This is a great article on two standpoints - it provides important high-level "abstract" advice to new founders without sounding like Sam Altman (more on that later). Secondly, it criticizes the general human tendency to look for examples of success, read biographies, watch interviews and think mimic those traits in themselves thinking that they've won the ticket to silicon valley lottery. I'd like to quote Richard Feynman, "... for nature cannot be fooled." and the world is an insanely complex place with a number of external factors that founders have no control over. Doesn't mean we should all give up on starting a company, but it should be humbling to learn this and internalize it.
Every single advice that Sam Altman gives has survivorship bias written all over it. I have never learned anything remotely useful from his vague generic articles and speeches. I'd rather watch Drew Hudson's startup pitch or read about Chad Rigetti and his quantum computer venture. Or maybe learn how Instacart managed to photograph every single grocery store item by literally going to the store and buying everything. Sam Altman's interviews are fantastic and I thank him for that but I think he should stop marketing himself as a startup guru of some kind. Each situation is unique and my personal opinion is that particular qualities such as leadership, convincing abilities, and charisma cannot be learned. It can only surface as a result of how one thinks and acts. This is why leadership courses are bullshit.
> Every single advice that Sam Altman gives has survivorship bias written all over it.
Every VC will talk like that, for a reason: they benefit from the view that your startup will be successful if you are smart and work hard. A VC doesn't care about the fate of the individual founder. They make money by spreading their risk and having many founders trying hard.
Sam usually puts a disclaimer into his articles. From his playbook: "A word of warning about choosing to start a startup: It sucks!...Joining an early-stage startup that’s on a rocketship trajectory is usually a much better financial deal."
I doubt these disclaimers work well when a crazed founder has dollar signs in his/her eyes. But he tries. Yes, VCs profit from a larger market of risk-bearing founders, but Sam was once a risk-taking founder too.
I always found this really interesting. If you join such rocketship often you find people swimming in their survivorship bias often coupled with general inexperience .
'The reason we're successful is that we got every engineer the top of the line MacBook! No one else does that!'
'The reason we're successful is that we got every engineer a reconditioned MacBook off of eBay! No one else does that!'
Though I have mixed emotions about the book, Gladwell's "outliers" does a good job reconstructing some famous success stories with a focus on the ecosystem and environment rather than (or on top on) the efforts of a single talented human.
->Every single advice that Sam Altman gives has survivorship bias written all over it. I have never learned anything remotely useful from his vague generic articles and speeches.
Every and never are really strong words, I don't think he intend to market himself as startup guru at least intentionally.
He is young and already had 10 years of experience of watching top notch startups rises and falls. Main message I am getting from him is practically advice about start-ups. like, do this and don't do this, then you may succeed.
> like, do this and don't do this, then you may succeed.
That's the whole point. It's 'may' and not 'will' or 'probably will'. Buy a lottery ticket and you may win.
Real advice should alter your chances, not leave them exactly the same as before.
If Sam Altman were a successful serial entrepreneur with a track record of one hit after another some of what he writes might be worth emulating but on the whole it is like observing the lottery playing crowds and noting that the ones carrying umbrellas ended up winning more lotteries so therefore you too should take your umbrella with you.
I think he's made a lot of money investing in startups so characterizing him as totally passive is a bit unfair. A more appropriate analogy would be something like poker, where there's some skill involved in addition to luck. But it's harder to teach investing in startups than playing poker
> I think he's made a lot of money investing in startups
That's not how I see it.
He got lucky being in one of the first YC batches, had his failing start-up Loopt acquired for a very slight premium over all investments up to that point.
Then for some reason Paul Graham made him CEO of YC. Now, Paul is anything but dumb so obviously Sam Altman has some qualities and quite possibly he will be instrumental in leveling up YC. But so far all that has happened is that he's tended the garden that others have built.
Making money when you start with a large pile of money is a reasonably sure thing.
I believe he made a good amount of money investing independent of YC before he joined. He was a scout for sequoia and invested from his proceeds from the sale of loopt. That doesn't necessarily qualify him to lead YC but I do think he has an angel investing track record independent of YC that is quite good compared to peers. But you're right, his relationship with PG probably had more to do with him getting his current job
Maybe, except poker has a fixed set of contexts. The hands you can hold, the hands your competition can hold, the winning and loss conditions, are fully enumerated. And you still can't assume that someone who did really well at a professional level can teach others to play at that level. How much worse in the land of startups when none of those things are fully enumerable or known?
