I'd be interested to know what about the negotiation lecture you think make it one of the best. I just listened to it for the first time and didn't actually find too much content. The speaker had a lot of anecdotes but I didn't find too much actionable advice or processes.
This is what I pulled from it:
* Be calm, don't get angry
* Learn what the other party really wants
* Offer a price you think is fair, offer it early
* Don't horse trade, unless the other party likes to horse trade.
* be trustworthy
* have an attorney
I'm not trying to be a downer, honestly. I think I may be missing the forest for the trees.
My biggest takeaway was that everything is a negotiation whether you think about it along those lines or not.
Edit: as a whole I find the ETL series more inspirational than actionable. Actionable items would differ from person to person depending on their situation and what they hope to achieve. Might be a key difference from the class Sam Altman is teaching.
Thanks for linking that lecture on negotiation! - it was an enjoyable listen and I especially liked the emphasis on fairness and even altruism to others in negotiations. I think humanity's a lot more fun to think about when people are good to each other.
Unfortunately, there's a huge difference in the psychological impact of seeing role models in-person, versus only on a screen.
I've experienced this many times while living outside of the US, in recent years. All of the people you'll read about in blogs, or see in videos -- they're perceived like movie stars or legends that must have been greatly distorted on their journey to the opposite end of the world. Keep in mind that many small countries have never seen a single big tech-startup success happen within their borders. Even suggesting a remote possibility of successes, will be met with the argument that every successful person they've ever known hasn't followed what they call the "American" startup way.
In-person role models -- can't underestimate the psychological impact.
> many small countries have never seen a single big tech-startup success happen within their borders
That sounds more like a difference caused by economic and cultural circumstances than whether you've met a rockstar in person.
If Country X is unable to produce viable startups, it's probably because it doesn't have the economic and cultural infrastructure to support startups yet, not because Peter Thiel has never graced that country with a royal visit.
> every successful person they've ever known hasn't followed what they call the "American" startup way.
Of course they haven't. The "American startup way" is optimized for the specific economic and cultural circumstances that are only found in certain parts of the United States. Some aspects of it may be generalizable, but most of it isn't. Following it to the letter in any other country will probably earn you nothing but ridicule and bankruptcy.
The countries I'm talking about have produced many startup founders. They move to the US and never move back. The successful role models don't exist in that country, because as soon as people start becoming successful they move out and never return.
One of the perceived privileges of the elite is their very access to opportunity, and being there is to provide that access.
Not being there is to observe the access, which is the addition of transparency that never existed before, but fundamentally the access hasn't been granted.
If you're already in a tough place without access to these kinds of opportunity, this is just going to underline and bold that some more.
Why the gnashing of teeth? Yes, privilege is real, but they had to pick some place to do it, and it's a hell of a lot better to have it online and for free than to not have it online and for free.
No gnashing of teeth, just a deep empathy (I was homeless/street-sleeping when young) with people who feel that they are (for whatever reason: geographical, socioeconomical, gender, racial, etc) lacking in privilege and locked out.
If you're going to take the attitude that nothing except physical proximity to a handful of high-status individuals will suffice, then you've defined terms under which almost everyone has to lose, no matter what happens. Then the dynamics of zero-sum games inevitably cause the value that would have been accrued by the handful of winners to be destroyed in fighting over who gets to be in that handful.
I say bugger that for a game of soldiers. No, you don't have to meet one of the 'legends' before you can succeed. That sort of thinking is false, poisonous and destructive. In almost all cases, the first step on the road to success is understanding that life is not a zero-sum game.
There's a quote from Lost which seems apropos - "It's one thing to believe it, it's another to see it". That's the effect I get from reading about all these stuff online.
And just because of that (i.e. making it available online) I cannot even begin to describe just how much good this might do in the world.
I could expand this sentiment to every teacher or lecturer who has chosen to put their video online, especially the great ones. They have done a great service to the world (probably beyond what they may themselves realize).
I recently met an undergrad student in India who considered Steve Huffman to be his guru (he was a fan of his Udacity course, and so am I, btw) and swears by everything Steve taught him. And, Steve probably does not even know that he has a fan following in a small town in India :)
Oh I definitely will! Its hard to argue that its a true substitute for face-to-face encounters, especially with some of the guest instructors. I don't mean to diminish the value of the online class at all.
If you're selling anything to a business and they've done any kind of research on you they will. And VCs definitely know. Sharing the same alma mater with a VC could make all the difference in funding.
Being able to raise funding is nice, but I could do that too, and I didn't attend Stanford.
