Paul Buchheit: Prototyped Gmail & GoogleAds. Co-founder of FriendFeed(RIP)

Our goal before launching gmail was to get 100 Happy users :)

Don't follow people advice blindly, as they can be wrong. You need to understand advice (i.e your situation is different than mine (age, time, place etc))Advices can be generalized (hence mismatched)

Listen to what people are saying, there is a lot to be learned from what they are telling you. You can't just accept what is on the surface. Understand the context. And try to understand why people think that s.t is a good idea.And how their situation is similar or different than yours.

Everyone has a unique set of resources, talents and abilities and insights. And if you try to play someone elses hand, you probably are gonna lose.

Also be careful and watch out for advice that is limiting beliefs. Example:If someone says "that's impossible." Understand it as according to my limited experience and very narror understaning of reality,that's very unlikely.

How do things happen in nature, tuning into a signal on the radio. Just work at it and you can get the signal eventually. Instead of going out and looking for solutions, go out and you look at problems and notice problems around you and then you can come up with solutions.

Listening for success.

• try to find at least one person who cares, one person that is enthusitic about what you are building. You kind of listen to that person,you follow them and you try to figure out if theres more ppl like that person. It's like you're tuning into that distant signal, slowly.
• this is the advantages of launching your products quickly, instead of thinking you're going to make it perfect, which is sort of arogant.

• when doing gmail, the challenge was getting 100 happy users inside of Google before launching. Turns out happiness is a really high bar. We did it one user at a time. What is it going to take to make you happy? We would do the really easy things until we got 100 people. And ppl are similar, if you can get 100 people, you can usually get more

Listening to yourself: Instead of going out and searching for things, if you stop and pay attention to what's going on, you notice something interesting, what's going on in your own body and mind. this is useful for everything. You don't need to have solutions, you just to notice the problems.Most of the things we put into gmail,were [because] i was annoyed with something and we tried to think of a solution for it. the same principle applies to pretty much everything(teams, projects, jobs)

Jessica Livingston: co-founder of Y Combinator

How to Build the future- Interviewed by Sam Altman

what do the most successful founders do during their 3 months in Y combinator?

totally focused on building their product, making something people want and talking to their users. And they do not let themselves be distracted by anything else...hyper focused on their product

How do to they start

I really do think it starts as let's build this product and see where it goes, in some cases, let's solve our own problem and see where it goes. However, i think the most successful ones do have that grander vision. (i.e Airbnb said 'we plan to become the Ebay of space' when they were nowhere near the ebay of space at that point they had that vision and they were working toward that.

Just get started with something...build somthing people want

we are funding companies at such an early stage that we're really funding the companie for the founders and for the attribute of the founders. Do they seem to be..

when you are using your own product or solving your own problem, you have all these insights that no one has (i.e Airbnb were renting up a room in their apartment bc they couldn't pay their own rent, so they had a lot of insights into this idea)

For stripe we said, do you realize how hard this is? And you don't have connections. But they were intrepid, they were like, 'well we don't have connections, we'll find connections'. How determined they were, how focused they were.

• [Firstly] If I had to say the most important traits of the most succesful founders, determination is by far the most important quality. More than intelligence, more than previous success in school. Determination is the most important thing.
• [Secondly] understanding your users, and build a product with a great user experience.
• [Thirdly] Not getting lured down these paths that aren't going to be important for building your product.i.e FOCUS
• [Fourth] being flexible-minded bc you have this idea, and you test it out, and it doesn't always work the first time and so you have to be able to say 'ok i thought I was gonna do this, but let's try this even though i have lot of energy vested in this, lets try this direction.' You have to be open-minded.
• [Fifth] Ultimately, you have to be convincing and a good leader.

What things can you do to start a startup?

Paul Graham- (do i have to tell u who he is?) YC co-founder & essayist

A conversation- Moderated by Geoff Ralst

If you care enough about users, you can just follow what will make users happy the way a scientist follows the truth. And eventually without thinking on your part the need to grow will give you this product idea that is the result of evolution.

