By: Sam Altman, Y Combinator CEO
Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I
So the four areas: You need a great idea, a great product, a great team, and great execution. These overlap somewhat, but I'm going to have to talk about them somewhat individually to make it make sense.
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 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.
Before we jump in on the how, I want to talk about why you should start a startup. I'm somewhat hesitant to be doing this class at all because 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.
f you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something the founders themselves wanted, not a random made up idea. Airbnb happened because Brian Chesky couldn't pay his rent, but he had some extra space. In general though if you look atthe track record of pivots, they don't become big companies. I myself used to believe ideas didn't matter that much, but I'm very sure that's wrong now.
The definition of the idea, as we talk about it, is very broad. 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. Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is really valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
The definition of the idea, as we talk about it, is very broad. 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. Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is really valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
As you're thinking through ideas, another thing we see that founders get wrong all the time is that someday you need to build a business that is difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.
I want to make this point again because it is so important: 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. What we hear again and again from founders is that they wish they had waited until they came up with an idea they really loved.
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.
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. When it comes to starting a startup, it's easier to found a hard startup than an easy startup. This is one of those counter-intuitive things that takes people a long time to understand. It's difficult to overstate how important being mission driven is, so I want to state it one last time: derivative companies, companies that copy an existing idea with very few new insights, don't excite people and they don't compel the teams to work hard enough to be successful.
No comments:
Post a Comment