“Startups live on growth. It’s the indicator of a great product.”

Sam Altman recently kicked off Stanford’s How To Start a Startup course. The course is running now through December, leveraging all the experience Sam and related founders and advisors (including Dustin Moskovitz, Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, and more) have been building over the past 9 years at Y Combinator.

An illustration representing startup planning and success with a rocket shop front and centre accompanied by a chart, a light bulb, a gear, and a coffee cup.

Y Combinator’s four areas you need to excel at in order to maximize your chance of success as a startup:

  1. Idea
  2. Product
  3. Team
  4. Execution

With a massive dose of luck.

So much great market insight from Sam:

For startups, you want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can’t be a monopoly in a big market right away. Too much competition for that. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly. And then quickly expand.

It’s good if you can say something like: today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I’m going to get all of them. And in the future almost everyone is going to use my product.

Dig in and enjoy this fantastic lecture series

And here’s Say Yeah’s contact page for when you’re ready to execute on that great idea.