If you want to draw that analogy, I think Pratchett's statement in Good Omens about God playing dice with the universe is more accurate - “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
I guess another way to think about it is with a sports analogy haha: he's like a coach of a professional team. Not all professional coaches were the best players, but many of them played professionally and were just good students of the game. That's maybe a better characterization of Sam: he played in the "big leagues", wasn't a huge success, but did well as a coach / angel afterwards
He is young and already had 10 years of experience of watching top notch startups rises and falls.
Is watching a few thousand baseball games enough experience to pitch at Fenway Park?
(I mean no disrespect to Sam; I've never met him and I have no knowledge of how good he is at advising startups. Starting and exiting Loopt shows he definitely knows more than most of us. I'm just skeptical about whether you can get useful experience of something passively.)
Data. YC has collected tons of data points since 2005. From more than 100k applications, roughly 2k batch startups (11 unicorns, several dozend +100MM startups), 3,5k founders, successful or not. Probably everything from founder CVs to week-per-week growth rates to the amount of office hours during a batch to VC deals/termsheet offerings after demo day to following series A, B, C rounds. Probably every single ratio you could imagine that might be somehow relevant. YC employs 50+ ppl, most of them engineers. They are basically a data-driven software business, with ML pre-selecting new applications.
So ... rather generic-sounding advice like 'do things that don't scale' or 'distribution is king' or 'make sth people love' is maybe as good and objective as it gets. These are probably the necessary heuristics to use while not being sufficient (luck, timing, talent...). From a merit-based point of view I'd say that SA is one of the top-10 global startup gurus. Because of the above.
He founded a single start-up when he was 19 that failed in its mission and was bought for a paltry sum (for YC, anyway). Other than that his experience in life and business consists primarily of having been born into affluence and all the privilege and advantage that brings.
It's so very Bay Area for someone like him to be president of a VC firm. His pre-YC resume wouldn't get most people past the resume filter in almost any other company, including a number that YC fund.
And most of his comments about business are not all that useful. They're exactly the sort of comments I'd expect from someone blessed with great luck and above average intellect but too little experience.
He was also a successful angel investor and I think a scout for sequoia before YC. I think he was more successful at the angel investing thing than at his startup
I like to think of startup advice as "necessary, but not sufficient". If you don't do the right things, you probably can't succeed. But even doing the right things doesn't mean you will succeed!
You don't believe leadership, persuasion, and charisma can be taught? You're denying the 1000's of years of study in rhetoric, persuasion, and logical reasoning going back to Ancient Greece? I agree with your post in general, but I think it's entirely reasonable to improve your interpersonal skills, emotional IQ, listening abilities, and leadership skills. Hell, even in scouts they know this, they improve upon all of those skills repeatedly as young men were given progressively more dutiful leadership positions.
Yes those things can be taught and they are being taught all the time. But, what portion of that really manifests into actual leadership and changing the world? You give an example of Scouts - did they ever become anything in their lives and change the world? Some do and some don't.
There is no definitive data that says you can go to a class, read a book or talk to someone and become a leader. In fact the opposite is probably true.
Leadership is an abstract quality that cannot, in my opinion, be actively managed. It just exudes from the person as they try to solve the problems, execute their vision, and build a rapport by delivering on promises. "Fake it until you make it" doesn't work actually work for most cases and neither do listening to lessons on leadership or reading a particular book.
Every single advice that Sam Altman gives has survivorship bias written all over it. I have never learned anything remotely useful from his vague generic articles and speeches. I'd rather watch Drew Hudson's startup pitch or read about Chad Rigetti and his quantum computer venture. Or maybe learn how Instacart managed to photograph every single grocery store item by literally going to the store and buying everything. Sam Altman's interviews are fantastic and I thank him for that but I think he should stop marketing himself as a startup guru of some kind. Each situation is unique and my personal opinion is that particular qualities such as leadership, convincing abilities, and charisma cannot be learned. It can only surface as a result of how one thinks and acts. This is why leadership courses are bullshit.