From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 13
- “The reality is: a founder is someone who deals with a ton of different headaches and no one is universally super powered.”
- “Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.”
- “What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their problem and their task.”
- “The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.”
- “It’s very conventional to say that you’re a contrarian these days.”
- “It’s actually pretty easy to be contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.”
- 1/ “When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about — how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me…
- 2/“…from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don’t know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.”
- “This is classic when you begin thinking about what is a great founder is, you navigate what is apparent paradoxes.”
- “You gotta be both flexible and persistent.”
- “You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea.”
- 1/“Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about what it is you want to be doing and where…”
- 2/”you want to be going, but also be smart enough that you’re essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.”
- “Data only exists within the framework of a vision you’re building to, a hypothesis of where you’re moving to.”
- “So usually you have to have product distribution as more fundamental than what the actual product is.”
- “When I’m raising money, this fundraising, I’m thinking about the next fundraising. I’m thinking how I’m set up for it.”
- 1/“It’s useful to be able to recognize whether you’re on track or not.”
- 2/“To have that belief, but also paranoia about am I tracking against my investment thesis.”
- “The question is: how you cross uneven ground, how you assemble networks around you.”
- “There’s an ability to learn & adapt, an ability to constantly have a vision that’s driving you, but to be taking input from all sources.”
- “The challenge when you think about product distribution is: how are you competing for potential customers or potential members time”
- “One of the tests that I frequently use in an interaction is I push on the idea and what I’m looking for is both flexibility & persistence.”
- “One of the phrases I frequently look for is infinite learning curve.Because each entrepreneurial pattern is to some degree unique and new.”
- “I am most heartened when I’m talking to a team when they’re reasoning to each other.”
- “In software, speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware, if you screw it up, you’re dead. So accuracy really matters.”
- “If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is how I have a balanced life so on and so forth — they’re not committed to winning.”
You can watch the entire lecture for yourself here:http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec13/
Image Credit: Happy Reid — By Joi Ito