The only question that matters to investors is, "Will the next Google or Facebook come out of Stanford?" If the answer is "No," then everyone investing in Stanford-related startups will lose.
There's a higher chance that the right talent, idea, and motivation might come together at Stanford, but it's far from likely. I don't know too much about elite universities, but the fact that Facebook originated from someone attending Harvard and Airbnb originated from an RISD alum is evidence that any university has a fair chance of starting the next hot company. Maybe even someone who hasn't attended university at all might start it.
Imagine if Google wasn't able to raise funding because someone was prejudiced against where the founders went to university, or whether they attended university. How different would the world be? That's why it's mistaken to place so much emphasis on Stanford. It shouldn't matter, except insofar as there's a lot of talent there.
Google may not be the best example... the founders went to Standford as well haha. I think the question comes down to, does the school give the unfair advantage or does the school attract smart people that are more likely to accomplish something great. I think its already accepted that there is a correlation.
The fact that Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox came out of other places suggests there isn't anything inherently special about Stanford, except that there's a lot of talent there.
I think the question comes down to, does the school give the unfair advantage or does the school attract smart people that are more likely to accomplish something great. I think its already accepted that there is a correlation.
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
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I'm going to go with "unfair advantage," but there are a lot of smart people there too.
It could, but you know what makes even more of a difference--to the business? Having customers and recurring revenue.
I know that funding is kind of like a nice additional checkbox on your list of upper-middle class elite treadmill objectives, but outside of sanfranistan we've somehow managed to build entire empires of real value without having to rely on venture capitalists who happened to get drunk in the same dorms that we did.
So, the assertion was "may make you more successful in funding"--you're moving the goalposts to "successful" after the fact.
Success and funding are not necessarily correlated, right? We saw that back in the 90s and are seeing it again.
I don't disagree that having these connections can ease certain parts of the fundraising (and even customer acquisition!) process--that said, I'm concerned that the emphasis placed a lot of times in the ecosystem is on funding and not the boring part of, you know, business.
My cynicism stems from the fact that, to me, the hip path these days has you going to an Ivy-league school or Stanford, starting a company, going through a well-known accelerator, raising funding from VCs, and then -~=magic startup time=~-. And for a lot of people, this path isn't about actually doing business--it's simply the thing that they're supposed to do and which it is implied is expected of them. All the while, spouting rhetoric about how they're going to "change the world" by chasing the same boring set of business concepts. I find it irritating.
It's not the Stanford (or Harvard, or USC, or Ohio State) education that really matters -- it's the people you meet. Going to a school that's a nexus for your industry puts you around people who are driven and knowledgeable about similar topics and is what leads to professional growth and opportunities.
(This is something that online education misses entirely and will largely never be able to replicate.)
Granted that watching instructional videos online doesn't (at least in and of itself) accomplish the goal of meeting driven and knowledgeable peers, but if that's the real goal, then let's focus on it, because there are ways to achieve it that are orders of magnitude more efficient (in both money and life) than trying to get into Stanford.
The fact that this information be made available online on the same day is quite a gift. That will take some effort. Thank you.
I would humbly suggest that early on you should address what YC means by startup. PG's essay on growth is by far the most well conveyed explanation. I think it would clear up a lot of confusion people have about Startups vs small businesses.
The fact that people disagree on the definition of "startup" isn't a sign of confusion. Rather, it reflects the fact that there are genuine differences between people in our industry about how to develop new business models, and how to define success. Graham has articulated one side of that debate with his essay, but calling it an explanation is disingenuous.
"That’s why each lecture will be available via YouTube and iTunes Connect shortly after they happen, and associated reading materials and assignments will be linked to on the course site. To keep in touch with others following along with the lectures from afar, there will be a forum and Facebook group available to discuss their content and provide further opportunities to learn from those involved in startups."
So, not quite a MOOC, but still pretty close. I wonder if this is the MVP for scaling YC beyond the individual batches.
The batches are the secret sauce. (Well, not that secret.) Doing YC without the batches would be a very impressive feat to pull off. It would turn the piston driven machine they have now into the equivalent of a turbine.
The people are the secret sauce. Specifically, the people at YC who know everyone worth knowing in the valley. You join YC for their rolodex; nothing else they do is that different from any other accelerator.
Not that YC doesn't add value (they do; especially in companies with very raw founders) but Silicon Valley is all about who you know. That's a lot of value right there.
