Friday, May 28, 2021

Advises for startups from Paul Graham

Full video is here.

I intentionally didn't include some of Paul's notes. Though I agreed with most of them. The key notes I made are:

  1. Hire a person only after spending much time together. It should be a reliable person, not just a nice person. "There are too much guys who know how to be nice for a short time". I personally would hire for a full time job some freelancer after he successfully made multiple useful (and I paid for that) instead of just a guy after half an hour interview.
  2. Know your customer, not your business. Airbnb founders lived and slept with their users. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook first among his own classmates.
  3. Startups are time-consuming. It can take all my life. Thus, the only way to succeed is to make what you love. Vice versa doesn't always work: you cannot force yourself to love something (or somebody) if you don't want to. So don't do a startup just for money. Another way to choose a startup niche is to find my life mission. If I know what did God send me to this planet for, I am pretty confident in what should I spend all my life on.
  4. Do something just for 2 guys - yourself and your friend. Paul Graham told about the guy who created a peer-to-peer audio chat to talk to his girlfriend from Thailand while he is abroad, to save money on phone charges. At that time, he even didn't think to upload such software on the Internet to let people widely use it around the world. The greatest benefit of making a software for my friend is immediately and continuously getting feedback from him/her. Agile implemented for free.

No comments:

Post a Comment