Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• The trait that matters most among the co-founders you choose: trustworthiness 
• In the beginning of your journey as a startup, do things that don’t scale
  • One way to do this – talk to your early users
• 99% of the time, having a team of co-founders > being a solo founder
• One of the most common mistakes startup founders make: Not paying enough attention to their users
• How do you know when it’s time to launch?
  • “Launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as there’s ONE person in the world who’s glad you launched because now they can do something they couldn’t do before” – Paul Graham
  • “The risk of launching early is not as great as the risk of launching late” – Paul Graham 

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



Subscribe to the Y Combinator Podcast

YC Partner Geoff Ralston talks with Paul Graham, one of the founders of YC, and tries to draw out as much startup wisdom as possible in 1/2 hour of conversation.

• Transcript
• Video Link
  
  

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Early employees at a startup take on the same risk as the founder, but without similar compensation and control
• Technology moves the human race forward
• “An ideal founding team has one person good at building technology or product, and one person who’s good at selling, so that person can raise capital, recruit employees, communicate the vision, and keep people motivated” – Naval Ravikant
• “At the very early stage, most investments are made based on the quality of the founder, how well they’ve thought through the problem, how well they can articulate a solution, and what evidence they have if they’ve already started building it out” – Naval Ravikant
• Lessons from complexity theory:
  • Extremely complex systems emerge from simple rules
  • When building a product: “If something isn’t working, if the community you want isn’t emerging, then you probably need to go back and remove something much more than you need to add something” – Naval Ravikant
  • Great companies replace complexity with simplicity for the end-user

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



Subscribe to the Appetite for Disruption Podcast

We welcome Naval Ravikant, a prodigious entrepreneur who has made a career helping other entrepreneurs. In this episode, we discuss how to be an effective entrepreneur, including the game theory of venture capital. Plus we cover complexity theory (or, Why can’t everything be simpler?), the “infrastructure of innovation,” and the first-principles thinking of science. Of course, nothing said in this episode is investment, legal, or any other advice of any kind.

Appetite for Disruption

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Early employees at a startup take on the same risk as the founder, but without similar compensation and control
• Technology moves the human race forward
• “An ideal founding team has one person good at building technology or product, and one person who’s good at selling, so that person can raise capital, recruit employees, communicate the vision, and keep people motivated” – Naval Ravikant
• “At the very early stage, most investments are made based on the quality of the founder, how well they’ve thought through the problem, how well they can articulate a solution, and what evidence they have if they’ve already started building it out” – Naval Ravikant
• Lessons from complexity theory:
  • Extremely complex systems emerge from simple rules
  • When building a product: “If something isn’t working, if the community you want isn’t emerging, then you probably need to go back and remove something much more than you need to add something” – Naval Ravikant
  • Great companies replace complexity with simplicity for the end-user

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

We welcome Naval Ravikant, a prodigious entrepreneur who has made a career helping other entrepreneurs. In this episode, we discuss how to be an effective entrepreneur, including the game theory of venture capital. Plus we cover complexity theory (or, Why can’t everything be simpler?), the “infrastructure of innovation,” and the first-principles thinking of science. Of course, nothing said in this episode is investment, legal, or any other advice of any kind.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Take the time to pause, reflect, and make sure you’re working on things that matter 
• “Take time to explore and try a lot of things. Try to have a beginner’s mind about what will and won’t work. Trust your intuitions. Pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible, and be honest with yourself about what’s working well and what’s not… Then, cut all the stuff that’s not working, and focus down until you’re eventually focused on the one thing that’s really working.” – Sam Altman
• If you can afford it, taking a gap year has tremendous value
• “What risk actually looks like is you look back at the end of your career, and you realize, ‘F***, I wasted it.'” – Sam Altman
• The deferred life plan doesn’t work
  • If you want to eventually do something… DO IT NOW

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



Subscribe to the Y Combinator Podcast

Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose.

Sam’s the president of YC Group and co-chairman of OpenAI. You can find him on Twitter @sama.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***

Topics

1:25 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.

