The problem with startup advice
Sam Altman spoke at IIT Delhi last week, and this bit went viral over the weekend:
“I feel so bad about the advice that I gave while running YC that I’m thinking about deleting my entire blog. There were a lot of things that we really held dear — you have to launch right away, you’ve got to launch a first version you’re embarrassed about, raise very little capital upfront, don’t take big R&D risk, you’ve got to immediately find product-market fit. OpenAI raised a billion dollars of capital before any product at all. It took us 4.5 years after we started to release something, and when we released it we didn’t talk to users for awhile…We didn’t do it the same way and it still worked.”
Those suggestions that Altman rattled off are basically the standard startup playbook now (thanks in no small part to Y Combinator). They aren’t controversial. They’re table stakes. Brand new founders will recite them like the Ten Commandments. Read enough VC Twitter threads and you’ll notice those same nuggets of wisdom, rehashed and repurposed, again and again and again.
The problem with a standard startup playbook, however, is that every really successful startup is an exception.
Whenever I hear “launch a first version you’re embarrassed about” I always think of Notion, Webflow and Figma. Each of those companies took 4+ years to launch the first version of their products. Why did they take so long? Those were hard products to build, with wide surface areas and deep technical challenges. There was no weekend hackathon version. If those founders followed the playbook, those products never would have been built.
And whenever I hear “immediately find product-market fit” I think about how every single investor we ever spoke to for Airtable told us to verticalize. I can’t blame them, I guess. They were following the playbook! Choose a niche, they’d say, and get to product-market fit quickly. The problem is that I’m pretty sure following their advice would have killed the company.
The reality is that the playbook isn’t wrong, per se. All that advice is reasonable. And many companies have died not following those rules. But slavishly following the standard startup playbook has resulted in a generation of entrepreneurs that think small, and a generation of investors that only know how to back hype and momentum.
The best entrepreneurs and investors, on the other hand, know the rules, but they also know when to break them. Building a massive company might require years not months, and might necessitate taking on real technology risk, and might require excess capital to start. That’s all right. As long as you know why you’re breaking those rules and have a rock solid plan to back it up.
If you listened until the end of that clip, you heard the one rule that can’t be broken. From Altman:
“The only certain thing I can say about startups is…make something people want.”
Like me, you might disagree with parts of the standard startup playbook. But you can’t disagree with that.