Love these 95 pieces of advice from Sam Altman in honor of the new YC batch. Each could be a few blog posts in and of themselves.  Orignal link here.

Startup Advice

In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard):

1. Make something people want.

2. A great team and a great market are both critically important—you have to have both. The debate about which is more important is silly.

3. Write code, talk to users, and build the company (hire the best people you can find, get the culture right, fundraise, close sales, etc.) Most other things that founders do are a waste of time.

4. Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.

5. Stay focused and don’t try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.

6. You have to have an almost crazy level of dedication to your company to succeed.

7. In general, don’t start a startup you’re not willing to work on for ten years.

8. Be relentlessly resourceful.

9. In the current pivot-happy world, good ideas are underweight. It’s worth the time to think through a good one.

10. Growth solves (nearly) all problems.

11. While growth is critical and you should focus on it, occasionally consider where you’re going—you need both growth and to be growing towards something valuable.

12. Obsess about the quality of the product.

13. Overcommunicate with your team. For some reason most founders are really bad at this one. Transparency is your friend.

14. Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.

15. Hire slow; fire fast. Hiring is the most important thing you do; spend at least a third of your time on it.

16. Occasionally think about why the 20th person will join your company.

17. Hire smart and effective people that are committed to what you’re doing. The last five words there are important.

18. Hire friends and friends of friends. Go after these people like crazy to get them to join. Some other candidate sources are ok, but I always got bad results from technical recruiters.

19. Generally, value aptitude over experience.

20. Hire people that you could describe as animals.

21. Eliminate distractions.

22. Don’t die.

23. Be frugal.

24. You’ll often hear conflicting advice about everything but “build a great product”. This means you can go either way on much of the rest of it and it doesn’t really matter. Just make a decision and get back to work. Product/market fit is what matters. You can—and will—make a lot of mistakes.

25. You make what you measure.

26. Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.

27. Momentum is critical. Don’t lose it.

28. Keep salaries low and equity high.

29. Keep the organization as flat as you can.

30. When working on a deal—raising money, trying to get a partnership, etc.—it’s important to create a competitive situation.

31. Schleps are good.

32. Don’t forget to make money.

33. Journalists like hearing directly from founders. If you hire PR people, resist their desire to control all the contact.

34. It’s standard for founders to keep board control in the first round.

35. Listen to everyone. Then make your own decision.

36. Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.

37. Get lucky.

38. Have a direct relationship with your customers.

39. Be formidable—do not be easy to push around.

40. Don’t let your company be run by a sales guy. But do learn how to sell your product.

41. Have a culture that rewards output.

42. Don’t hire professional managers too early.

43. Simple is good. Be suspicious of complexity.

44. Get on planes in marginal situations. In-person is still better than tele-anything.

45. Most things are not as risky as they seem.

46. Be suspect of anyone who says the word process too often.

47. Raise a bit more money than you think you need.

48. Ignore the fact that “the press loves [you]”.

49. Have great customer service.

50. You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

51. The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.

52. Board observers are usually a headache.

53. If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new—it’s hard to kill your babies.

54. It’s better to make a decision and be wrong than to equivocate.

55. Set goals for the company and motivate people to get there.

56. Always praise good work.

57. Celebrate your wins as a company. Get t-shirts for big milestones.

58. Have a good operational cadence where projects are short and you’re releasing something new on a regular basis.

59. You can win with the best product, the best price, or the best experience.

60. Meetups and conferences are generally a waste of time.

61. If the founders of your company seem to care more about being founders than they care about your specific company, go join another company.

62. It’s easier to sell painkillers than vitamins.

63. Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It’s easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

64. It’s better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.

65. Learn how to stay extermally optimistic when your world is melting down.

66. Startups should require as few miracles as possible, but at least one.

67. You have to have great execution—far more people have good ideas than are willing to roll up their sleeves and get shit done.

