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Sam Altman - How to Succeed with a Startup

Y Combinator · 2.5M views · 2018-08-29 · 16:07

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Overview

A 16-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk in which Sam Altman lays out what makes a startup succeed. It covers building a product people tell friends about, exponential markets, real versus fake trends, and having an ambitious vision.

On Hacker News

Recommended as the single Startup School video worth watching, a short and dense talk on what makes a startup work; one commenter dismisses it as platitudes.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2020

Topics

Startups & entrepreneurship
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startupsy combinatorsam altmanproduct-market fitfounders

What people said

davej · 2019-12 · Strong recommendation

I did the very first Startup School and the most recent Startup School. When I did the first Startup School I made a number of mistakes. The most costly was that I didn't launch early enough. When I did eventually launch my product, I launched with too many features and I found it difficult to explain to my beta testers. It was "cool" but my users found that it changed their workflow too much and they didn't want to make the investment to see if it was worthwhile. I got disheartened and gave up. The funny thing was that I was aware that what I was doing was considered "common startup pitfalls" even as I was making the mistakes. From talking to other founders, it seems that a lot of us only learn by making the mistake for ourselves. At the most recent Startup School, I started again with a new idea. I was determined to build something that solved a specific problem that was easy-to-explain and I wanted to launch quickly . I'm still very early-on in the journey but I have customers, revenue and growth. I would particularly recommend solo founders to give Startup School a go. As a solo founder, the weekly updates with peers really helped keep me honest with myself. edit: Old (failed) Startup: [LINK] New Startup: [LINK] edit2: If you watch one SUS video ever then watch this 16 minute video from Sam Altman: [VIDEO]

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karmakaze · 2019-06 · Recommendation

This is very much my line of thought. I have come to use different terms for these: - Startup is what I now call VC funded companies. A startup can and often does 'make the world better' for some definition of better - A profitable side-business that could grow into a large stable company starts as a side-project/side-business. This short Sam Altman "How to Succeed with a Startup" video[0] plainly covers why this is so. [0] [VIDEO]

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augustt · 2020-12 · Criticism

Maybe I'm not seeing the right material but when I watch stuff like [VIDEO] from him, all I hear are mind-numbing platitudes. Having a "sensible business model" might have been my favorite piece of advice from that one.

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Sources

Video by Y Combinator, played through YouTube.

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