💰 How to Start a Startup? Sam Altman's Advices

Two talks by Sam Altman, from 2014, when he was running Y Combinator.​

There's no step-by-step "overnight success" recipe in these videos. Still, there are plenty of valuable ideas that help not only in business but also in everyday life.

A few takeaways:

✅ The startup formula is a product of idea, product, team, execution, and luck—where luck is a random number from 0 to 10,000.

✅ A good idea often sounds stupid (another search engine, a social network just for students, a website to sleep on strangers' couches).

✅ A good idea should be easy to explain in one ruling. "Something, but with a beautiful design," is almost always a fail.

✅ You should take a small market and own it like a monopoly, then expand fast. First, you build for a narrow group—but you win the whole group.

Feels like OpenAI with ChatGPT proved every one of these points.

➡️ Lecture #1
➡️ Lecture #2

So what matters most for a startup?

❤️ — idea and product
😎 — money and investors
🍾 — luck!

@hiaimediaen