68. Don’t have a diverse culture in the early days.

69. Keep a to-do list every day. At the top of it, put the one or two big things you want to work on.

70. Being the CEO is miserable more often than it’s good. But when it’s good, it’s really good.

71. On the really bad days, remember that tomorrow will be better—it’s hard to see it being much worse!

72. Sleep and exercise.

73. Success in a startup is usually pass/fail. Worry more about making sure you pass than an extra point of dilution.

74. Good investors are worth a reasonable premium.

75. Give your investors something to do.

76. Go for a few highly involved investors over a lot of lightly engaged ones.

77. Raise money on promise. Raise money on clean terms.

78. Do reference checks on your potential investors. Ask other founders how they are when everything goes wrong.

79. Investors love companies other investors love.

80. A lot of the best ideas seem silly or bad initially—you want an idea at the intersection of “seems like bad idea” and “is good idea”. (It’s important to note you need to be contrarian and right, not simply contrarian.)

81. Surf someone else’s wave.

82. Sometimes you can succeed through sheer force of will.

83. All startups are fucked in at least one major way. Keep going.

84. Keep an eye on cash in the bank and don’t run out of it.

85. Pay a lot of attention to the relationship between cofounders, especially if both/all of you want to be CEO.

86. Stay small and nimble.

87. Have a staff meeting at least once a week.

88. Find a mentor that will teach you how to manage.

89. Keep burn low until you’re sure everything is working.

90. Be suspect about buying users.

91. Lead by example.

92. Have the right kind of office. The proper office for a very small company is an apartment or house.

93. Share results (financial and key metrics) with the company every month.

94. Have a table in your offer letters that shows how much the stock you’re granting a new hire could be worth in various scenarios.

95. The best startups are defined by exceptions; all of these rules are probably breakable, but probably not all at the same time.

I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day about fundraising. This company was not raising money, but had in the past and is quite successful.

We talked about the psychology of how one presents themselves in the fundraising process. Some entrepreneurs just have “mojo” when they come in. It’s a fine line, but it’s important to come in with a sense of purpose and determination, coupled with confidence that the round is inevitable, coupled with humility and authenticity.

This entrepreneur shared what I thought was a great perspective. Basically, he realizes that in most fundraises, most investors are likely to pass or be lukewarm. But regardless of that expectation:

“I genuinely believe that it’s a privilege for someone to invest in my company. Even if there are many reasons to say no, I believe that what we are doing is special, and I have very talented people that have taken huge paycuts to be part of a team that will work like crazy to give our investors a great great return.”

I thought this was just an awesome attitude. And it’s totally true. Every time I have invested in a company, I have felt that it is a privilege to work with the entrepreneurs and the teams. We take a chance on companies and founders, but founders take a more profound risk in working with us. We provide capital and I think a lot of helpful leverage for companies, but founders provide a piece of their hardest and most productive years of their lives.

Unfortunately, I don’t think all entrepreneurs present themselves like this is true, and I continue to hear about interactions with investors that make entrepreneurs feel the exact opposite – that it’s the entrepreneur’s privilege to receive investment from such a great VC.

It’s a privilege for a VC to be an investor in a company. Not the other way around.

I’m excited to announce our recent investment in Sunrise.

I first met Pierre (the co-founder and CEO of Sunrise) through Jeremy Fisher, the founder of Wander.  At the time, Sunrise was already on my phone, but was competing for a permanent spot on my home screen along with a number of different applications.  Ultimately, Sunrise won because of its wonderfully intuitive design and how seamlessly it introduced just enough small new features to make my days easier and more productive.

The Calendar is a fascinating category.  It’s one of the last remaining “native” apps on the phone that has not been significantly disrupted by an independent competitor.  It is also one of the few applications that is used multiple times a day, every single day by most professionals and many consumers.  The Calendar is also the nexus of a trove of structured information.  Information that should be leveraged to make life easier and make other services smarter.

It’s early days for Sunrise, but the app has seen great early usage, and some of the highest rates of daily engagement I’ve seen.  I’m excited for this company, and for the road ahead for Pierre, Jeremy Le Van, and the team.  There are some really exciting things planned for the next few months, so stay tuned.

