Great lecture series. Favourite part of this lecture was hearing about all of the distractions that founders will face throughout the life of their startup (especially if they're successful). Getting a heads up on what to expect is the first step towards planning on how to deal with it.
P.S. I've somewhat religiously been watching/taking notes from these lectures since they started. I really agree with a lot of the comments here, that it's been a very practical lecture series with lots of tactical advice that you can directly apply to your startup (as opposed to high level strategy discussions). Thanks to YC and Sam for putting this together.
I think it would've helped to separate the sales/marketing form the how to talk to investors portion, as this lecture seemed to pack a lot of material into a short period.
Having said that, I think the sales and marketing part was done pretty well. It didn't cover a lot of sales tactics, but the fact that it was highly focused on the $0-1M in revenue portion of a company was important. There is lots of 'startup' sales advice out there that is more focussed on scaling sales and sales process, which is generally more useful for companies greater than $5M in Rev.
As someone who's never personally raised any VC, but has been in the startup space for a while...I thought they did a really good job on making things easily to understand as an introduction to VC. I also liked their insights into the value of advisors, investors, and board members, and particularly, what requests are considered legitimate/illegitimate.
This lecture was a bit different from most of the course lectures and not because it was hardware focussed. I felt like it was a lot more 'high level' with less tactical startup takeaways as compared to other lectures. His slides were very elaborate, but lacked real actionable content. In many ways, they were what I'd call "business school" or "management consultant" style case study slides geared towards bringing design thinking to a larger organization. He even mentioned a couple of times- the difference between him needing to force people from different disciplines in a room together versus being able to do it sitting at a table when you're just starting out. I think that was a prime example of the difference between 'startup' thinking and 'growth' thinking. I would've loved to hear more about his process for thinking about design when they just started the company.
In any case, I did find value in his lecture and thought process around treating everything as a system (instead of looking at hardware, software, data all discretely). I've tried to capture my takeaways via publishing 22 Quotes that I took away from the lecture here: https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/22-quotes-from-hosain-rahma...
The #1 piece of advice that I took away from this was: "“Who you talk to is just as important as what questions you ask and what you pull away from it."
Nowadays with things like Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend (which I do think serve a purpose and are valuable to building habits around customer development), I've seen prospective entrepreneurs get caught up in the MOTIONS of doing customer development and interviews thinking i.e. just getting out of the room and talking to anyone they can find on the street, instead of the real target customer that you've really thought about. I like Emmett's focus on really thinking this part through.
I actually liked the fact that this lecture had just 1 lesson to teach, where Ben Horowitz used the entire time to reinforce the one point. I particularly enjoyed his historical reference to Touissaint L’Ouverture.
Best quote and lesson I picked up: “When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.”
The two big takeaways for me were: 1) The editor analogy for founders and 2) The Ammunition and Barrels metaphor. Looking at yourself as an editor that has to apply 'red ink' to your startup (especially as it grows) makes sense to me intuitively. As for the Ammunition and Barrels, I think this is counter intuitive but true. More manpower doesn't mean more results, unless you have the right type of manpower and process in place.
I'd probably distill most of his lecture down to these two core ideas...as a method of operating you're startup. As a result, I've summarized most of the useful quotes from the lecture here:
https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/56-quotes-from-kei...
I've left out a lot of the X or Y slideware related aspirational statements he made. I think his comments on being a contrarian these days and the need for an investment thesis was interesting.
I would've hoped for less about Box's story and more focus about building an enterprise software company, but he did touch on some areas towards the latter half of the lecture. I summarized about 32 quotes (primarily for the latter half of the lecture) here: https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/32-quotes-from-aar...
I felt that everything about Brian's stories comes back to doing things that don't scale.
- Interviewing the first 300 employees
- Taking 3-4 months to make his first hire
- Stories of talking to/meeting/living with users
- Door to Door taking pictures and the entire hacked together process of taking pics
- Selling cereal to fund the startup
Overall, what's most interesting was seeing his intensity and focus permeate through the entire lecture.
Here are 42 quotes I picked up from the lecture that I've published here: https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/42-quotes-from-sam-altman-o...
P.S. I've somewhat religiously been watching/taking notes from these lectures since they started. I really agree with a lot of the comments here, that it's been a very practical lecture series with lots of tactical advice that you can directly apply to your startup (as opposed to high level strategy discussions). Thanks to YC and Sam for putting this together.