Big guy hands-on teaching how to start a business: creativity is the first of four elements of success

The project selected well-known venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, incubator mentor, well-known internet company CEO, pioneering star company founder and other celebrities entrepreneurial experience, to share widely. In this series of articles, the above "entrepreneurial teacher" will bring you from the entrepreneurial preparation to venture capital, listing and other constructive, nuanced guidance. This article is the first article on the topic. Sam Altman is the new master of YC, whose main job is to instruct young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. In the first lesson of "How to start a business," Sam highlighted the importance of good ideas, telling everyone that good products start with small markets. In addition, it is very difficult to turn ideas into products. This article also specifically for entrepreneurship, how to make good business to create good products, and attract users word of mouth. Welcome you to cs183b. My name is Sam Altman, and I'm in charge of Y Combinator. I was a Stanford student nine years ago, but then I left school and started a company. Since then, I have become an investor. So for nine years at YC, we've been teaching everyone how to start a business. Most cases are only for startups, but 30% of these are also quite general. So what we're going to teach you in class is this 30%. Although only 30% of the content, I believe it will help. We've already taught a lot of things similar to this lesson at YC, but it's not public. This will be the first time we have to open up a lot of teaching content. We have invited some speakers who are speaking here in the same way as in YC. We have so far been raising money for 725 companies, so we are pretty sure that the advice is very useful. While we cannot fund every start-up, we hope that we can learn more or less from these suggestions. I only speak three times. Each of the speakers has been involved in creating companies worth more than 1 billion dollars, including YC. Therefore, these proposals are not lip, and those who give them are indeed implementing them. The advice we give in class is aimed at people who start their own businesses, who pursue rapid development with the ultimate aim of setting up a large company. There are some things I have to say in the first place, and for other situations, it is not advisable to listen to our courses; If you want to practice what you hear in a large company, rather than a startup, it is useless. It's also interesting to hear, I think entrepreneurship will be the mainstream of future development, it is also good to know this form, but startups and the general company is very different. Using today's course, I will summarize four aspects, if you do the four, then your chances of success will be greatly increased. Throughout the course, speakers will emphasize more details. These four points are: good ideas, good products, good team and good implementation. These four points may overlap a little, but for the sake of clarity, I will be alone at every pointTalk。 Even with these four things, you may still fail. And why? Luck can be a random number between 0 and 10000 because the result is a "creative x product x performing x Team x Luck". Sometimes luck does have a big difference. But if you do well in the top four, then it is more successful. One thing that is very exciting about entrepreneurship is that the competition is fair. Inexperienced young people can start a business, and an older person can start a business. About entrepreneurship, one thing I particularly like: flaws in other workplaces, such as personal financial constraints, obscurity in the workplace, and so on, is very good for entrepreneurship. Before we start talking about starting a business, I'd like to talk about why we're starting a business. I'm still a little hesitant about coming here, and if you're just starting a business to start a business, you'll never be able to achieve it. There are many simpler ways to earn money, and those who are successful in entrepreneurship always say, please note, they always say that it is impossible to imagine how difficult and painful it would be to start a business. If you feel constrained by a particular problem and you think that only entrepreneurship is the best way to solve the problem, start a business. First there is passion, then action. In fact, we follow this in the course of Professor Yc. 1. Creativity first, good idea. In recent years it has been popular to say that "creativity is not important" and "it is unwise to spend a lot of time thinking about an idea to start a business". This means that to start a business immediately began to cast nets, the focus of fish, as to grasp the things have no value, will not work, thinking about these problems are a waste of time. A point of attention is enough, more natural better. These statements cannot be said to be wholly wrong, for the development of things you cannot fully anticipate. If your product is not used by users, it is very limited to understand the original product. Good execution is 10 times times more important than good creativity, and it is more difficult to implement. Even if you arrayed to action, it is still useless, the result is still bad. Bad ideas are bad ideas, and in a world chasing hot spots, there is no good idea to be satisfied. Only good executive power, but no good ideas, will nothing. There are exceptions, but most big companies start with a good idea, not from a so-called fulcrum. You can look at the fulcrum of success, almost all of which are the founders ' own needs, not the spur of the moment. Brian Chesky had a spare room on his hands, but couldn't pay his rent, so he founded Airbnb. If you know something about this, you'll understand that entrepreneurs who only focus on Fulcrum are not able to carry the company forward. I used to think that creativity was irrelevant, but I now admit that the idea was completely wrong. So, as we speak, creativity is actually a very broad concept. It includes the size and growth of the market, the growth strategy of the Enterprise toand defense strategy and so on. When you evaluate an idea, you need to take a holistic view, not just the product itself. If the idea works, you'll spend 10 years working on the idea, so you need to think about the value of the company and the defense strategy early on. Although the plan does not catch up with the change, but it is important to learn to plan, many people forget this when they start a business. People who have long-term plans are rare, and more obvious among entrepreneurs. But if you make a plan, you will benefit a lot. Remember, if you devote yourself to creativity, you will keep your ideas big and your ideas will be filled up gradually. Of course, you don't have to plan ahead on every point of the road to success, but before you start, you have to understand what the core is. Make sure your ideas develop in an interesting way. In the creative we found that there is a place has always been a blind spot for entrepreneurs, you know, one day if you set up a company, the company must be difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea. I would like to reiterate this point because it is too important: first, there is good creativity, then action. When you think of a very creative idea, start