I’m also excited to co-investing with a terrific group of friends both old and new, especially our co-lead, Mike Hirsland at Resolute.VC

Right after OMGPOP released DrawSomething to rave reviews (and traction), I was catching up with my friend Nabeel Hyatt and chatted a bit about the game’s meteoric rise.  I joked that the success was eerily well timed with him joining Spark as a Venture Partner, although of course, the development of the game was well in the works before then.

I asked Nabeel (who was previously the GM of Zynga BOS) how the company developed the hit game after a number of years with more moderate success.  His answer: “They just decided to throw a fastball right down the middle”.

What he meant was that the company had previously tried to be innovative in a number of different ways in their game development. That led to a catalog of beautiful games that were edgy and different on many dimensions, but ones that didn’t quite have the growth everyone was hoping for.  With Draw Something, they took a pretty plain vanilla, tried and true playbook.  They started with a popular and familier offline game (Pictionary), added asychronous social components (a-la Words with Friends), and of course, built it beutifully with good viral loops.  They focused on building the best drawing game they could, instead of trying to be too cheeky, cute, or implement a bunch of other innovations on the edges.  It helped Draw Something become one of the fastest mobile games of all time, even if that growth wasn’t sustained long term.

Since then, I’ve noticed that many really interesting companies start out as fastballs right down the middle.  And many pivots look like that too.  The reverse is that I often see less successful companies start out very complicated, or require customers to make too many leaps.

Mobile payments is a good example. A lot of companies have gone after this opportunity, and tried different versions of stored value on phones, wireless payments, etc.  But what’s the company that has really broken out here? Square.  They started with a little white dongle that allowed merchants to just take credit cards.  They are moving beyond this, but they started with a fastball right down the middle.  As Angus Davis (the founder of our portfolio company Swipely) has said, “millions of people are walking around with a mobile payment device in their pocket… it’s called a credit card.”  Similarly, Swipely is starting to show terrific traction based on a that simple premise

Increasingly, when I speak with companies that seem to be in a promising space but aren’t quite getting the traction they hope for, I ask myself “what’s the fastball down the middle for this business?”  It’s hard at time to give up on the elegance and innovative-nature of the more complicated solution, but sometimes, the best way to earn the right to be completely transformative is to do one simple thing really really well.

We have our NextView 2013 Annual meeting this afternoon. I blocked off the morning expecting to have to do a bunch of last minute preparation, but everything seems to be pretty much ready to go.  If you are an entrepreneur and are unfamiliar with these, think of it as a board meeting, but with more participants and a bit more gravity since it only happens once or twice a year.

There is a fair bit of work and preparation that goes into VC annual meetings. One could get overly focused on presenting information in just the right way or scripting the message perfectly. It can be pretty stressful.

We’re tried to maintain a different perspective over the years. I find these meetings to be a really good way to force ourselves to look at the forest from the trees, and think less about day-today activities and try to take the long view on our business and our industry. It’s helpful to be able to synthesize our thinking and get feedback from our limited partners based on their own extensive experience.  We’re lucky to be in business with some great Limited Partners, who are a mix of terrific institutions as well as a number of individuals (many of whom have known us for a long time).

We also want to have fun and enjoy the day. Not that our meeting is all that entertaining (it’s fairly serious), but it’s a nice time to reflect on how lucky we are to do the work we do, with partners we like and respect, and with entrepreneurs that grind it out each day to try to change the world. When I think of it that way, I can’t help but enjoy the process, even if the material is dry, and we have to share both good and bad news.  I find this perspective also frees us to be more intellectually honest about the state of affairs, and more authentic in our interactions overall.

Anyway, I better post this and make sure everything is in order and ready to go.  Thanks for reading this stream-of-consciousness post!  I might post some follow-up thoughts in the coming days/weeks.

