a sign of muddled thinking or made up problem
23. If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it’s almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated
