You can win with the best product, the best price, or the best experience.
Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.
Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.
The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.
You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
Growth solves (nearly) all problems
Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
Every company has a rocky beginning.
If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.
Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.
Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
Good startups usually take 10 years.
Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much; sometimes they do.
The second part of how to hire: try not to.
In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.
... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.
