Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: @ycombinator (2018)

Larry Ellison: You won't be successful doing the same thing everyone else is doing “My standard advice to entrepreneurs is you can’t be successful as a small company doing the same thing everyone else is doing… If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to find errors in conventional wisdom.” When you tell people your startup idea, most of them should say, “None’s doing that. You’re crazy!” Ellison continues: “When you hear that, there are two possibilities: One is you’re first with a really good idea. Unfortunately, the other is that you’re crazy.”

Paul Graham explains his rule of thumb for when to launch your product “The risk of launching early is not as great as the risk of launching late… So you’ve got to have a good rule of thumb about when to launch. And my rule of thumb is launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as there’s one person in the world who is glad you launched because now they can do something that they couldn’t do.” He continues: “If you have something that if you launched it, no one would be happy, then you’re not ready to launch… [But] if there’s 10 people who are super excited and nobody else cares, totally launch. That’s perfectly fine. That’s great.” Video source: @ycombinator (2018)

Jensen Huang: “My will to survive exceeds everybody else’s will to kill me” Jensen is asked how Nvidia survived the intense competition in the 3D graphics industry. To which he replies: “I would say that our company wanted it more than everybody else. I do believe that, as a company and an entrepreneur, you have to want to succeed more than your competitors want you not to.” He continues: “That’s hard to teach. Someone said recently that I’m the most tenacious CEO they’ve ever seen. I’m not exactly sure whether that’s a compliment or not, but my will to survive exceeds almost everybody else’s will to kill me.” Video source: @ECorner (2003)

Mark Zuckerberg: “You can’t 80/20 everything” When Facebook first launched, a user’s profile included things like the dorm they lived in and the courses they were taking. Paul Graham asks Mark if he thinks Facebook would’ve worked without these features, to which Mark replies: “I remember this early debate that Dustin [Moskovitz] and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we released Facebook at. To do that, we went through and parsed the course catalogs at the schools to make sure that the data was clean.” Dustin argued that it would be easier to launch new schools if they didn’t parse these catalogs, while Mark thought this would be an unacceptable drop in quality. “We just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and the culture. In retrospect, maybe it wouldn’t have made a huge difference in how things played out. But it definitely set this tone where there’s a lot of clean data on Facebook, you can rely on it, it feels like a college-specific thing—which was valuable early on for setting the culture.” Mark then offers the following advice to the YC Startup School audience: “In the projects you work on, you will have a lot of similar questions. There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing that’s out there.” Video source: @ycombinator (2012)

Jensen Huang: I don’t need to change the world overnight “Having a simple idea that you can execute perfectly is sometimes better than having a grandiose idea that your company can’t execute on.” Jensen reflects on how he’s constantly bombarded with ideas and feature requests from customers and engineers at Nvidia. But he believes it’s prudent to keep things simple. As he puts it: “I don’t need to change the world overnight; I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight; I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball… Most companies need to realize that it is a long road and you can’t build that perfect product [overnight].” He continues: “Once you do that and keep the project’s scope confined — you have a long-term vision but your product definition is rather simple — your people can now execute flawlessly on a simple plan. Then you come back and do it again.” Video source: @ECorner (2003)

Jony Ive recounts the time Steve Jobs called him vain Jony recounts the time he asked Steve Jobs to be less harsh in his critique of a piece of work. When Steve asked “why?”, Jony replied: “Well, because I care about the team.” Steve then said, as Jony puts it, “this brutally, brilliantly, insightful thing”: “No Jony, you’re just really vain. You just want people to like you. And I’m surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important—not how you believe you are perceived by other people.” Jony reflects on the remark: “I was terribly cross because I knew he was right.” Video source: @VanityFair (2014)

Naval Ravikant: “Try to be one of the people who creates things” “You should actually go out and build the thing you want to see exist—not just say ‘oh, that’s gonna happen. I’m just going to sit back and wait for somebody else to do it’… Things don’t just automatically show up. There are great men and women who go out there and create these things. So try to be one of those people who creates these things.” If you’re going to be an investor, Naval urges you to “at least bet on things that you think may not exist without you betting on them.” He continues: “The other mindset — which is I’m just going to hustle ahead of other investors and slip some money in before they get there and mark it up — maybe you’ll make money, sure, but it’s a very unfulfilling life. And I would argue long term you will not make the most money because the greatest winners of the last few decades have been unexpected winners.” He gives SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, and Apple Computer as examples. “These are companies that were written off because it was believed that their dream was impossible and too expensive…. When you see these impossible dreams come true, not only is it the most fulfilling thing, it’s also where you make the most money.” Video source: @AngelList (2023)

Peter Thiel on the importance of pitching your startup as a “discount to the future” Most founders will pitch their startup valuation as a sort of premium on the last round (e.g. “Our valuation last year was X, we’ve made Y progress, and now we deserve a valuation 2x greater.”) But Thiel argues that this is “completely wrong.” “The value is never a premium on the past. It’s always a discount to the future. I think the way one should always try to pitch the value of a company is by explaining why it will be worth a lot more in the future and why investors are getting to invest at a point that it’s a lot cheaper.” He uses his experience fundraising for PayPal as an example. In March 2000, PayPal raised a round at a $500M pre-money valuation, which was a massive premium on the $45M valuation from their raise 3-months prior (note: PayPal also completed a 50/50 merger with Elon Musk’s x in this 3-month period). How did they get a 5x step up in 3 months? Thiel explains: “The way we presented the round was: this is going to be the last round before the IPO. We got people thinking the next round is going to be the IPO and this was going to be at a discount to the IPO. It doesn’t matter what happened three months ago—you’re getting it at a discount to the IPO.” He concludes: “Always think of it as a discount to the future. Never a premium on the past.”

Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people Everybody tells you “work really hard to hire the best people.” But as Patrick explains, that’s not helpful because everyone knows they should do that. As he puts it: “The question is to what length should you go and what does that actually mean in practice? And in practice, it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people.” It took Stripe six months to hire their first two people, and six more months to hire another 3-4 people. He can think of five people at Stripe who took 3+ years to hire. “If you think about the smartest people you know, if you want to get them to work on your thing, chances are they already have pretty good paths ahead of them… You have to be way more persistent and be okay with it taking way longer than any sane or reasonable person would think it should take.” There’s an important compounding effect here — hiring just one great person will make it marginally easier to get the next great person. Patrick argues you should also view every person you hire as bringing along another 50 people just like them if your company is successful: “Even if they don’t literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the selection of those 50 people.” Video source: @GreylockVC (2015)