If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.
Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.
When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.
Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.
If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.
Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.
Someday, you need to build a business that's difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.
The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.
More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.
As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.
Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.
Why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?
Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.
A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.
I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.
I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.
The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
