Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 6 – Alex Schultz

Lecture 6 was by Alex Schultz – a very good talk on Growth.

Salient points

1. Self intro: Paid for college doing online marketing, directions marketing. I started with SEO in the 1990s. I created a paper airplane site, and had a monopoly in the small niche market of paper airplanes. When you want to start a startup also see how big the market could be. (In the long term, it wasn’t great.) But what that taught me was how to do SEO. And back in those days it was Alta Vista, and the way to do SEO was to have white text, on a white background, five pages below the fold, and you would rank top of Alta Vista if you just said planes 20 or 30 times in that text. And that was how you won SEO in the 1990s. It was a really, really easy skill to learn.
2. Retention is the single most important thing for growth and retention comes from having a great idea and a great product to back up that idea, and great product market fit. The way we look at, whether a product has great retention or not, is whether or not the users who install it, actually stay on it long-term, when you normalize on a cohort basis, and I think that’s a really good methodology for looking at your product and say ‘okay the first 100, the first 1,000, the first 10,000 people I get on this, will they be retained in the long-run
3. Every different company when it thinks about growth, needs a different North star; however, when you are operating for growth it is critical that you have that North star, and you define as a leader. That one metric that drives the company and a person who drives it.
4. For Facebook the magic moment, is that moment when you see your friend’s face, and everything we do on growth, if you look at the Linkedin registration flow, you look at the Twitter registration flow, or you look at what WhatsApp does when you sign up, the number one thing all these services look to do, is show you the people you want to follow, connect to, send messages to, as quickly as possible, because in this vertical, this is what matters. When you think about Airbnb or eBay, it’s about finding that unique item, that PEZ dispenser or broken laser pointer, that you really really cared about and want to get ahold of. Like when you see that collectible that you are missing, that is the real magic moment on eBay. When you look on Airbnb and you find that first listing, that cool house you can stay in, and when you go through the door, that’s a magic moment
5. Operating for growth, what you really need to think about, is what is the North star of your company: What is that one metric, where if everyone in your company is thinking about it and driving their product towards that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up, you know in the long-run your company will be successful.

6. Make sure you have deliverability. Focus on notifications and triggered based emails, SMS, and Push Notifications.( A bunch of theory on SEO methods)

   Conclusion:

   “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

   BTW PG said Startup = Growth – so lets keep that in mind all the time shall we.

   Btw I highly recommend Genius and thank them for the lecture annotations. A lot of these posts are filtered from there- very helpful.

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 5 – Peter Thiel

Been busy with office work and finally getting a chance to continue blogging on what I learnt with the Sam Altman lectures.

Lecture 5 was by Peter Thiel. Thiel is notoriously famous for being a cut throat execution oriented investor and has invested in some of the most successful startups on the planet. His lecture was of course polarizing (wouldn’t have it any other way) titled Competition is for losers and mostly took out pieces from his very successful and highly recommended book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Salient points

1.)  If you’re the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition. And so hence competition is for losers!

2.) If you have a valuable company two things are true. Number one, that it creates “X” dollars of value for the world. Number two, that you capture “Y” percent of “X.” And the critical thing that I think people always miss in this sort of analysis is that “X” and “Y” are completely independent variables, and so “X” can be very big and “Y” can be very small. “X” can be an intermediate size and if “Y” is reasonably big, you can still have a very big business.

3.) If we look at perfect competition, there’s some pros and cons to the world of perfect competition, on one end of the spectrum you have industries that are perfectly competitive and at the other end of the spectrum you have things that I would say are monopolies, and they’re much more stable longer term businesses, you have more capital, and if you get a creative monopoly for inventing something new, I think it’s symptomatic of having created something really valuable.

