Choice quotes:
Understanding exponents and power law distributions isn’t just about understanding VC. There are important personal applications too. Many things, such as key life decisions or starting businesses, also result in similar distributions. We tend to think about these things too moderately. There is a perception that some things are sort of better than other things, sometimes. But the reality is probably more extreme than that.
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Paul Graham: Founders. Ideas are just indicative of how the founders can think. We look for relentlessly resourceful people. That combination is key. Relentlessness alone is useful. You can relentlessly just bang your head against the wall. It’s better to be relentless in your search for a door, and then resourcefully walk through it.
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Roelof Botha: It is so rare to find people who can clearly and concisely identify a problem and formulate coherent approach to solve it.
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Roelof Botha: You can discover a lot about founders by asking them about their choices. What are the key decisions you faced in your life and what did you decide? What were the alternatives? Why did you go to this school? Why did you move to this city?
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Paul Graham: Another corollary to the power law is that it’s OK to be lame in a lot of ways, so long as you’re not lame in some really important ways. The Apple guys were crazy and really bad dressers. But they got importance of microprocessors. Larry and Sergey got that search was important.
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Peter Thiel: Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” It revolved around a line from an ancient Greek poet: foxes know many little things, but hedgehogs know one big thing. People tend to think that foxes are best because they are nimble and have broad knowledge. But in business, it’s better to be a hedgehog if you have to choose between the two. But you should still try and know lots of little things too.
- He wants founders who are thoughtful, but then make forceful decisions.
- Founders must be able to code, but he doesn’t have strong opinions about languages.
- Don’t raise more money until you’re sure you have product market fit.
- “most of the time entrepreneurs are realistic near the end and say this isn’t working. Those decisions aren’t that difficult. It gets more difficult in later stages when you’ve got millions of dollars in.”
How to:
- Compress your y-axis
- Choose your x-axis
- Lower expectations
- Choose your y-axis
- Use absolute and growth numbers
- Tell a story of a customer
- Benchmark against a known competitor
- Annotate a graph
- Using testimonials as traction (don’t)
- Using press as traction (don’t)
1. Adaptability
“ask where they want to be in five years. While most job recruiters look for candidates who know exactly where they want to be, we’re the opposite.”
2. Honesty
“we ask them if they’re nervous. If we ask someone whether they’re nervous and they say no, but they’re sweating, shaking, and breaking out in rashes, it’s pretty much a red flag they’re not being genuine.”
3. Confidence
“Say, for example, a candidate says they think the start-up down the street is building something awesome. Then I say, “that start-up is the worst idea since pink Vitamin Water. And that stuff tastes like Robitussin.”“
4. Enthusiasm
“Making sure that they’re not more enthusiastic about the idea of working at your company (free food, crazy team outings) than the reality of the job (disruptive ideas, talented co-workers) is super important.”
My favorite parts:
Don’t take too much advice:
But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”
“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.
Being comfortable as a non-engineer:
Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.
“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said.
The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:
Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”
In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.
Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.
Developing Product Ideas
Mark Prigg: When you are coming up with product ideas such as the iPod, do you try to solve a problem?
Sir Jonathan Ive: There are different approaches - sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging. What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware of, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions, what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device, rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge, and that’s what is exciting. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html
One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations.
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| — | Paul Graham |