Apologies for using a metaphor. Let me try to clarify. Batches allow you to look at a bunch of companies at roughly the same point in time. So you now get to look at the companies against the backdrop of all the other companies in the same batch. Rather than having to make a one-shot decision about a single start-up you make a decision about which N of the 100's of applicants you like best which will give you a statistical advantage.
But it is possible that YC now has crunched enough data and has enough people in the alumni network that they can abandon the batch model and get the same kind of quality without having to use the batch model.
The 'late' applications were a hint in this direction, if they get rid of the batch model entirely they will have potentially a huge benefit both in load (batches will create temporary overload) and in total throughput.
So instead of having two 'strokes' per year they'd be moving at an ever accelerating pace until they run at the maximum rate at which viable applicants can apply and be processed.
To explain a bit of the metaphor, a piston has very discrete stages to produce work (at minimum, up and down) whereas a turbine is continuously spinning. YC's history has relied on 'stages' where all the companies are on the same path, they present at demo day, and the investors know exactly what to expect. If they turned into a 'turbine', the companies would all be at random stages, Demo Day would be much different, and YC would come to resemble more typical VC funds.
Hopefully, they'll also be captioned so that deaf entrepreneurs like me can also watch. They've set the standard by funding non-profits, hopefully they'll also set another standard by building an accessible lecture series.
Apologies for the delayed response, bnjs. Apparently I need to figure out a way to get replies to comments. Thanks for the awesome transcription, I know how much of effort these take :).
It's interesting that this is inside of the computer science department and is limited to engineering students considering YC has really been expanding the companies it's accepting. E145[0], an existing and highly sought after technology entrepreneurship course, is just a general engineering class and isn't limited to traditional engineering majors, as far as I'm aware.
Tons of great founders of tech companies come from disciplines outside of engineering and manage to learn enough on their own. I would wonder if it's a function of keeping it from getting oversubscribed or possibly a way to allow the curriculum to be narrowly focused towards how to build a scalable software business.
What makes you think that because it's inside the CS department it's limited to engineering students? At Stanford any student can register for nearly any class.
This is an amazing recruiting tool for YC and is a page out of JOEL SPOLSKY's book:
"So if the top 1 percent never apply for jobs (aka get startup funding), how can you recruit them? My theory is that the best way is to find them before they realize there is a job market (aka startup funding)--back when they're still in college."[0]
Sergey and Larry actually "just got a job" after graduation: Researchers at a university pursuing a phd. They used THIS JOB to develop the technology for their (later) company. Then they FIRST tried to SELL the (search-)algorithm and when they didn't find someone (to pay a couple of millions) they started Google. AND... Larry is/was the driving master mind taking Sergey (and a lot of others) with him to success. Well... it's an add.
This ad is the poster (pardon the pun) for YC sexism, it still appears in women in tech blog posts all the time. Hard to imagine being a Stanford student in 2006 who has never heard of "Y Combinator" and sees this ad. May get a laugh from a guy like Evan Spiegel, but is just plain creepy to a woman.
Honestly this is like having "The Justice League" give a course about "How to be a Superhero". Congratulations to the team that has put this together. Best round up of speakers in any startup course that I can remember.
In some sense, this seems to represent an open sourcing of YC. I bet this will become a foundational resource for aspiring entrepreneurs for years to come.
The list of speakers looks fantastic! This said, I think the list lacks diversity. I think it would be great to have someone outside of SV in it (e.g. Jason Fried, Jeff Bezos etc.) One of the better Startup School talks I seen was from DHH (that presented another way of building a successful company).
But then they'd have to cover stuff like focusing on sales from the start of a business, developing a business model, and making money (from customers) ASAP.
(In case of confusion, I have my tongue in cheek ;-) These topics will surely be covered in the content somewhere if it's about building a business.)
What's fantastic about this is that even though the class is at Stanford, everyone from around the world can follow along just as easily. Stanford is opening up more and more of its opportunities to the general public, which is awesome. Another one I'd recommend taking advantage of is Stanford's Hacking Hours:
This is a weekly on-campus meetup where people hack on their projects in a collaborative environment. It's open to the general public, and anyone nearby with code to write is welcome to come work on it at Stanford.
Just finished reading Peter Thiel's Zero to One; and it is interesting that both him and Marissa Mayer are going to teach. He sort of disses her in the book. This is a quote from his book.
"Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous. Ever since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo! in mid-2012, she has worked to revive the once-popular internet giant by making it cool again. In a single tweet, Yahoo! summarized Mayer’s plan as a chain reaction of “people then products then traffic then revenue.” The people are supposed to come for the coolness: Yahoo! demonstrated design awareness by overhauling its logo, it asserted youthful relevance by acquiring hot startups like Tumblr, and it has gained media attention for Mayer’s own star power. But the big question is what products Yahoo! will actually create. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t just make Apple a cool place to work; he slashed product lines to focus on the handful of opportunities for 10x improvements. No technology company can be built on branding alone."- [1]
This is great. Someday if/when the lectures are streamed real-time, consider a reddit group for remote students to ask good (upvoted) questions to the lecturer.
A MOOC I'd definitely recommend taking along side this is the Startup Engineering from Stanford, taught by Balaji Srinivasan and Vijay Pande.
I've taken a lot of MOOCs but that was one that truly changed a lot of things in terms of how I approached tech and startups, and it actually says in it's description that it's somewhat of a sequel to CS183 (this new course is CS183B).
I'll second this sentiment. Balaji's class goes into real-world implementation and if you learn everything packed into the dense curriculum, you'll come out much more powerful and capable. This new class seems only to extend upon the theory of the original CS183.
Nice, but, very few of those individuals have started a startup in the past five years, or even ten years. What exactly do they KNOW that is going to help you, the founder?
I don't think this is the ideal lineup for a day of talks about How to Start a Startup in the fall of 2014. The past few years have been particularly brutal for starting a startup. Mostly because there are so many others doing the same thing, and most of them are vying for the same funding dollars you're vying for.
Thousands upon thousands of people are trying and have tried, and most have failed, and all have stories to tell. That is the norm, that is the most likely outcome: failure. Instead, you'll hear from billionaires and superachievers and tech celebrities none of whom have been hungry, driven with a vision, struggling to build something new, fighting the good fight, any time recently. They're disconnected, imho.
Go ahead and downvote, I know, it's YC heresy, but so be it.
I can't speak for the rest of the lineup, but I know that YC partners see hundreds of startups run through their program each year. The aggregate value of that is significant, and there are very few patterns they haven't already encountered.
Having seen so many iterations of the startup process, I'd argue that they are eminently qualified to give advice on the subject.
I'd certainly prefer it over some random, anecdotal account from a founder who just happened to be in the trenches recently.
There is the argument that you can't learn much from failure. You could've failed for 6-7 reasons in reality and can have a theory about the 2-3 reasons for your failure with some overlap between the two.
Successful people however had a series of small wins and small failures and got to experience the difficulties/challenges at each level of success.
If I was learning to swim I'd rather be taught by a great swimming coach who's taught many hundreds of swimmers before and seen the common mistakes / challenges than by another great swimmer.
Your criticism is a very contrived, as it seems to me that YC have been careful to ensure that most of the speakers are recent entrepreneurs.
The VCs on the course are also former entrepreneurs.
Thats a whos who of the startup world which is fantastic. I hope you can motivate students in not only on just the web side to change the world. Sort of a great way to teach future entrepreneurs the requirements, structure and path of a successful startup.
This is a fantastic move by the YC folks. Doing the class at Stanford raises their profile in just the right place -- now more of just the right and able individuals will apply to YC (especially because YC basically "teaching" at Stanford has earned them validation as a place to go for Stanford students, who up til now may have had any reservation about joining YC, or just simply hadn't considered the possibility, or just didn't know of YC). I hope to see a lot of good come out of this.
I hope the next class comes to us in the East coast? :) (Harvard and MIT, producer of Drew Houston, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.)
now more of just the right and able individuals will apply to YC
Do those people care about Stanford? The founders of neither Dropbox nor Airbnb attended Stanford, for example. Evidence thus far seems to indicate that elitism isn't the right metric to optimize for. That said, there's certainly a large talent pool concentrated at Stanford.
Keeping YC a meritocracy seems important, so hopefully it won't become something else.
I have spent quite some time and effort (failing) to get an open source company into open source contracts in the UK government. Bu I want to because things like the GDS (grand father of USGDS) are saying open source is the future of government
And this is one more tick in that argument - what YC is doing is industrialisation of startup founding - and now they are "open sourcing" the how to, I would think that any government not stealing these ideas and throwing money that otherwise would languish in bureaucratic purses is missing a huge opportunity.
I am very excited to have a chance to listen in on this course. I currently attend a state university in Illinois that has a small entrepreneurship program and I am working hard to get every student involved in the startup space in Chicago where I know they will gain the most knowledge and experience. This course that Sam and YC are making available will be a huge resource to myself and my fellow students this semester. Appreciate the hard work and thought. Can't wait!