4.) Companies lie for their own benefit regarding monopolies. Anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they are in incredible competition; and on the other end of the spectrum if you are incredibly competitive, and if you’re in some sort of business where you will never make any money, you’ll be tempted to tell a lie that goes in the other direction, where you will say that you’re doing something unique that is somehow less competitive than it looks because you’ll want to differentiate. (Example, a restaurant not making money in Palo Alto will position itself as “Well we’re the only British food restaurant in Palo Alto” to seek attention of the monopoly they create. CounterExample of Google who have monopolized the search market but all press and PR is about Self driving cars and the competitive space they are in)

5.) Very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of the monopoly thread is that you want to go after small markets. If you’re a startup, you want to get to monopoly. You’re starting a new company, you want to get to monopoly. Monopolies have a large share of the market, how do you get to a large share of the market? You start with a really small market and you take over the whole market and then over time you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles.

Conclusion:

So much of people’s identities got wrapped up in winning these competitions that they somehow lost sight of what was important, what was valuable. Competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing at because when you’re competing you’re comparing yourself with the people around you. I’m figuring out how to beat the people next to me, how do I do somewhat better than whatever it is they’re doing and you will get better at that. I’m not questioning that, I’m not denying that, but there often comes this tremendous price that you stop asking some bigger questions about what’s truly important and truly valuable. Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through, maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that nobody is taking.

 Now if you haven’t been catching up, its fine, my final post in this series is going to be an infographic on what’s been talked about so far and I absolutely recommend his book Zero to one – Buy it here, must read for anyone wanting to build startups

Cantonese Proverbs in One Picture

廣府話小研究Cantonese Resources

阿塗(Ah To), a graphic designer and part-time cartoonist who concerns about the survival of Cantonese in Canton and Hong Kong, has just published a comic called ” The Great Canton and Hong Kong Proverbs” on Hong Kong independent media “Passion Times“. The cartoon contains illustrations of 81 Cantonese proverbs.

“The Great Canton and Hong Kong Proverbs”
In 1559, Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel created the oil painting “Netherlandish Proverbs” which illustrates many Dutch proverbs to praise the Dutch culture. In 2014, Ah To imitated the idea and created “Great Canton and Hong Kong proverbs” illustrating 81 Cantonese proverbs to propagate the Cantonese culture and defend Cantonese.

81 Cantonese Proverbs 

(The 2 extra proverbs are the bonus given by the author. And audio clips only work on PC.)

1.		上山捉蟹 [séuhng sāan jūk háaih] (To catch crabs on a hill) Harder than hard, almost impossible
2.		鬼揞眼 [gwái ám…

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Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 4 – Adora Cheung

Lecture 4 was on Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing by Adora Cheung. Adora is the CEO of HomeJoy, a online platform which connects customers with house cleaners. Adora Cheung did the first few cleaning jobs herself(Talk about dogfooding), and until late 2013 continued to work at least one cleaning job per month. HomeJoy, After Series B, led by Google Ventures, in early December 2013,  has raised about $38 million totally so far.

Salient points from the talk.

1. Build a startup when you have a big block of available free time!
2. Build a startup that solves a problem you have. Adora and her brother Aaron started a company called PathJoy(online platform to connect users to life coaches), but didn’t continue after a years effort, since they realized it wasnt the problem they wanted to solve.
3. Start by learning A LOT about the target segment, become experts,story board ideal user experience. Build an MVP and put it out, smallest feature set to solve the problem, with simple product positioning.
4. Have lots of avenues for customer feedback. Go out, talk to users. But setup support@company , surveys, qualitative,quantitative feedback, beware of the honesty curve, graph everything. Stealth is stupid.
5. There are three types of growth. Sticky, viral, and paid growth.

Sticky growth is trying to get your existing users to come back and pay you more or use you more. Viral growth is when people talk about you. So you use a product, you really like it and you tell ten other friends, and they like it. That’s viral growth. And the third is paid growth. If you happen to have money in the bank you’re going to be able to use part of that money to buy growth.

Key to growth = Sustainability

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 3 – PG

Lecture 3 had  Paul Graham speaking on the Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas. PG is an advisory icon and the founder and former president of YCombinator, and the primary driving force for this list of amazingly good startup’s. He is also known for his essays on startups.

PG spoke about how startup’s are counter intuitive.

