I just wanted to say thank you to Sam and YC for creating this class and putting it all online. I enjoyed each of them and its most probable that these set of lectures are going to return more value to me over my life than any of the other classes I am taking right now in college.
The company I founded just hit 25 employees and I just got finished spending a couple quarters trying to ignore management because it seemed cooler to have no structure, and working on a project in hero mode because I got over-excited about it... wish it had come out 6 months ago :)
I haven't seen this lecture yet, but I also want to thank you Sam and all other people who had lectures.
These 2.5 months have been very interesting and being from the other part of the world I don't have access to these kind of people and information. The people I know and hang out who have created companies have revenues of a couple of millions when they have something "big", surely not billions.
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 have found these series very entertaining and there have been some great suggestions along the way. I know that Sam is not going to organise such a course, but it would be great to have a series on the non-vc path on how to start a start up (the unfairly defamed lifestyle businesses).
We are a company with 20 People and this is really a great lecture for me personally (Single Founder with Organic growth and never raised outside investment).
Thanks for doing this.
The whole lecture series is great addition to startup community and will be useful for founders everywhere for years to come.
Thanks Sam. For me the note on how you stay personally organised and the last answer I.e 'wait till it's working' were little insights that may make a big difference.
Ta!
Surprisingly good, thoughtful, experienced,
well informed, mature. Definitely get
the transcript and slides.
For some of the work, e.g., trademarks,
I would suggest getting those filed
earlier than "later-stage". Similarly
for the bookkeeping, tax planning and
taxes, accounting, employee benefits,
stock planning, where to put the
intellectual property
to lease back to the operating business,
etc.
Altman suggested each year, for the
first 10 years, assign another
3-5% of the stock to employees.
That sounds generous and like it
would create one heck of an internal
fight for stock.
Once an apparently wise adviser told
me, "Never give stock to an employee
who doesn't contribute directly to
earnings.".
For some more on leadership and culture, also
draw from the AVC.com blog user JLM's contributions
and links, often back to JLM's Web site,
at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com. JLM
has long been
the most popular contributor
to that blog.
Altman seemed to want a fairly strict
organizational
hierarchy. He recognized that too little
hierarchical organization can be bad
but was not clear on just how much
a good hierarchy should do.
A strict hierarchy can lead to a lot
of goal subordination
(where a middle manager
works for their own interests
largely against the interests of
the company),
process and
formality over reality and progress,
fighting with people down the hall
instead of against problems inside the company
or competitors outside,
arrogance, fear that any effort at
innovation could have a lot of
downside with nearly no chance of
upside, fear that good success
could lead to jealousy and
attacks from above, narrowly
just managing the existing
business with no interest in
progress for new business directions
or even for the existing business, etc.
For how to get work done and evaluate
employees outside of just a strict
hierarchy, I'm entertaining borrowing
from other work. E.g., when someone
sees a problem, find a likely person,
or for a really big problem a person
and some assistants for a team, and
(a) have them investigate and
write a paper and give a presentation
describing the problem, its importance,
etc. If continue, then (b) have them
do some research and write a paper,
etc., on proposed solutions and give
a presentation. (c) If continue, then
have them write a paper, etc., planning
the implementation of the solution.
(d) If continue, then have them write a paper
on the implementation with budgets,
other resources, milestones, quality
control, due dates, progress
reporting, etc. (e) If continue,
then have them proceed as in (d).
At employee evaluation time, look
at the papers and, especially, the
completed projects.
I definitely intend to get the
transcript and slides. Apparently
Altman has learned a lot, somewhere,
in his own start-ups, watching
YC start-ups, somewhere.
