Lecture 3 - Before the Startup (Paul Graham)

18 insights saved from this video by @business

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The ultimate advice for young founders is almost offensively simple: just learn.
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Twitter was a side project inside Odeo, a company focused on podcasting.
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Launching with the rituals but without something users want is called “playing house.”
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A founder with a beloved product and no fundraising knowledge generally raises money more easily than a savvy founder with flat usage.
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For ambitious people, delaying a startup preserves exploration. Succeeding at twenty can permanently remove those opportunities.
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Measure performance, and people inevitably exploit the gap between the metric and the real objective.
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The late-1990s bubble saw VCs knowingly fund poor startups to sell them to retail investors.
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The best startups often begin when experts solve their own problems, not when they set out to build companies.
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There is no meaningful growth hack beyond making something users genuinely love and telling people about it.
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Raise money at high valuations as if future funding will vanish. Plan for severe economic downside.
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Your education does not need immediate startup utility. Genuine curiosity becomes useful in unexpected ways.
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Fundraising is best accomplished by building a company that is doing well, especially growing quickly, then telling investors plainly.
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Create deadlines and obligations that force sustained attention and high-quality work.
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Intuitions about people are more trustworthy than intuitions about starting a company.
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Trying to invent startup ideas on command often produces plausible-sounding ideas that waste your time before their flaws appear.
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Your first employees should be self-motivated peers who operate like founders and need little management.
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Mark Zuckerberg succeeded with Facebook by understanding its users, not by mastering startup expertise or fundraising mechanics.
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Starting a startup can consume your life for several years, a decade, or your entire working life.

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