You know the trick with Steve Jobs, he satisified users too, accept he was the user. I don't want to have any phone jack anymore, so no more phone jacks for anybody...he was living in the future.

What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision. And then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself, and write/build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users (b/c that is doing sales which is a pain in the ass and they might say no) And you'd be wayyy better off finding someone, anyone, who has a problem they will pay you to fix and fixing it. And then seeing if you can find more people like that. Best case is you yourself have the problem. [so the lesson you'll ignore is that] you will not ship fast enough, b/c you don't want to face the [critizim] you're embarassed to ship something unfinished and you don't wanna face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping. So you will shrink from contact with the real world. Or contact with your users, that's the mistake you will make.

Then You should Launch. As soon as you have quantum of utility. If there are 10 people who are super excited, totally, totally launch, and nobody else cares? that is perfectly fine, that is great. _52:00

[bonus tip for getting ur question answered in a conference] By the way, that is the trick to getting your question answered, you raise your hand as ppl are finishing the procceding question

Best tips for great user interview? You want to figure out not just what they think is wrong, but what's actually wrong. Like what's missing in their life. Just start talking to them: what would you like to do, what would you like to be able to do thqat you can't? they will tend to give you an answer, eg: asking about email, then say, it's important to me to be able to mark emails as 'unread' What does it mean unread? That whole unread thing is a sign that the whole inbox is being misused. What's really going on is a to-do list, that's why you have to mark items as unread so they stay on your to-do list.
You start asking them with what's wrong, and you try to figure out what they really mean, what they're really getting at, which they themselves might not know. And you start asking them: so what if you can do such and such. So start asking them about their life and then get hypothetical on them. _52:00

If you are doing something where need and want are very different, be real careful about picking need. Or you'll go out and your goal will be to cleanse the world of sin. The other danger is what you implicitily talking about is what you think they need, cleanse the world of your definition of sin.

Sam Altman: 'How to start a Startup'

Great execution is at least ten times more important and a hundred times harder than a good idea

Idea -> Product -> Team -> Execution

If it works out, you're going to be working on this for ten years. So it's worth some real upfront time to think of the long term value and the definessibility.

Some day, you need to build a business that's difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea

You'll get more support on a hard important project than a derivative[a company that copy an existing ideawith very few new insights] one. When it comes to starting a startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup. this is one of the cpunter intiutve things that takes ppl a long time to understand.

You want an idea that turns into a monopoly, but you can't get a monopoly in a big market right away, too much competition for that. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.

You wanna sound crazy, but you wanna actually be right. You want to work on an idea other people are working on. It needs to takeover a specific market and expand from there. That's how most successful companies have started. Unpopular but right, is what you're going for. You want something that sounds like a bad idea, but is a good idea.

you need to think about how the market is going to evolve in 10 years. [Don't just think of the growth of the startup, but how the market is going to evolve]. I care much more about the growth rate of the market than it's current size. And I also care if there is any reason that it's gonna top out. You should think about this, I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.

one of the big advantages of these mall but rapidly growing market is customers are usually pretty desperate for a solution and they will put up with imperfect, but rapidly improving product.

you can change everything about a startup but the market. You know and other people don't the [market] is going to grow reallyfast. think about where this is happening in the world. You need a sort of tailwind to make a startup successful.

why noww? why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late

Build something you, yourself need. You'll understand it much better than talking to a customer.

Getting good on having new ides takes a while, so start working on it now.

->Sidenote: How to have good ideas? Per Paul Graham:"The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies." Essay on How to Get Startup Ideas. "Live in the future and build what is missing seems interesting" <-

"You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you treate the appropriate supply" - 50 cent

think about what customers want and think about the demand of the market. Most ppl don't do this, if you can do this one thing- if you can just learn to think of the market first, you'll have a big leg up on most ppl starting startups.

product-includes customer support and copyright explaining the product

turn great idea into great product. How to build it? One of the most important task for a founder is the company builds a great product.

Until you build a great product, almost nothing else matters.

Build a product and get it as good as possible by talking to your users.