1.)  Startups are counterintuitive! They are like skiing. The first counterintuitive point is that , You cant trust  your intuition about startups,but you can trust your intuition about people.

2.) The second counterintuitive point is that what you need to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users. Most startups founders now go through the motion of building a startup, because it feels cool, hire people, rent an office in SoMa etc., But forget to do the one important thing, build something users want.

3.) The third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. IN a large company, you can get away by sucking up to people, sending emails late nights and on weekends to create an illusion of hard work, but you cant do that in startups, because there is no boss/management to fool, and you are fooling yourself. To some extent with the right phrases you can fool some investors but its not in your interest to do so!

4.) The fourth counterintuitive point is that startups are all consuming but this doesn’t end once you grow as a company. They take over your life. As the companies get bigger, the problems don’t go away, they just change scale. Larry page, a billionaire, still has a lot of problems to tackle daily.  IT NEVER GETS EASIER. It maybe a different set of problems but still the total volume of worry never decreases. Mark Z cant bum around a foreign country

5.) The fifth counterintuitive point is that the age/point in your life at which you should start a startup will eventually come to you. Starting startups is hard, but the answer to the question when should I do it, you can tell!

Reading how to get ideas is here: An exercise left to the reader.

PG’s essay on the topic.

How building startups are like planting trees

Starting startups and planting trees basically have the same steps. Here’s an analogy

1. Find the right soil and area –  this is basically market research without which there is no beginning.  Making sure the soil, the weather, the surroundings is crucial for plants to even begin. Same for startups. Find the right product/market/idea fit. Solve a real problem.

2. Buy the right seeds –  this is the formation of the idea. The idea has to be right, and fit the market, just like the right soil needs the right seeds. Also to buy the seeds you need money and possibly land. You either put in your own money or borrow from friends and family with a promise to repay in kind. This is angel investment. Angels can be friends and family/bootstrapped/angel investors.

3. Choose the right people to plant the tree with – planting and growing trees is a lifelong process.  And you need the right set of people to work with you, who share the same vision for what the tree should look like 20 years from now and will do anything to see it gets there. Also ideally you’ve planted other trees before with these people. This is how you should choose Co founders. The vision should be to grow an Orchard of trees. Ideally you’ll need someone who knows the science of planting trees (CTO) and someone who can ensure daily watering/healthcheck operations happen smoothly(COO). Your primary role(CEO) will be to oversee the other two and start talking to local markets about the benefits of buying your produce and signing up early customers. The purpose is after all to create customers.

4. Plant the seed – This is the start. Make sure everything is in order. Team is set, plans are set, laser focused on building, growth and execution.

5. Water the seed till it becomes a healthy plant – Early growth. This basically proves the land is fertile and the growing trees here is not disastrous. This also sends the right cues to investors and customers alike, who see that 20 years from now, you might be the best producer in the market, and want an early piece of it.

6. Find people who can buy you the right tools and fertilizers– expecting trees to grow on their own is hard especially considering all the factors that can go against it. Find Investors who can buy expensive fertilizers and help solve your problems with their vast experience of having grown trees before. These people are only here to help. Make sure of that, and that you don’t give up too much of your early produce or promise too much of your end product

7. Water everyday and grow the tree – Water the plants everyday, ensure good health, start selling produce, put money back into buying things that help in growth. Similarly for startups – execute, execute, execute, use early revenues to buy more tools , build more metrics and hire more people

8. Find people to help you plant more seeds – find coworkers who believe in your vision and work hard with you. Find people willing to invest in helping you to plant more trees. Scale your startup.

9. Build a business- now that you have the produce, the customers willing to buy your produce and the right hardworking team you have sustainable business. Grow the business. Start planting more trees and orchards, start planting trees in other suitable orchards, acquire orchards that have trees you’d like but cant plant them due to the time involved.

10. Sell the Orchard or continue to expand across regions, orchards – sell or go IPO

At every point be aware of bad weather conditions(co founder spats, bad hires), diseases(bad execution, bad advice) that can kill the plant and make sure to root them out early.

Very similar don’t you think. Comments?