your own business. In addition, we offer you a way to choose among many ideas. If you have a few ideas at the same time, choose the one you most often think of, and it's the idea that you don't think of as a job. We often hear entrepreneurs sigh: At the outset, they should wait until their true love of the idea appeared, and then start a business. On the other hand, those good companies almost have their own mission to guide. Startups cannot achieve the same agglutination as big companies unless they have a very important sense of mission. If entrepreneurship is not good enough, it is difficult to create such a sense of mission. A sense of purpose also has an advantage, which means that you will devote yourself wholeheartedly to it. Entrepreneurial success takes many years, usually 10 years. If you're not passionate about what you're creating, and you don't have faith, you might as well give up halfway through your business. If there is no mission as a belief, it is impossible to survive the hardships of entrepreneurship. Many entrepreneurs, especially students, think it takes only two or three years to start a business, and then they can do something they feel passionate about. I tell you this is basically impossible. Entrepreneurship generally takes 10 years. The third benefit of a clear sense of purpose is that people outside the company are willing to help you. Compared with those derivatives, the future of the unknown but very promising products will be more support. When it comes to starting a business, those that start up are more likely to reach a goal than a simple company. This counterintuitive conclusion is what people experience for a long time. There is no way to emphasize the sense of mission, but in the end I would like to reiterate that companies that constantly replicate traditional ideas are unlikely to inspire enthusiasm or motivate the team to do their best to succeed. We'll talk about how to create ideas later by Paul Graham. Many entrepreneurs have struggled at this point, but Ibelieve that after practice, we will do better. This is very important, we must do a good job. When it comes to creativity, there is a tricky aspect to it: good ideas seem hard to implement at first. Search engines do not have the concept of a portal, many people previously (or now) do not look at it, search function can be used, but there is no great role, after all, the portal is the value. For example, social networking is only open to college students and is free. Hard to write. Who ever thought of college students as a user group? No, so MySpace succeeded; who ever thought of staying in a stranger's home? No, so Airbnb can succeed. At any rate, this sounds like a myth at first. All this sounds incredible, and in the end it has been a success. If the idea was great at first, there would be a lot of people rushing to do it. Peter Thiel will teach you how to monopolize the industry in future courses. But it's not going to happen right now. First, you have to locate a small market that can be monopolized, and then expand quickly. That's why many ideas look bad at first. "Today, only a small fraction of the customers use my product; And in the future, everyone will use my product. "It would be nice if you could say that. At the same time there is a point: you have to have your own beliefs, when others raise objections, to be able to adhere to their own ideas. This is difficult because you don't know where the line is between right and wrong. Both in and out. But keep in mind that a good idea will be disproved at the very beginning, and you should be happy that no one is competing with you. That's why it's no matter to discuss your ideas with others. Really good ideas are not easily plagiarized. Your idea may be, "the idea itself may sound bad, but it must have a good side." We want our ideas to sound cool, but we want them to work, and hope that no one competes with them. It doesn't matter if you start to get creative and not be concerned. For the entrepreneur, especially for the first time to start a business, it is generally wrong to think that their first product, or the product under the creative, to be particularly bluffing. This is not the case. At first, the idea is to focus on a specific small market, and then gradually expand it. That's how many big companies start. You don't have to be famous, but you must be right in the direction. The ideas you need may not sound good, but they are actually great. That's why we take the time to study the direction of the market. The market you choose will grow rapidly within 10 years. Today, many investors are focused on the size of the market, but regardless of the direction of the market. In fact, I think this is one of the biggest mistakes of investors. They only considered the development of start-ups, but did not consider the development of the market itself. Compared to the current market size, I am more concerned about the growth of the market, but also I am concerned about what factors lead to the peak of market development. You should think about it.I am more willing to invest in small but fast-growing markets than in large but slow growth markets. These small, but fast-growing markets have a prominent advantage, that is, the customer demand, even if the product is not perfect, but as long as continuous improvement, customers can also accept. Students have an advantage as entrepreneurs and, on the one hand, students have a more intuitive sense of which market will grow faster than adults. But there's a point students usually don't understand, or, at least for a while, to understand that you can't create a market that isn't. In entrepreneurship, you can change anything, but you can't change the market, so you have to think about it, the market you choose has a future. To pick on the market is also quite fastidious. For example, follow the footsteps of predecessors, hitch a ride, or participate in some big projects, all of which indicate that the market you enter must grow fast. Now the market seems to be very small, it does not matter, others do not understand, but you know very well, the market will develop rapidly. Let's think about where this is going to happen. To succeed in business, the impetus of the environment is essential. What is exciting is that, compared with the past, today's big environment is more and more conducive to entrepreneurship. As Marc Andreessen says, software is devouring the world. Software is everywhere, so good ideas are everywhere. All you have to do is find the one you are most interested in. To put it another way, we're going back to the same question, the famous question of Sequoia Capital: why now? Why is it the best time to start a business for this idea? Why create a company like this? Why not two years ago? Why not two years later? For all the success stories we've seen, they have great ideas, and they have very good answers to this question. If you can't answer, think about starting a business. In general, it is best to develop the products that you need. As a result, when making prototypes, you can better understand the product itself than with the user. If you don't need this product yourself, you're creating a product that someone else needs, which is a very big disadvantage for you and you need to be close to the customer. If you can, go to the customer's office to understand the situation, if not, then a lot of communication.