Sam Altman *Lecture 2* Team & Execution

'what are you spending your time and money on?'

What being a founder means is signing up for this years long grind on exectuion, and you can't outsource this. The way to have a company that executes well is to execute well yourself. Everything in a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture So if you want a culture where people work hard and pay attention to detail and focus on the customer and are frugal, you have to do it yourself, there is no other way. The company needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.

There's like a hundred times at least more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what adds value, what creaes value.

A big part of execution is just putting in the effort. But there is a lot you can learn about how to be good at it.

In early days the job of a CEO mainly includes- setting the execution bar- i.e make sure the entire company executes.

execution gets divided into two key questions: Can you figure out what do do? and Can you get it done?

Can you get it done = Focus + Intensity

Focus is critical- one of my fav questions to ask founders is 'what are you spending your time and money on?' This reveals almost everything about what founders think is important. One of the hardest things about being a founder is there are a hundred things competing for your attention every day. And you have to identify the right two or three, work on those and then ignore or delegate or defer the rest.

What really does matter varies with time but it's an important May Day advice: You need to figure out what the two or three important things are and then just do those. And you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday b/c everything else will just come at you. You know, fires of the day and if you don't get really good at setting what these 2 or 3 priorities are everyday, you will never be great at actually getting stuff done.

The trick to great execution is to say no alot. You're saying no 97 times out of a 100. Most startups are not nearly focused enough; they work really hard, maybe, but they don't work hard on the right things. And you'll still fail. You get no credit for trying, you only get points when you make something that the market wants.

How do you figure out what to focus on each day? And this is where it is really important to have goals. Most good founders that I know, at any given time have a small number of overarching goals for the company. Everybody in the company knows...anybody could tell you in the company every week what are our key goals and everybody executes based off of that

Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole copny focuses on. And the best founders repeat these goals over and over far more often than they think they should need to.. one of the keys to focused is great communication. Even 4=5 ppl in a company, a small communication breakdown is enough for everybody to be working on slightly different things and then you lose focus and the company just scrambles

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on, and you always have to focus on maintaining these. You should always know how you are doing against your metrics, you should have a weekly meeting every week.

You want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. And don't let the company get distracted or excited by other things.

Intensity

Startups only work at a fairly intense level. the secret to startup sucess is extreme focus and extreme dedication Startups are all consuming in a way that is difficult to explain. You generally need to be willing to outwork your competitors. The good news is that a small amount of extra work on the right thing makes a huge difference. Example: the viral coefficient for a consumer web product. How many new uswers each existing user brings in. If iv's .99 company eventually flatlines and die. If it's 1.01 you'll be in this happy place of exponential growth forever.

Relentless operating rhythm: Execution speed.

Obsession with Execution Quality

Be decisive: indecisivness is a startup killer. You need bias toward action. The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. This is the one thing we've learned that best predicts success of founders in YC, if everytime we talk to a team they've gotten new things done, that's the best preidtor the company will go on to be successful.

Part of this is you can do huge things in incremental pieces if you just keep knocking down small chunks one at a time, in a year you look back you've done this amazing thing.

So speed is this huge premium- they are generally quick. They get on planes in marginal situations.

Always keep momentum. If i can only tell founders one thing about how to run a company it would be this. For most software startups this translates to keep growing and for hardware startups, don't let your ship date slip.

Get product right in the beginning is a good way to not lose momentum. And remember- Sales fix everything in a startup. So you figure out where you can get these small wins and you get that done.

A framework- when there is disagreement smong the team about what to do, then you ask your users and you do whatever your user tell you.

the most important decision is whose advise to listen to.

Jason Fried: founder of 37signals, author or 'rework'

Why 40 Hours is Enough

think of your company as a product, and thinking of the things you do as features. And iterating on those over time and not let your company be stuck in 1.0.