3:50 - Stepping back and evaluating your work

5:30 - Creating metrics for your projects

6:30 - Taking a year off

9:30 - Figuring out when to commit

11:30 - Poker

12:30 - From Productivity - Sleep seems to be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. Exercise is probably the second most important physical factor. The third area is nutrition.

15:00 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"

16:30 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.

17:30 - Perspective shifts

20:15 - From Productivity - My system has three key pillars: “Make sure to get the important shit done”, “Don’t waste time on stupid shit”, and “make a lot of lists”.

22:30 - What Happened to Innovation

24:50 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

26:50 - The deferred life plan doesn’t work

31:50 - From The Merge - Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing.

34:10 - Weight training

35:30 - The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello

Y Combinator

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• Take the time to pause, reflect, and make sure you’re working on things that matter 
• “Take time to explore and try a lot of things. Try to have a beginner’s mind about what will and won’t work. Trust your intuitions. Pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible, and be honest with yourself about what’s working well and what’s not… Then, cut all the stuff that’s not working, and focus down until you’re eventually focused on the one thing that’s really working.” – Sam Altman
• If you can afford it, taking a gap year has tremendous value
• “What risk actually looks like is you look back at the end of your career, and you realize, ‘F***, I wasted it.'” – Sam Altman
• The deferred life plan doesn’t work
  • If you want to eventually do something… DO IT NOW

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose.

Sam’s the president of YC Group and co-chairman of OpenAI. You can find him on Twitter @sama.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***

Topics

1:25 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.

3:50 - Stepping back and evaluating your work

5:30 - Creating metrics for your projects

6:30 - Taking a year off

9:30 - Figuring out when to commit

11:30 - Poker

12:30 - From Productivity - Sleep seems to be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. Exercise is probably the second most important physical factor. The third area is nutrition.

15:00 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?"

16:30 - From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short - Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.

17:30 - Perspective shifts

20:15 - From Productivity - My system has three key pillars: “Make sure to get the important shit done”, “Don’t waste time on stupid shit”, and “make a lot of lists”.

22:30 - What Happened to Innovation

24:50 - From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

26:50 - The deferred life plan doesn’t work

31:50 - From The Merge - Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing.

34:10 - Weight training

35:30 - The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello

Mike Maples, Jr talks to Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Netscape—the startup that launched the Internet era. What it was like when Netscape was about to blow up? What does he wish Netscape had done differently? -- and what lessons from its success are not fully understood?

Why proving a startup’s value hypothesis before testing its growth hypothesis is critical.

"If the customer doesn't scream, you don't have product-market fit." — Andy Rachleff

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This time, we have a slightly different episode—a takeover by Mike Maples, Jr.

Mike Maples, Jr. (@m2jr) and his firm, Floodgate, have invested in and supported many of the startups you might recognize — including Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Chegg, and Okta, among others — long before they were household names. He's been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade, but he's much more than a successful investor. Mike has also succeeded as both a founder and operating executive.

He's also simply a great guy and the first person who really taught me how to angel invest. For more on that background, listen to my interview with Mike at tim.blog/mikemaples.

In this episode, however, Mike speaks with Andy Rachleff (@arachleff), co-founder of Wealthfront and Benchmark Capital, about two of the biggest questions that should be on every start-up founder's mind: How do you reach "product-market fit" (a term that Andy coined), and how do they know when you've achieved it?

Andy has known many of the start-up world's giants and synthesized their lessons, so you will also hear what Andy learned from Don Valentine of Sequoia, Scott Cook of Intuit, Reed Hastings of Netflix, Geoffrey Moore, Clay Christensen, Eric Ries, and Steve Blank.

The audio from this conversation is from the premiere episode of Mike's brand-new podcast, Starting Greatness, which I encourage you check out. There are some incredible guests coming.

So, if you like this conversation between Mike and Andy, be sure to subscribe to Starting Greatness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out the website at greatness.floodgate.com, and on Twitter you can follow Mike at @m2jr and Andy at @arachleff.

