STARTUP PLAYBOOK by Sam Altman, Gregory Koberger

• Your goal as a startup is to make something users love.
• To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution.
• It’s important to be able to think and communicate clearly as a founder—you
• complex ideas are almost always a sign of muddled thinking or a made up problem.
• The way to test an idea is to either launch it and see what happens or try to sell it (e.g. try to get a letter of intent before you write a line of code.)
• For most biotech and hard tech companies, the way to test an idea is to first talk to potential customers and then figure out the smallest subset of the technology you can build first.
• We like it when major technological shifts are just starting that most people haven’t realized yet—big companies are bad at addressing those.
• Most really big companies start with something fundamentally new (one acceptable definition of new is 10x better.)
• it’s easier to do something new and hard than something derivative and easy.
• learn about a lot of different things.
• Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts.
• Mediocre teams do not build great companies.
• Communication is a very important skill for founders—in fact, I think this is the most important rarely-discussed founder skill.
• Tech startups need at least one founder who can build the company’s product or service, and at least one founder who is (or can become) good at sales and talking to users. This can be the same person.
• Here is the secret to success: have a great product. This is the only thing all great companies have in common.
• You want to start with something very simple—as little surface area as possible—and launch it sooner than you’d think.
• In fact, simplicity is always good, and you should always keep your product and company as simple as possible.
• The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins.
• Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution.
• The company does what the CEO measures.
• A good rule of thumb is to only think about how things will work at 10x your current scale.
• get growth the same way all great companies have—by building a product users love, recruiting users manually first, and then testing lots of growth strategies (ads, referral programs, sales and marketing, etc.) and doing more of what works.
• As a general rule, don’t let your company start doing the next thing until you’ve dominated the first thing.
• A very, very common cause of startup death is doing too many of the wrong things.
• When you find something that works, keep going. Don’t get distracted and do something else.
• A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money and make sure the company does not run out of money, and 5) set the execution quality bar.
• A surprising amount of our advice at YC is of the form “just ask them” or “just do it”.
• Just be direct, be willing to ask for what you want, and don’t be a jerk.
• Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company (as opposed to a great product.)
• Be generous with equity, trust, and responsibility.
• Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire.
• Value aptitude over experience for almost all roles. Look for raw intelligence and a track record of getting things done.
• 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder.
• 99% of the time, you should ignore competitors.
• Remember that at least a thousand people have every great idea. One of them actually becomes successful. The difference comes down to execution.