karolsputoon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How People Get Rich Now”
Dustin Moskovitz presented that point in the invaluable How to start a startup series - link to this video A good resource when deciding on your future ambitions
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Lecture 1 - How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)
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376K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2023.
- Presented by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
5.6M views12 years ago3 recommendations
Careers and interviewsStartupsCareer growth
Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz introduce the core pillars of starting a startup, focusing on ideas, products, and the motivations behind entrepreneurship.
Lecture Transcript: tech.genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-… Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Dustin Moskovitz, Cofounder of Facebook, Asana, and Good Ventures, kick off the How to Start a Startup Course. Sam covers the first 2 of the 4 Key Areas: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution; and Dustin discusses Why to Start a Startup. See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec01/ Discuss this lecture: startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/6403… This video is under Creative Commons license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/Why it's here
3 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as a foundational lecture on the realities, risks, and proper motivations for launching a tech startup.
dgelkson Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?”
link to this video - How to Start a Startup 2014 by YC & Stanford Amazing set of speakers and pretty timeless advice for starting a startup
robertelderon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: I am doing $2M annually as a solopreneur and need your help”
This lecture series specifically talks about the different problems faced at various stages of scaling, and it includes a lot of reputable people who have actually done it: link The YC series is of course good too: link to this video I'm not actually qualified to answer your question, but it sounds like you haven't discovered a bottleneck in your business yet, and until you do, you probably shouldn't hire any employees.
mbestoon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Lecture 1 – How to Start a Startup [video]”
Dustin talks about Financial Reward and Impact of "why to do a startup" for examples like Facebook and Dropbox here: link to this video Are these values correct? If you join Dropbox as employee #100 with 10bp, you're 10bp is going to get massively diluted through subsequent rounds, no? Isn't it more like $1-2mil? And also this is wealth on paper, which means that you don't all of the sudden have $10mil sitting in the bank. I don't think he explains that but that's how it's portrayed, and is probably worth explaining, given the audience.
7Figures2Commason Hacker News • Mentions
On “Show HN: Dating Ring (YC W14) – We do the work, you do the dating”
> Another solid YC investment at work. I actually think this is an interesting example of YC's investments, but not for the reason you seem to suggest. YC's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large" companies1. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that. There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite high because there's so much competition.…
7Figures2Commason Hacker News • Mentions
On “Why investors don’t fund dating”
link I offered similar thoughts when Dating Ring first launched: YC's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large" companies1. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that. There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite high because there's so much competition. That makes it very difficult for new services to gain traction without significant i…
bachbackon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Ask HN: Optimal strategy to sell startup shares?”
…. I don't know much about Silicon Valley, but there you have a lot of investor driven companies (people raising money to push the value, to raise more money, etc. without a real business seems much more common). The 10B$ outcome is exceedingly rare, so the employee should think really hard about the value (see Moskovitz talk about it here at 36:00 link to this video ) Usually 1M$ will be much more valuable when going from 0 then the next 1M$. In the example it seems irrational not to sell for 1M$, if the employee doesn't have already a lot of money. But usually people are not given the choice and need a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition). If one assumes that shares could be liquid from day 1 the dyna…
headcanonon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The Truth About Starting a Startup”
Thats a really cynical interpretation of YC - There's a ton of risk with starting any business, tech especially. You could say the same about any angel or early stage investor or accelerator program. PG and Sam Altman have always been upfront about the risk and expected returns from one of these - in the Startup Class, Altman even says that if your goal is highest expected returns you should go work at a FAANG 1 1 link to this video
abetuskon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Ask HN: How to finish last 30% of a side project?”
The articles that are most relevant are probably ones from YC itself, along with ancillary material on startup woes, pitfalls, etc. Among the advice is how to validate ideas, is how to maintain momentum, knowing when to ship, when to wringing your hands and stop adding features, etc. Obviously geared towards startups and businesses but also applicable to projects. The pieces of advice that I try and follow (and often fail at following) are: * Commit to completing projects, not time. I'm bad at estimating time and putting time limits stresses me out. I prefer to work towards a goal rather than a time limit. * Be vicious about removing features that are superfluous to the main project in order…