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 2

Lecture 2 was part 2 of the first class i.e. Ideas, Product , Teams and execution with focus on Teams and Execution. The class started with Sam answering a couple of questions from the questionnaire.

Q: How does someone identify markets that are growing quickly?

A. College students instinctively have better know how of this, better than older people, since they see friends, market trends etc., everyday closer than others.

Q: How do you deal with burnout?

A. It sucks, but keep going. Address the challenges, things that are going wrong , and things would get better. Founder depression is a serious issue

Team Notes:

1.) Choosing Co Founders is very very very  important. Co Founder blow up is the main reason for failing YC Startups. Best place to find a co founder – college or a very interesting startup type company – FB, Google. Don’t go solo, very difficult.

2.) Best friend\Friend\Acquaintance Co founder > Solo Founder > Random Founder you meet. Founders = 007 , Hire James Bond type people – do whatever it takes to achieve goals,tough+calm.

3.) Hire slowly, hire correctly.Get the best, don’t settle. Recruitment is hard! Spend either 0% or 25% of time hiring. Use personal referrals liberally. Look outside the valley.

4.) Hire the Venn Diagram intersection of Smart, GTD and Like to spend time with. Try to work together on something instead of just interviews. For interviews ask  for projects and call references.

5.) Give lot more equity to employees vs investors. Do this very soon. Be near equal, this is a very difficult decision, vest equity. Employee retention is a big part. Do simple things to do this , not micromanage, praise teams. Fire fast.

 Execution notes:

1.) CEO –> Vision, Raise money, evangelize, hire and manage, make sure the company executes.

2.) FOCUS –> What are you spending time and money, find two things to do everyday with laser focus. Say No a lot, Set overarching goals and repeat them over and over again, communicate.

3.) INTENSITY–> Not for work life balance, all consuming. GTD!

4.) INDECISIVENESS is a startup killer – Bias towards action.

5.)  ALWAYS KEEP MOMENTUM and ALWAYS KEEP GROWING.

BUILD FEATURES–> SHIP–>VIEW METRICS.

Don’t let competitors worry you unless they don’t care about you.

 

Slide Deck

Sam Altman’s CS183B – Lecture 1

Signed up for Sam Altman’s CS183B. Quite excited to watch and learn a little bit about how to build startups. Sam Altman is a proven technology leader(sold Loopt(First YC batch)) and voted one of the best founders ever by Paul Graham(PG), and hence is his successor at YCombinator as the President.

The first class was just an introduction. I think the biggest insights from the first part of  Sam Altman’s talk were

1.) 4 components that make a great startup – Great idea, Awesome product, Strong founding team, and cut throat execution

2.) Ideas are important(contrary to recent popular belief that ideas don’t matter)! Of course not the most important, but certainly ideas form a very important piece of the startup value prop.

3.) Make amazing products. Products are easy to build if you have a strong founding team and the right toolset. Its better to have a small group of users who absolutely love the product rather than having a large group of users who just like it.

4.) Dont follow the policy – “We will build and they will come”, rather follow “I will build what they want by asking them over and over again”

5.) The holy grail of growth metrics :

Total registrations
Active users
Activity Levels
Cohort Retention
Revenue
Net Promoter Score

Slide deck: Sam Altman Slide deck

Dustin Moskovitz, Co Founder at Facebook and Asana, also talked about the pitfalls of thinking about startups as being cool, rad and the most fun thing to do and the only reason for you to start something is that you can Not start it , your own passion of solving a problem you are facing and helping others to solve the same problem and the acknowledgement of the world of the existence of the problem and the need to solve it.

Slide deck: Dustin Moskovitz Slide deck

 

Here is a link to the questionnaire , if you want to ask Sama or PG or Adora Cheung any specific questions:

Questionnaire

Btw – These are a few books, in my opinion, you need to read before even thinking of starting something

1.) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Peter Thiel

2.) The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries

3.)Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) – Clayton Christensen

4.)The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank

5.) Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age – Paul Graham

Of course this is just 5 out of the many that are out there, so please comment on what books you would rate higher than the ones above for any budding entrepreneur to read.

