Notes: How to Start a Startup

Notes from a Michael Seibel presentation

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

Michael Seibel of YCombinator fame gave a great presentation that Startup Istanbul. The full presentation is available here:

Here’s some notes from that presentation:

Prerequisites

• 2-4 cofounders, at least 50% engineering

• 1 year’s worth of cash each

• Everyone ready to quit jobs

Idea

• Brainstorm with team mates

• Personal experience

• Daily/weekly problems

Market

• Billions of dollars

• Do some research

• Use competitors product

Legal

• Delaware C Corp

• Use https://www.clerky.com

Minimum Viable Product

• 2nd most common place that companies mess up

• How fast can you get a product into your user’s hands?

• 2 months is good, 2 weeks is better

• Nothing until you launch

Growth

• Number one factor for getting VC funding

• Ads - Least favorite

• Reference customers - Customers tell other people about you

• Usage should equal sharing, sharing should be 100% a part of using your product

Press

• Are people talking about your company?

• PR is like business development

  • Warm introduction

  • Follow up

  • Build relationship

  • Provide something of value

• Something launching, money being raised, key hire, significant deal

• Treat as an ongoing relationship

Fundraising

• If you don’t need money, people love to give it to you

• Structure so you pay for the living expenses of your founders

• Timing is important, schedule them one all at once

• Build Induce FOMO in investors

• Have growth

Fundraising Problems

• If you have a launch plan that requires funding, change it

• Grow!!!

• Are you generating PR?

• Build momentum/FOMO

• Pitch to angels who understand the problem

• Customers can be great early investors

Operations

• Number one problem companies have is they spend too much money

• Pay yourself less, get a cheaper office, suck it up

• Look at how much you spend each month

Hiring

• Figure out how you can increase the average talent with each hire

• Founders to to be smart but with higher risk tolerance

• First few hires should be smarter than the founder and a little more risk adverse

• Your first few hires are your hiring advertisement

• If you can’t hire someone smarter, do it your self

• Hire slow