I’ve been using the days.am app for a few months now. (Full disclosure, I’m an investor in their parent company, Wander). It’s a beautiful, visual diary that allows you to capture life “unfiltered”.  You can read more about the thinking behind the product here.

It’s been a fun app to play with, and one that has brought with it some cool, unexpected surprises. First, it has changed my behavior and made me start cataloging many more life moments. These moments were one’s I enjoyed, but then again, why would anyone really care about a mediocre picture of a door, or a bee, or a fountain in isolation?  Previously, I’d just take a mental snapshot, and move on.

I also was pleasantly surprised by what I saw from other people. It’s amazing how I feel like I “know” the people that I followed in the closed alpha, even though I may have never met many of them. Sharing the moments in their life in an unfiltered way, with a low-bar of “does this make me look good” was really cool. It gives you a unique lens into the way your friend see the world and themselves.

Consumer social services are always pretty tricky. They aren’t really utilities (at least at the start), and it’s hard to pinpoint why something may or may not work. Also, some social utilities come out of the gates fast, and others are a slow boil. But long-term, it’s not how fast you are out of the gates, but how you finish that matters.

What I think gets me excited about a consumer social application is whether a) it changes my behavior meaningfully and b) I feel excited to see what my friends are posting. Pretty simple, and I think days.am has done a nice job on both counts.

Congrats on Jeremy, Keenan and the team on the initial product and launch.  Below is one of my favorite days from a trip to NY a few months back.  Click through to see the comments, some animation, and check out the app. Enjoy, and have fun!

Last night I attended a really fun event called the NEVY’s put on by the New England Venture Capital Association.  It was a wonderful showcase of all the great companies, people, and investors that have helped the Boston technology market come roaring back in recent months and years.

It was fun to attend, and I was really pleased that a bunch of our portfolio company founders (and many other friends) were nominated for awards that night.  Click here for the full list of nominees and winners.

I was reminded last night why I moved to Boston from Silicon Valley many years ago and why I think the ecosystem is so great.  There have been naysayers in recent years about the strength of the ecosystem here, and I think people are finally waking up to the reality that that meme is simply untrue.  It’s funny that it’s taken so long – given that the raw data on large-scale venture-backed exits is so strong relative to some other markets.

But forget what the media says.  There are things on the ground here that make this place really great, and the folks that were honored last night really hammered it home for me. In particular, I love this place because:

Boston is a town of substance.  Maybe this is why the tech community here has been less embraced by pop-tech media which seems to care more about movie-star investors than real businesses.  But I love the focus here on real substance. Now, substance can take many forms.  Where this market has gone wrong ~5 years back was in failing to understand that “substance” could mean something different from “hard science” or “a guy who sold his company for $500M and is doing it again”.  The definition of substance is much broader, but the new crop of investors and entrepreneurs totally get that.  And along the way, amazing businesses of substance have been built.  Wayfair in particular was honored as the “best startup” in Boston, and what a startup it is.  Although other flashy e-commerce sites might have greater notoriety, none can come close to matching Wayfair for scale ($600M+ revenue), profitability (bootstrapped all the way until last year), and long-term potential (that’s my own commentary).  And by the way, check out all the “deal of the year” candidates and you’ll see a bunch of other extremely substantial businesses in the making as well.

Boston founders want to finish.  Acme Packet won the award for exit of the year for its $2.1B acquisition by Oracle.  What impressed me was that the company is still led by its founder Andy Ory who stuck with the business from inception, to IPO, and to acquisition.  Similarly, I’ve really admired Steve Kaufer, who founded Tripadvisor and saw it through its acquisition by Expedia, but then continued to lead the company as it was spun out as an independent public company.  You hear a lot about founders leaving formerly “hot” startups and starting new companies to great fanfare, and that can be good at times. But I do love that many of the best Boston founders want to start, build, and finish. Just as impressive, I find many entrepreneurs that are far earlier in their careers really seek to build their abilities and leadership so that they can scale to be GREAT CEO’s, not just great founders.  Sravish Sridhar, who was the “rising star entrepreneur” award is just this sort of guy, and I admit I regret not being in business with him just because of what a great CEO he is becoming. Our portfolio company founders at IS2, Boundless, Plastiq, and Lookout were also all nominated for various awards, and fit this bill as well.