Interesting idea! Though, my guess is few. Many of the "startup-dropouts" probably already have. It sounds like this course doesn't bring any new information to the table, but, rather, is the most concise one can get with 1000 minutes.
As an interesting corollary, Virgil Elings taught an entrepreneurship course at UCSB wherein the first day he assigned the following homework assignment: Drop out and work-for/start-up a company. I didn't take attendance (neither did he, for that matter!), but it seems nobody dropped out.
yes, they are. all of these will be recorded and available online same-day. we'll also post all other material (readings, etc). it should be pretty good--i really tried hard to get the very best people i know on each topic.
Why not? People aren't stupid, and I expect most people realize that some businesses aren't meant for YC for one reason or another. Trying to obscure that fact doesn't make YC better, or more appealing. I'd actually say that covering that material would make YC more appealing, because it would hammer home the point that the YC people are on-the-level, straight-shooters who don't try to distort the truth to favor themselves. Who wouldn't rather do business with somebody like that? It's basically about trust.
You could almost make a comparison by analogy the old saw about how "the best way to get customers to use your product is to make it easy for them to leave your product".
It takes guts to open source yourself. It also highlights that so much of the value comes from the in person meetings - sharing of ideas and networking.
You're not doing yourself any favours with comments like these. YC is going out of their way to make this stuff accessible and privilege has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Please, don't do this.
Perhaps it wasn't the most useful comment I've written, but I think I have a strong point.
It's not the information or know-how that makes YC a game-changer. It's the connections and seal of approval, which are scarce by definition. And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%.
I don't begrudge YC, really. It's a brilliantly run business and it's probably done a lot of good for the world. It's just fun to snark about these things because, honestly, most of the people "out there" (the ones who actually think protesting Google Buses makes some kind of sense) are going to react more harshly than I do. I just make fun of shit.
> It's not the information or know-how that makes YC a game-changer.
YC is composed of equal parts capital, smarts and process. That's not taking into account the connections or the seal of approval, those are results not inputs! You could claim they are inputs now but it wasn't always like that.
> It's the connections and seal of approval, which are scarce by definition.
Connections are not scarce at all. You - and anybody else - have the power to reach out to those that you want to reach. Assuming you play at 6 degrees for a bit you'll find a link to whoever you want to reach. What makes the difference is that once YC gives you that coveted 'seal of approval' (and that's also not that scarce, vast numbers of start-ups have received it) that some people will throw money at you.
But that's a curse and a blessing at the same time, for many of those recipients will receive the 'curse' and only a few will eventually see it as a blessing. But all of them agree: the experience alone was well worth it.
Now I'm not a YC alumnus, nor will I ever be one but I think that if a very large number of people that go through a program think it is worth it then that has my vote.
The seal of approval is something that VCs that do not wish to do their own vetting have come up with, they have basically outsourced their vetting to YC because YC does so much better a job of this than they could ever do by themselves that they might as well try to get in on the feeding frenzy aka demo day.
And YC has forever been expanding the size of their batches based on capacity available for processing. So the scarcity element would seem to be under control and reducing.
> And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%.
On the contrary, all the material will be made available, so you too can benefit from this.
Stanford is merely a convenient vehicle.
> I don't begrudge YC, really.
I'll take your word for it. But it seems as if you do hold some kind of grudge and a pretty deep one.
> It's a brilliantly run business and it's probably done a lot of good for the world.
So why all this negativity then? It's like walking around on a square attempting to insult random people for either being successful, connected, part of some perceived secret cabal or some other figment of the imagination. That's a strange line to walk.
> It's just fun to snark about these things because, honestly, most of the people "out there" (the ones who actually think protesting Google Buses makes some kind of sense) are going to react more harshly than I do. I just make fun of shit.
Well, it's good to have that on the table then because I honestly believed that you were serious in the way you present yourself. You're obviously a pretty smart fellow, the bit that I did not understand is if you're so jealous of all this why are you hurting your personal rep at this level. But if you're just 'making fun of shit' then that explains things sufficiently for me, I tried to make sense of it. My mistake.
>> And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%.
>On the contrary, all the material will be made available, so you too can benefit from this.
This is missing his point. The student in the same room as these speakers will have considerably more access to the individuals speaking than someone merely watching the lectures online. In addition, those students also have the stamp of approval that comes with being a Stanford student.
This situation isn't creating this privilege, but it is reinforcing it.
That said, it also creates some lesser opportunities for the clever and determined outsider that didn't exist otherwise.
