As a serial tech founder and bootstrap evangelist, I thought the way he communicated his Y Combinator philosophy was a death sentence for 99% of young founders.
But, fundamentally I actually liked some of his advice.
Then, in an interview with Digital India I heard him say this:
”Honestly, I feel so bad about the advice I gave while running YC I’ve been thinking about deleting my entire blog”
Then, he rattled off some of the revisions he would make if he could go back in time...
Truth is, I still have strong opinions that differ from Sam’s new mentality.
So, here are OpenAI Sam’s 4 new rules for building startups vs Y Combinator Sam’s 4 rules.
What do you think?
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Y Combinator Sam Altman: You gotta launch fast. If you’re not embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long.
OpenAI Sam Altman: Took 4 and half years to release first version of ChatGPT.
Y Combinator Sam Altman: Raise and deploy very little capital upfront
OpenAI Sam Altman: OpenAI raised $1B before starting to build product.
Y Combinator Sam Altman: You don’t take big R&D risk
OpenAI Sam Altman: OpenAI did not interview customers at all before first release, and didn’t speak to a single customer for 4 years (!!) after releasing v1
Y Combinator Sam Altman: Find PMF as fast as possible.
OpenAI Sam Altman: Released v1 to little fanfare after quietly building for years without shipping. Continued to build in relative silence for a few more years and then reached 1 million active users faster than any application in history with the release of GPT 3.
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Takeaway:
At the end of the day, this just all points to one truth (which Sam acknowledged):
“There is no one way, the only certain thing is make something people want.”
It then made me think…
If I were writing “Alex Turnbull’s 4 rules for building B2B SaaS startups”, what would they be?
Well here you go…
#1. Interview at least 50 potential customers before writing a single line of code. I call this proof of work. Understand and internalize their pain points as if they were your own.
#2. Be able to pre-sell your product before you’ve built anything.
That means building a solution to a problem that is actually “lighting people’s hair on fire”. That also means receiving pre-payment (or at least an email list signup to a waiting list).
There’s plenty of noise on the internet, I only want to build things people absolutely need. If the product doesn’t have “I can’t even imagine what my life was like before this product” potential, is it truly worth building?
Check the comments below for #3 and #4 👇
This post was originally shared by Alex Turnbull on Linkedin.