Boston is a town of grit.  After the horrific bombings a few weeks back, pretty much everyone who commented publicly about this city said something like “Boston is tough”.  It’s funny – people know that this is a tough town, it doesn’t seem that way outwardly, but everyone knows it inwardly.  People here just have a lot of grit, and can bounce back from challenging times.  That’s why the story of Atlas Venture is so captivating for folks here.  Fred Destin (who is a new but terrific member of the tech community) wrote a really wonderful post yesterday about the re-invention of Atlas in light of their newest fund.  As he describes, the firm had their “battle of Thermopyles” moment, but the team there took the bull by the horns and wrestled the beast to the ground to build a really terrific firm that entrepreneurs rave about.   All startup founders know how much grit is involved in building great companies, and I love this town for the grit you see everywhere you look.

I was born in the Philippines and lived the first 17 years of my life in Manila and in Hong Kong.

It occurred to me that this year marks the year that I have lived in the United States longer than I have lived anywhere else combined. It’s kind of crazy.

I have a lot to be thankful for about this country. I was educated here. My best friends are Americans. My wife and children are Americans. I’ve had the professional opportunities I’ve had because of this country, and I’ve become the person I am largely because of the values instilled by this country.

I’m lucky that I have always been able to secure H-1B visas to stay here and work, at least prior to getting my green card. But it honestly changed the calculus for me in many ways about risk and professional ambition. I know it’s impacted the lives of many friends who have had trouble staying in the country because of their career choices. And I’m on the board of two companies led by founders who had to jump through hoops to get their O-1 visa so they can build their companies in America and continue to contribute to the local economy and hire lots and lots of people.  Pretty nutty.

Immigration policy is pretty confusing, and it isn’t that cut and dry, obviously. Many elements are a total no-brainer, but as Fred Wilson discussed in his last post, these policies end up getting intermingled with other, more controversial initiatives as part of immigration reform.  Check out his post here.

I’ve actually been pretty torn on immigration reform overall. But I’m coming around. I come from a long line of immigrants.  My grandfather left China to be an indentured servant in the Philippines.  My Mom fled China to Hong Kong after her father was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution.  My parents left the Philippines to go to Hong Kong during the revolution that over-threw the Marcos regime.  And as a Christian, I think it’s quite clear that the story of my faith is one OF immigrants welcoming immigrants.

I’m pasting below Fred Wilson’s call to action and suggestions for how members of the tech community can help.  Please spread the word, and let’s get something done.

“There are many opponents to the comprehensive immigration reform bill out there. And they will use anything, including things like what happened in Boston last week, to kill it. We need everyone in the tech industry and the world of startups to get behind this bill. Not only because it addresses pretty much every request we have made on immigration but also because the US is a land of opportunity and diversity and it is our greatest strength that we allow good people to come here and build a life, a career, a family, and a company.

I hope all of you will support comprehensive immigration refrom loudly and vigorously. We will need it. If you want to do something right now, go here or here and get involved.”

I’ve been getting this question a lot recently. I think everyone who asks the question isn’t really expecting that unique of an answer, but find it helpful to ask anyway in hopes of gleaning something specific to me or the firm.

All investors pretty much look at team, product, and market, in various ways.  We are no different.  But in a nutshell, here’s our take on what we look for that mirrors pretty closely to these three.

1. Golazo Potential. The #2 reason why VC’s pass aside from strength of team is “it’s too small“.  It’s because of fund return economics, but also because of personal interest and ambition.  Golazo is a spanish slang for a “beautiful goal” in soccer, and we are most excited about opportunities that have the potential to be uniquely spectacular. My partner Lee has shared more about this here.