That Stanford session will be over-subscribed to the point that any access privilege is relatively minor, as well as just a moment in time but the treasure trove of footage resulting from it will last for a lifetime.
The bubble will probably wind down in the next 3 years, and douche companies Snapchat and Clinkle have done so much damage to the credibility of technology (even though their founders are douches, not technologists) that, after those assholes finish vaporizing billions, it could be another 50 years before anyone with money takes us seriously.
The problem is that most of the people "out there" don't separate the Google-Glass-wearing douches in most of the executive roles and true technologists. They lump us together and think we're like them. Which is why they hate us.
I used to be much angrier about the non-meritocracy of the Valley, but in 2014, we're near the end of the bubble cycle anyway. I've decided to be forward-thinking and wait for the crash.
After the crash hits and the carpetbaggers leave, it'll be up to people like me to rebuild the technology world. I hope that, when we do it, we create one in which engineers and scientists and makers matter again.
Our hosts are betting that Michael is right about part of this, the part that is far enough removed from their lives that they might be considering it objectively.
There has never in the history of mankind been a time when engineers, scientists and makers mattered more than they do today.
8 (or 18, or 38) years ago, before the douchebags tracked the mainstream business culture into startups, reduced engineer equity slices dramatically, and generally made the sorts of people who built the original Silicon Valley into second-class citizens.
There are many who argue that the 1970s was the Golden Age of Silicon Valley. People who actually wrote the software were treated like real people, and equity slices reflected it. None of this 90-hour-work-week-for-0.03% bullshit.
seriouslypleasedropit here, I've commented on your blog.
I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to completely flatten things. There will always be an in-group.
But new in-groups can be created. That's basically what YC has done in the last 20 years. Further, in-groups can actively help outgroups. Pell grants are a great example of this.
YC wants startups with promise. Build one, join the in-group, and then shape the world according to your will.
I don't see it... if anything this should have the opposite effect. It's making that more more great information and know-how available to absolutely anyone, anywhere in the world, for free. OK, to be fair, anyone with a computer and a 'net connection, which does leave out some people... but still, it's a lot better than having a corresponding class at Stanford, which is available only to paying Stanford students, and not put up on the web for everybody.
I get that you think connections are everything (or close to everything), so I'll just say that I disagree. Connections are useful, but there are a lot of ways to build a network, establish relationships and grow you base of connections. And heck, for those of us not on the West Coast, we'll probably never meet most of the people involved in this class "in real life" at all. And our startups will succeed or fail quite independently of what Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, Ron Conway, et al., think.
And our startups will succeed or fail quite independently of what Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, Ron Conway, et al., think.
Even if that's true, it's beside the point. You still care what the VCs think of you, independent of their effect on the success or failure of your business.
If it succeeds, you need to be sure that the board keeps you in place. What use is it to build a successful business if you lose your position and equity? (You're an idiot if you end up in a position where you lose all your equity, but what I'm saying is still valid.)
If it fails, you need the VCs to line you up with an EIR position or an executive role at a portfolio company so you can recover your savings, repair your reputation, and get out there again.
If you don't have the VCs in your pocket, then the personal pressures that are on you can keep you from being able to make the right decisions for your business. So, yeah, they matter.
For someone so cognizant of how status games work, your comment betrays such an assumption of helplessness and low status in your own beliefs.
If you want to avoid being removed from your own startup, don't seek VC until you have enough negotiating leverage that you can keep a majority of board seats. It's that simple.
If your startup fails, there will be a large number of other startups, giant tech companies, etc. that are willing to hire you, as long as you demonstrate you learned something. It happened to me after my first startup, it happened to you, it's just you squandered the opportunity to recover your savings and repair your reputation within Google.
If the VCs are putting personal pressure on you to make the wrong decisions and they don't have a board majority, then listen carefully to them, and if they're still wrong on reflection, gently explain to them what the right decision is, why it is so, and then say that you appreciate their advice but will make the right decision regardless. If they do have a board majority, then listen carefully to them, understand what they're saying, point out whatever information they're missing when they gave you that advice, and ask if they would still like you to make that decision, or would they prefer that you go make this other decision that incorporates all the information that both of you have?
VCs - and anyone else - do not have any power over you other than what you give them. If working with them means making untenable concessions, don't work with them.
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
Talks have been given by some of the same people (including Marc Andreessen, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, and Marissa Mayer) and many others.
This talk on negotiation is one of the best lectures I've ever heard and I've recommended it to people dozens of times:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1573