Godfather motto: Before starting a business

(This article is a guest article by Sam Altman at Stanford University, originally intended for college students, but also potentially helpful to entrepreneurs of all ages.) One of the benefits of having children is that when you want to give advice, you ask yourself, "What would I tell my kids?" My children are still small, but I can imagine what I would tell them about starting a business if they went to college to choose the course, so the following is what I want to tell you. Entrepreneurship is very counterintuitive (counterintuitive) and I'm not sure why. Or just because the knowledge of entrepreneurship does not penetrate into our culture. But for whatever reason, starting a business is a task that cannot be done intuitively. It's like skiing, when you first ski, you want to slow down, your intuition tells you to tilt backwards, but leaning backwards during skiing will speed up the slide and get out of control. So part of skiing teaching is learning to suppress this impulse. In the end you learn to ski, but in the beginning it takes some effort. Before you slide down the hillside, you need to remember a series of things. Entrepreneurship is as unnatural as skiing, so there is a similar list to remember before starting a business. In this article, I'm going to tell you the first part of what you need to remember before you start your business. The first thing I've said before is counterintuitive: entrepreneurship is so weird, if you believe in your intuition, you make a lot of mistakes. If you only know how to start a business, it's best to stop before you start. When I started YC, I joked that our job was to tell the founders what they were going to ignore. It's true, YC. Among a group of graduates, YC Partners warned them of future mistakes, some founders ignored them and told us when they came back the following year, "I wish I had listened to you." "Why did the founders of startups ignore the advice given by their partners? This is a counterintuitive expression: they deny what the partner teaches. Some suggestions seem wrong, so your first impulse is to ignore them. In fact, my jokes are not just about YC's business, but also other businesses. If the founders ' intuition gives them the right answer, they don't need our coaching. What you need is someone else giving advice enough to scare you. That's why there are so many ski coaches, but not so many running coaches. But you can trust people with your intuition. In fact, one of the most common mistakes that founders make is the lack of trust in others. They deal with a group of seemingly powerful people, but they have concerns about them. So, then, if something went wrong, they would say, "I knew there was something wrong with this guy, but because he looked so bad, I just ignored it." "If you're going to deal with someone, the other person may be a co-founder, employee, investor or buyer, and if you think they're bad, then trust your instincts." If you think aPeople are glib, xuyuweishe, or simply an abnormal person, do not ignore these problems. It's all up to you to decide. Work with people you really like and work with people you know well. The second major violation of intuition is that it's not important to know so much about entrepreneurial content. To be successful is not to be an expert in the field of entrepreneurship, but to be a user and problem-solving expert. Marco Zackerberg is not an expert in entrepreneurial field. His success is all because he is completely ignorant of entrepreneurship because he knows the user very well. Don't be frustrated if you don't know anything about starting a business or how to finance an angel round. These are the knowledge that you will know when you need it, and the angel's wheel is finished and forgotten. In fact, what worries me is not only that it is unnecessary to know too much about entrepreneurial knowledge, but also that some knowledge is fatal. If I met a graduate student who was very proficient in the subject of convertible bonds and employment agreements, I would not think "this is more than the others", but it sounded the alarm. Another typical mistake for young entrepreneurs is to be involved in starting startups. They come up with seemingly workable ideas, get investments with good valuations, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people. In the outside world, this is what startups do. But the next step after renting an office or hiring a staff member is to realize that they're not going to do it, because they imitate the external form of entrepreneurship, but ignore the most important essence of making products that people like. A game that happens all the time, and we give it a name: Play House. Finally, I understand why such things happen. The reason young entrepreneurs start their business is because they have been trained to start a business from the beginning. Think about what you need to do if you want to go to college. Extracurricular activities? Even in college classrooms, most of the tasks are fake. I'm not attacking the education system. When you are taught something, there are always some false ingredients, and if you want to measure their performance, you will inevitably encounter the contents of your measurement and artificial false elements. I admit, I was like this in college. I've found that in many classes there are probably only 20-30 ideas that can be used for exams. What I learned in class is the content for the exam, not to master the knowledge in the class, but to prepare for the subject of the exam, and find the answer to the exam in advance. When I walked into the final exam, my biggest curiosity was that a few of the topics I prepared would appear on the paper. It's like a game. When our whole life is trained to play this game, the young entrepreneur's first impulse is to find the secret to winning the game, so it is not surprising. Because financing is one way to judge whether startups are successful (another classic rookie mistake), they always want to know how to persuade investors to invest. We tell them that the best way to convince investors is to start a real businessGood, fast forward companies, and then tell the investors the situation. Then they will want to know how to develop quickly, and then we will tell them that the best way is to make the products that people want. So the dialogue between the YC partner and the young founder is generally: "I should ...?" the founder asked. PARTNER: "Just ... why do founders always make things so complicated?" I think the reason is they're always trying to find the ropes. This is the third counterintuitive thing entrepreneurs need to remember: entrepreneurship is not for gaming systems. The game system may be useful in large companies. The fragmentation of large corporations can be successful by absorbing the right people and increasing productivity. [2] But this method is not suitable for start-up companies, entrepreneurs do not need to deal with the boss, to face only users, and users are only considering your product is not what they need. Entrepreneurship is as objective as the contents of a physical book. You need to make something that people want, and only by how much do you do it to determine success. The danger is coming, and cheating can work on investors to some extent. If your company sounds great and you seem to know what to say, you can trick investors into financing round and round. But this is not your interest, and the company will eventually fail. What you do is a waste of time going downhill. So, stop looking for some entrepreneurial secrets. As in other areas, entrepreneurship is tricky, but these skills are less important than solving real problems. A founder who knows nothing about financing, but who can make a product that users like, is more likely to get financing, but those who know how to make a beautiful graphic use chart are not. More importantly, the founder of a product that can make a user's favorite will succeed after getting financing. It's not good to be deprived of such a powerful weapon, but I think it's exciting to be able to shut down the game system when you start a business. What makes it exciting is that there are still places in the world where you can work hard to win. Imagine, if the world is like a school, a big company, spend most of the time doing meaningless things, neglect to contact others, it is much more depressing. [3] I would be happy if I realized in the university that there is a place in the real world where the game system is less important than the rest of the content and the importance of other learning is second. This change is one of the most important things you can think about in the future. How to win in different work, how to win? Time consuming power This is our fourth counterintuitive content: entrepreneurship is time-consuming and consumes everything. If you start a business, it takes up the level of your life that you can't imagine. If you succeed in your business, you may take a long time: short 35 years, or 10 years, long is the rest of the work of life. Therefore, there is real opportunity cost. Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there must be a lot of themBe envied by others. Basically, from the age of 25, he kept running and had little respite. Every day, Google's big Empire has its own mess. Only the CEO can fix it, and he can only solve them as CEO. If he's been on vacation for a week, he'll have a week of problems. And he has nothing to complain about, partly because he cannot show fear and cowardice as the boss of the company, partly because he is a super rich man who says he's not feeling well enough to sympathize. However, the difficulty of being the founder of a successful start-up can only be understood by a truly successful founder. Some of the startups that YC has invested in are already successful, and the founders will say the same thing in every case. Entrepreneurship is not easy, the nature of the problem has changed. You are concerned about the delayed construction of the London office, not the bad air-conditioning in the studio. The total amount of things to worry about will never drop, but it'll increase. Successful entrepreneurship is like raising a child, pressing the button, the whole life irrevocably changed. Although it's nice to have children, many things are much simpler than having children before you have children. You can be a good parent when you have a child. If you can delay the click of the button, rich country people will wait to press.