2. Capital Efficient Beginnings. Although a company might have a spectacular goal, we focus on companies that have the potential for capital efficient beginnings.  This is a fit for our own investment strategy as seed stage specialists, but also because we notice many of the best entrepreneurs take a capital efficient approach to starting and testing their businesses.  Extraordinarily few internet based businesses started out by raising $10+M before ever launching a product.  Our model works when a company is able to prove a lot with modest capital, and then leverage that early validation and market knowledge to really lean in and start growing their business.  Some of these companies may raise quite a bit of capital to grow, but we look for opportunities where significant, value-creating milestones can be achieved with modest capital up front.

3. Excellent, authentic teams. We look for high-potential founding teams with some unique insight into the market they are going after due to authentic and deep prior experiences.  This is in contrast to some companies that are hatched through a more academic approach of “what’s an opportunity that fits X, Y, or Z attributes”.  Some great companies have been birthed through a more academic approach, but we tend to get excited about authentic founding stories, and feel like on the margins, authentic entrepreneurs have better intuition and determination in the early stages of building a business.

I was lucky to attend a discussion last night on technology education in Arlington schools.  It was graciously organized by Larry Bohn from General Catalyst, who sent multiple kids through the Arlington school district.  There was a great group of investors, entrepreneurs, and educators who all live in Arlington.  As the parent with the youngest kids in the group (4 and 1.5) I was mainly learning, although I really hope to contribute in the months and years to come.

It’s not entirely clear what will come from this meeting, but I’m pretty optimistic.  A couple broad observations and thoughts.

1. Do something, fast. Paul English, the founder and CTO of Kayak very quickly noted that there was a lot that could be done to bring technology to the Arlington schools fast, and with litte/no cost. There are terrific resources out there that are free, like Codeacademy that can get high school students engaged tomorrow.  As a group, we pushed our town’s assistant superintendant to think through what it would take to get some meaningful new programs in place by the 2014 school year.  There are a lot of practical reasons why this isn’t possible, but I think this is something that the startup culture is really good at – circumventing beaurocratic timelines and driving for things to be done quickly, and utilizing terrific free resources even if it won’t be used perfectly early on.  This ethos of cheap experimentation with openly available resources is something that needs to penetrate our education system to drive faster change and adoption of effective (and cheap) tools in the classroom.

2. Human Capital Limitations. There were a number of discussions tonight that revolved around human capital. We talked about the difficulty of recruiting teachers with technical skills because of opportunity cost, and the expense of training teachers in skills that we want our kids to be able to learn. It’s a real issue that has no easy solutions.  For a long time though, I’ve been thinking about how the race towards smaller class sizes actually goes against the economic reality of teaching.  Rather than have smaller class sizes, is there a way to leverage great teachers and allow them to impact twice as many kids (or three times as many, or many more times over)?  I think technology allows us to do this – both multiply the presence of great teachers, and replicate the impact of their know-how through software.  I’m excited about companies that are starting to do this, and think it would be wonderful if we could couple this sorts of technologies with a delivery model for education that would allow great teachers to make 2x+ what they make today, and still have the math work economically for schools and districts.

3. Start Early.  My friend Adam Medros from Tripadvisor also made a good point early on inspired by Sheryl Sandberg’s talk earlier this week. His point was that a big issue is not just around the availability of technical education, but in the attractiveness of it to kids.  And especially, to girls.  He argued that in order for both girls and boys to get engaged in technology and programming, it’s important to integrate it into the curriculum (as opposed to providing it as an after-school program) and to start really early, before strong social gender norms start to form.  As the father of two girls (and with a wife who also attended Sheryl’s talk), I’m totally a believer and am starting to think that I might want to be more aggressive about encouraging my daughter to play with my ipad, rather than rationing her time with it each week.

These are just some quick thoughts, but I’m ruminating on a lot more.  Hopefully, I’ll have some more insightful conclusions to share in future posts.  Oh, by the way, I also learned about a terrific programming language for kids developed by the Media Lab called Scratch. I’m looking forward to checking it out!