When you start a startup, you get pushed off the side of a cliff with a bag of aerospace parts.1 You hope they are the parts for a spaceship, and they look like they might be, but it’s impossible to tell when they’re all in a bag. So you start figuring out how the parts fit together as you fall. Every once in a while, it turns out you do have the parts for a spaceship—the market is huge, you have a great product, there’s a natural monopoly, and you have a credible path to be the winner. In that
Build the thing you wish to see in the world
For most of my career, I've been confusing building products with building businesses—and that confusion kept me from pursuing a lot of ideas. Two weeks off helped me realize that not everything needs to be a startup, and some of the best things we build are the ones we build just because we want them to exist.
Bob Moesta - Jobs-to-be-Done Find Out the Why!
On Taste, Effort & Curiosity - again
When AI collapses how long it takes to ship, what’s left is judgment, experimentation, and knowing what not to build.
12 Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups | Andreessen Horowitz
#1 “If everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.” Anyone thinking about starting a business should be searching for mispriced opportunities. While markets are mostly efficient in eliminating opportunities for extraordinary profit, there are always areas of an economy in which there are significant uncertainty. These areas are...
Before You Grow | Y Combinator
Startups are defined by growth [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html], but growth isn’t step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating–many founders hurt their companies by focusing on growth too soon. I’m not saying don’t grow at all–getting people to use your product, even in its earliest form, will help you better understand what your customers want. Bu
Requests for Startups | Y Combinator
Y Combinator is looking for startups working on these ideas. If you're working on something we're interested in, we'd love to hear from you.
Why the Best Companies and Developers Give Away Almost Everything They Do
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2018
We've rounded up 30 of the best insights from the articles we published over the last year. Read on for a time-capsule-like toolkit, full of the best tactical wisdom that seasoned company builders had to offer in 2018.
My Next Act: The First Startup Accelerator for Bootstrappers | Rob Walling
When you hear the term startup accelerator you likely think of YCombinator, TechStars or 500 Startups. Accelerators traditionally cater to "unicorns" – companies that have the potential to be worth at least a billion dollars. This focus has made them successful in launching startups l
Startup Playbook
We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.
Everything is ugly, so go build something that isn't — Raiza Martin, Huxe (ex NotebookLM)
All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders | Andreessen Horowitz
As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He himself used to hold the “engineer-centric” view that if...
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
They Promised Us Jet Packs. They Promised the Bosses Profit. (Published 2016)
Alphabet’s X research lab is still being asked to imagine the impossible. Only now, under pressure from investors, it has to imagine making money, too.