When u stat thinking about your company as a product, you start asking different questions about it:

• is my company usable is my company useful? is my company fast, is it slow? what's my company really really good at what is it sort of okay at? what does it need to be better at what does it not have to do at all where are the bugs in our company what are we doing, that we are not doing that well? what's difficult about what we're doing? where are we getting in our way? what are the botte necks? how do our users (employees feel about it?

these are questions you ask about software, that people should be asking about their own company

Attention costs: how are they spending their time? Our days are eaten up by meetings, tons of distraction in the office. We looked at way we worked and what ways of distraction?

1. We have no meetings - one meeting a month. We don't meet in person to talk about stuff. two people can meet up. But for big groups we write stuff down. Because it will be better absorbed when people are ready to absorb it, versus when the speaker is ready to tell it. we write things down and share things across the company It reclaims peoples time. Each person can absorb it in their own schedule.

2. In a physical space there are a lot of distraction- noise is a major part. How can we eliminate physical distraction. We have 'library rules' quiet, respect people. why can't offices be that way? We have open space plan- if you need to talk to someone, you can pull them into a room.

3. Virtual distractions-notifications and other parts.( Goal can be ) to have 4 hours to yourself. Real time communication for social but not for serious stuff- instead it's written up.

Michael Seibel - Building Product, co-founder of Twitch/JustinTv, current partner @ YC

Metrics: identifying what peoples actions were when they were using your product. for this you want events based product. If you are not you can'be sophisticated at building your product. So, implement Mixpannel.

Pick 5-10 most important stats to track for mixpanel. this should be understood by everyone in your company and use

Product development cycle: KPI

ex of a KPI Goal: 3 ways new users, retention of users and new content creator. Every cycle our goal was to move to the right direction. And we wanted real brainstorm where everyones ideas are considered and written on the board. Everyone's idea is checked with Mixpanel. Having peoples idea written on the board makes people feel better, and everyone is at the brainstorm sessions.

Our brainstorm were typically split up into three categories. One, new features or iterations on existing ones. Two bug fixes and/or other maintanance. Three, tests AB tests we wanted to run

We will have the whole board filled out with ideas on these three categories and we go through it and do what we call Easy, Medium, Hard. For us hard meant it would take one engineer most ot the dev cycle to build. Medium typically meant it would take a day, two days. Easy means we can do multiple in a day.

Most hard ideas can be restated as an easy idea if you just understand what bits of your hard ideas are useless and hard. And most of the time there are useless and hard bits in hard ideas that can just be removed.

So this was educating everyone what is easy, medium hard. It also created an objective standard by which to start thinking about these ideas. Instead of based on the argumentability of the person delivering them- it was like well your idea is really hard and it wouldn't move the number that much based on Mixedpanel.

The next thing we do is decide on hard first. We look at all the hards and say which hard is gonna impact the KPI the most. And then we move to medium, then to easy.

Just with the ideas on the board and with easy, medium, hard a lot of the ego was removed to the debate. Because you knew your idea has been considered and two you saw some onjective measure about how hard it was and three the board has a bunch of ideas on it now so it's probably easy for you to find an easy idea that you really like.

the next step is you have to write the spec. You actually write down what do we mean by we're allowing people to chat with one another. What does that actually mean? how is it going to work? this is really important. Once this is done you can then distribute tasks to the team

We would run these cycles every two weeks (if you're web you can do every week) The rule we had to not have the team hate these long meetings, this was the only meeting we had.

if you have some brilliant idea in the meaintime, wait two weeks.

Every two weeks we had success, if you built what we say we are going to build, we felt good. And that cadence meant we go into the new cycle and do even more. This cadence is cadence is exteremly important, bc its going to take you a long time to find product market fit, and you'll be trying a lot of things, and iterating a lot. And if that process doesn't seem fun you're going to be frustrated.

