Is this advice actually helpful? I feel like if I were considering a start-up I’d still have just as many questions after reading what amounts to, “If you want to be great, you need to … be great.”
Sam Altman himself failed with his original startup (Loopt), then got hired into YCombinator. He's basically made it through leveraging his connections (OpenAI was a later investment with a number of other established players).
So really the advice is, be born into the right family, or at least get into to the right university, join the Good Old Boys network, and fail upwards. The old "two dropouts in a garage" idea of a startup immortalized by Steves Jobs and Wozniak is very much a romanticized 20th century phenomenon. Nowadays it's more like the old East Coast financial world of clubs and school ties, albeit with a different uniform of jeans and hoodies.
For context, Loopt raised $39M and was then acquihired for $43M by a bank that scrapped their product and used the team to write a mobile banking app. So the VCs got out but doubtful that anyone involved in Loopt got rich out of it. Also that has to rank as the most expensive way to hire mobile developers in history so I do wonder what the real story is there, surely there was something going on behind the scenes to justify that?
I just kind of skimmed the post, but I know more than a few wantrepreneurs who don't seem to understand the importance of a great team and great execution. They think the steps to building a successful company are just "come up with a revolutionary idea" and "find cheap labor to turn that idea into a product".
This post may not be the most in depth thing in the world, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who could learn something from it.
Yeah, for one of the startups I founded, my mantra was "build a great business and a great product". But I didn't think I had the bandwidth to do both, I wanted help on the business side so I could focus on the product, so I hired a team to "build a great business".
But I wish I had read the bits about cofounders and exec teams.
The number of pitched battles I had about management processes in my pre-revenue, pre-customer, barely-there startup took so much of my time, while I was just trying to get the product out the door so we could sign people up.
I definitely chose the wrong parters... and it definitely sunk the company.
Advice is pretty much never one-size-fits-all. If it’s helpful to you, then it’s helpful to you. If not, or not at this stage in your life, then it’s not. You decide.