Please enjoy!

This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.

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You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based based on their style and industry specialization. It's simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you'll end up with a design that you're happy with. Click this link (99designs.com/tim) and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade.

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Keith Rabois (@rabois), partner at Founders Fund, joins Erik on this episode. It was recorded live at an On Deck Fellowship event in San Francisco.

They discuss:

- The kinds of companies and founders he looks to fund, including why he wants half of his VC friends to laugh at how ambitious and ridiculous the companies he’s funding are.

- Why going from zero to one involves roughly the same amount of pain no matter whether the “one” the company gets to is tiny or a billion-dollar-plus enterprise.

- Some of the different spaces he’s invested in recently and how he’s navigated the idea maze in different sectors.

- Stories from the early days of PayPal.

- Why he likes regulated markets, and why he says “the more legal risk, the better.”

- How to think about creating a founding team, and why you need to absolutely make sure you and your co-founders agree on first principles.

And of course, they also discuss basketball and politics.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “If you’re going to build a product, the only reason it should exist in the world is because it solves someone’s problem” –Mike Krieger
• To get an idea of what new product features to build, ask yourself: “How are people hacking our product, and how can we meet them in the middle to make that way easier?”
  • For example, people were using hashtags on Instagram before Instagram made them trackable or clickable
• “People forget your failures; they remember your successes” – Kevin Systrom
  • No one remembers the 15 features Instagram launched that failed, but everyone remembers their Stories feature
• Employee satisfaction at a company is highly correlated with whether or not the company is building a great product
• “No matter what new idea you have, people are going to tell you it stinks” – Kevin Systrom
  • “The one common thing of all great ideas is that they usually look pretty bad in the beginning”
• “Stay super curious and stay a learner” – Kevin Systrom
  • Most people stop learning after graduating from college – don’t be like most people

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

My guests this week are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram.

I met Kevin and Mike a few months ago over a shared interest in business and investing. I have found them both to be extremely good people who have a rare talent for finding and solving interesting problems. Indeed, problem-solving and jobs-to-be-done is a big part of our conversation.

I realized walking into the podcast that Kevin and Mike have a rare set of experiences: having both built and sold an extremely successful product from scratch, but then also operated and scaled inside one of the largest businesses in the world. This means they have unique knowledge to offer just about anyone interested in business and products. We dig into all those lessons here.

I am working on hosting more founders and CEOs on the podcast, and can’t think of a better pair to show you why I want to do so. Please enjoy my conversation with Kevin and Mike. 

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

 

Show Notes

1:38 – (first question) – Projects they’ve been working on since leaving Instagram

5:22 – How they can apply what they are learning in machine learning

7:18 – Most interesting experience diving back into data and machine learning

8:42 – How startups compare today to when they founded Instagram

13:23 – Judging founders and whether they know how to use their data effectively

14:26 – The jobs-to-be-done framework

19:14 – Laying out a vision vs solving problems that pop up

25:20 – Developing and sharing the principles of the company with the team

30:48 – Creating a community when it includes almost the entire world

39:03 – The most popular ways people used the platform

41:24 – What was the jobs-to-be-done rational behind the stories feature

44:15 – Interesting things that they saw as Instagram entered the developing world

46:40 – Their thoughts on how Instagram shaped culture and if they focused on those

52:58 – The new waves that they are observing right now

55:11 – How their thinking on leadership and teams changed during their time at Instagram and Facebook

1:03:23 – The pillars of a good business, including humility and confidence

1:06:06 – Focus on growth and distribution in a startup

1:10:01 – How early were they thinking about monetization on this free platform

1:13:43 – How do they think about how they invest their money and allocate resources

1:17:36 – Mentors for Kevin and Mike

1:20:30 – Their passion for learning to fly and the someday/maybe list

1:23:01 – Their interest in coffee

1:26:24 – Advice for everyone else

1:30:00 – Kindest thing anyone has done for them

 

Learn More

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. 

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag