CS183C has changed how I do things
I still remember tinkering with my first idea. Senior year of high school. First learning what a startup was. What technology companies did. Realizing that Google wasn’t just a verb in the dictionary and a website online, but actually a massive corporation based in Mountain View. My world was spinning. It wasn’t that complicated though. I just had a simple realization: Not too far away from where I lived, there existed a place called Silicon Valley, where the apps, websites, and services I used were created.
In the land of startups, the “Family” stage, where small teams are building a product to get product market fit, is by far the one I can relate the most to. I’ve been working in the Family stage of companies from my first internship to my only early products. There were a few lessons that hit home particularly hard:
- “The key in this stage is to know which fires are important to fix and which ones can keep burning. You have to focus on the things which are the most critical only.”
- “Getting people to care about your product is much more important than metrics”
- And of course everything Sam Altman and everything mentioned in Do things that don’t scale.
Sam phrased the principles in these phases extremely well:
“Don’t do the things that would make a TV show about startups interesting.”
In my high school “startup/project”, I did ONLY the things that made a TV show about startups interesting. I did not talk to users. I focused on all the fires that should have been ignored. Even when I did learn the principles of “talking to users” and “build things that users want”, I still didn’t do them well. While this only became clear in retrospect, we didn’t focus enough. I felt more productive being “busy” and checking the unimportant things off of my checklist than actually working on the fires that mattered. Product and Growth. Making something that users loved. Getting to product market fit.
The talks, especially by Reid, John, and Sam, really called to me because it was only fairly recently that I pasted this on my wall to stare at every day and keep me on the true goal of the family stage.
Michael Dearing provided the most surprising information for me and something I’m immediately implementing into my decision making and startup:
I like to do a pre-mortem. Pretend that you started the idea and failed already — forecast what went wrong and try to identify all of the deadly risks early. We may decide to bail or keep going but if we keep going we can put in shock absorbers for those key risks.
Talking to mentors and friends about a concept is great because they are invested into the idea and they aren’t in love with the idea like I am. This gives an unbiased view of the company. The flip-side to this, however, is that they likely don’t understand the problem and industry as well as I do. Doing a pre-mortem allows me to remove many of my biases and identify the critical pieces to prove in my business.
You can also take this pre-mortem and apply to many other aspects of life that are subject to biases. For example, you can pretend that you got divorced and evaluate the weakest points in your marriage. Things you might want to patch up.
It’s nice to be back in class and have to do homework. Especially class and homework that force me to reflect on my execution of ideas and startups. From the first few classes, I already find myself changing habits and increasing focus on the things that matter in a startup.
Looking forward to what’s next.
