flâneur

Armel Talla

1 followers · 2 following · 292 views

on the atlas — 30

highlights — 176

  • Finally, if you don't pay the person, or if you pay them bare subsistence wages (say, $20-30k) and they're senior talent, you've introduced an additional level of risk, and you should pay a premium for that. However, there may be better ways to compensate that risk; for instance, you can defer salary at a premium rate.
    Ask HN: Equity for a first employee | Hacker News
  • I treat a first employee as a co-founder just with fewer shares. Its says "we're in this together" more than words can say. I have given them rights to review our financials (noone ever did, but perhaps my openness with our revenues made them comfortable), voting rights, same dilution rules as a co-founder, etc. The percent of shares varies, but being careful to not create different classes of people in such a small working group seems valuable.
    Ask HN: Equity for a first employee | Hacker News
  • Communicate clearly and concisely.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about them on.
    The Strength of Being Misunderstood - Sam Altman
  • You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do.
    The Strength of Being Misunderstood - Sam Altman
  • they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.
    The Strength of Being Misunderstood - Sam Altman
  • Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
    What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman
  • Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it.
    Schlep Blindness
  • The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.
    Schlep Blindness
  • In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek out ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to spark a thought.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea you'd previously been working on.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • So any startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a market with existing competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Live in the future and build what seems interesting.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • But you know the ideas are out there. This is not one of those problems where there might not be an answer. It's impossibly unlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?"
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice."
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Live in the future, then build what's missing.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future."
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you can't.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • What's much harder, and probably more important, is the other axis: how good you are at describing reality to someone with much less context than you have
    Taking advice - Aaron's Essays
  • There are two axes that determine the goodness of advice. The first is the obvious one: the quality of the person giving advice.
    Taking advice - Aaron's Essays
  • The worst ideas we see at Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other people will want.
    Organic Startup Ideas