How to succeed with a startup -Sam Altman- 2018

the number one thing, the number one lesson we try to teach startups is the degree to which you are successful approximates the degree which you build a product that is so good people spontaneously tell their friends about it this is it. If you can build a product that is so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about it, you have done 80% of the work that you need to build a really good startup.

this is the bar, something that people love so much they teir their friends about it.

one imp indicator for a product like that is easy to explain, easy to understand. if you cant explain in few words what you do, and at least some ppl say thats interesting, thats usally a sign of unclear thinking or a need that is big enough.

look for a market that starting to undergo or soon undergo an exponential growth. identify a market thats going to grow every year and be ride that up elevator

differentiate b/n fake and real trend. make sure its real. real trends are one where a new technology platform comes along and the early adopters use it obsessively and tell their friends about it.

at least one evangelical founder- usu. the ceo. talk to press, raise money, recruit, sell produt, talk to press. someone that can infect the world about what the company is trying to do. it is hard to build a team without that.

have ambitious vision. hard startup is easier to start than an easy startup. ambitious projects are interesting.

confident and definite view of the future. confident and flexible. having courage of your convictions, being a clear leader, 'we're going to do this' that seems to really correlate success.

go for something that is huge if it works

team you need to assemble- 'the team you build is the company you build.' I have only met a few founders that spend enough time on recruiting. building a great team, other than picking the right market and building a great product is the most important thing you do.

the spirit of 'we'll figure it out' is my favoirate thing to hear among early startup team members. even if i'm not qualified on paper, even if i haven't solved this problem before, even if this problem feels like its going to kill the company(many probs will feel that way), this spirit among the team of u know what, we've got the people we need, we're gonna figure this out, we're gonna get this done is super important.

another thing i love to hear from early team members is 'i've got it'

ppl that have bias toward action

the blessing of inexperience. no money and no experience can be a blessing per Wozniak

? to ask yourself and think about: (note: for question 1-2: 'all of the really great businesses I know have an answer to this question and in fact, the better they are the more they pretend not to- this is something you want to have a plan for"

1. what is the long term monopoly effec? what is the long term advantage?
2. where is the network effect in this business?
3. so how are we going to make money?
4. how are we going to grow, how are we going to get users

paul buchheit (yc partners) looked at the traits of our best foundrs and tried to distill them down. he came up with FRUGALITY, FOCUS, OBSESSION, LOVE

larry page 2009 commencment speech

technology, especially the internet can help you be lazy. what i mean is a group of three people can write software that then millions can use and enjoy. find the leverage in the world so you can be truely lazy.

when a really great dream shows up, grab it.

You never lose a dream, it just incubates as an hobby.

have a healthy disregard for the impossible and actually build the solutions.

i think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact there are so few people this crazy that i feel like i know them all by first name. they all travel as if they were pack dogs and they stick to each other like glue.

the best people want to work on the big challenges- how can you not get excited.

what is the one sentence summary of how do you change the world? always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting.

You never lose a dream, it just incubates as an hobby.

back to lazy- find the leverage in the world so you can be truely lazy.

get a little crazy, follow your curiosity and be ambitious about it. Don't give up on your dream, the world needs you all

things are fleeting,

Paul Grahm - how to be an expert in a changing world

essay Dec. 2014

aka how to protect yourself from obselete beliefs

1. don't trust your opinion. only human nature is static (doesn't change overtime)everything else is suspetable to change.

2. most startup ideas look like bad ideas but something in the world changes to turn them from bad to good. At YC a 'crazy idea' is a compliment (even more so than an idea being described as 'good'

3. have an explicit belief in change- remind yourself the world is not static and you'll start to notice change

4. change that matters comes from unforseen quarters- i.e change is hard to predict so don't even try to predict it

5. instead of trying to predict(which imposes rigidity in your mind) be aggressively open-minded. Don't try to predict the 'right direction' instead be 'super sensitive to the winds of change.'

6. have a working hypotheses, it can motivate you- its exciting to try to guess the right answers- but be disciplined not to let your hypotheses harden into anything more.

7. a passive modus operandi for having ideas is not to try to have good ideas, but to solve problems and simply not discount the hunches you have in the process. any weird idea or apparently irrelevant questions are worth exploring

8. a 'crazy idea' is a compliment

9. have an extraordinary insentive for collecting obsolete beliefs, publicly bet on ideas instead of just commenting so you worry more about getting things right.

10. initally focus on people instead of ideas- earnest, energetic and independent minded people