 

PS: I’ll be summarizing all classes into possibly flashcards like posts with 5 points each, like above

Medieval Selfies

Really fun article on medieval selfies

medievalbooks

Self-portraits of medieval book artisans are as exciting as they are rare. In the age before the modern camera there were limited means to show others what you looked like. In the very late medieval period, when the Renaissance spirit was already felt in the air, some painters made self-portraits or included themselves in paintings commissioned by others. Stunningly, the medieval painter Jan van Eyck showed himself in the portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his fiance: he is staring at you from the mirror that is hanging behind the couple. For those who still didn’t get it, he painted above it Johannes de eyck fuit hic, “Jan van Eyck was here” (Fig. 1, more here). He added the date 1434 to the picture, making it a particularly early selfie.

Fig. 1 – Jan van Eyck, Giovanni Arnolfini and fiance (right)  and mirror detail (left)

As far as producers of books is concerned, there were only two kinds…

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Sequoia::Hackathon 2014 – Analysis

Just came back from Sequoia Hack 2014 at the ITC Gardenia in Bangalore. We were team Slartibartfast (Jainendra Kumar) and I. My original teammate couldn’t come, and Jai decided to join up for a fun 24 hour hackathon(his first). As it is the norm in bangalore, a great crowd of some of the smartest hackers in Bangalore had showed up .  A lot of Sequoia backed indian companies were releasing API’s like JustDial, Freecharge, HealthKart, Practo, Appier etc, But we were focused on working and seeing the OLA cabs API. We were quite excited because we both are excited about the potential Ola cabs has to disrupt the transportation space in India. There were 12 tracks one could be in- i.e Payments, ML, Transport, Open Source, Gaming, Social,Virtual Goods, Search, Analytics, Infra, healthcare and (one more that I cant remember anymore, will update).

Our original idea was to build Poola – Carpooling with Ola. But when the OLA API’s were released, they just weren’t enough to build what we wanted to, and we didn’t want to download and fudge data and show something fake and even though Ola worked really hard on releasing the API’s they couldnt expose more data. We tried to build a pseudo hack till 10PM with dummy data without a lot of API use on Saturday but then realized it would be futile to continue, plus we later discovered a lot of teams were doing Carpooling with Ola . This is when we made the switch from Transportation to Gaming. We ended up building a small game on Android.

The premise for building the game:

1. Very easy game play but should be difficult to master
2. Addictive
3. Can be built in 10 hours and Put onto play store by 10 am
4. Learn about game building on Android for work purposes, try to use concepts like OPENGL etc., to build it

Presenting Wiley Runner. (Removed for now off the store, will be back after a few image tweaks)

Help Wile E. Coyote – the hero in our game(Yes!) escape a barrage of roadrunners and kill as many as you can with ACME missiles Instructions:

1.  Move the coyote from left to right to escape roadrunners
2.  Swipe up to shoot ACME missiles
3. Try to achieve high scores and compete with your friends .

Next steps for the app will include

1. Google play integration
2. Ads
3. Infinite scroll levels

And Maybe gaze tracking integration (Anand chandrashekaran from MadStreetDen will be thrilled) Lets see if it can become the next flappy bird – everyone I sent the game to are still playing it 😀 All in all a great event.

Met a few investors of Sequoia who I will certainly want to be talking to again 😉

Feedback to the event organizers:

1. Wifi – Very hit/miss . Maybe try handing out one day dongles to every one next time?
2. Segregate teams doing 24 hours hacks vs . I know this is difficult but this would be great.
3. Organized better – we weren’t in any of the track lists, we didn’t receive a google link to register our track and we literally had 1 minute with the judges towards the end because quite literally time was up.

But then its only the second sequoia hack and hope it gets better next year- so all in all good fun! The food and the continuous supply of paper boat/tzinga was brilliant

Congratulations to all the winners and great work!

Follow the #seqhack tag on twitter to find all the winners and winning ideas.