Some notes I made. Might include minor errors or misinterpretation on my side.

-> how do you identify markets that are growing quickly?

trust your instincts

students: watch what you're doing or your friends are doing

-> how do you deal with burnout as a founder?

it's real life. you just have to get through it. canonical advice: go on a vacation. almost never works for a founder. you just keep going. you rely on people. you need a support network. address the challenges and things that are going wrong.

3. Team

A. Co-Founders

-> Co-Founder relationships are among the most important in a company. #1 cause for early death: co-founder blowups.

-> Choosing a co-founder is a very important decision

-> Do not choose a random co-founder or someone who you're not friends with.

-> YC batch where 9 startups choose a random co-founder and all 9 fell apart

-> A good way to meet a co-founder is in college. Next best thing is to work at an interesting company (e.g. Facebook/Google)

-> It's better to have no co-founder than having a bad co-founder

-> Top 20 most valuable YC companies: all have at least 2 co-founders

-> "Be relentlessly resourceful" - look for this in potential co-founders. You need someone that behaves like James Bond. Smart, tough and calm

-> You really want a technical co-founder

-> Software companies should be started by software people. Not great non-technical managers.

-> 2 or 3 co-founders is ideal

B. Try not to hire

-> Try not to hire. It sucks to have a lot of employees (high burn-rate, complexity, tension, slow decision making, ...)

-> Be proud of what you can do what a small number of employees

-> In the early days, only hire when you desperately need to

C. Get the best people

-> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" - culture of extremely dedicated people

-> Make sure everyone believes in your mission

-> Pick a company that's already working, but that not everyone has noticed yet. Breakout trajectory.

-> Spend about 25% of your time hiring, once in hiring mode

-> "Mediocre engineers do not build great companies". A few bad hires can kill your startup

-> Get person referrals to hire

-> Look outside of the valley

-> For most of the early hires, experience does not matter that much. Go for aptitude

-> Are they smart, do they get things done, do I wanna spend a lot of time around them?

-> Try to work together on a project, instead of doing a formal interview

-> Care about projects and focus on references

-> Look for good communication skills, manic determination, animal test and someone you'd feel comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed (Mark Zuckerberg)

D. Keep the best people around

-> Aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees. Vested over 4 years. If they're successful, they'll increase the company by way more than that

-> Fight with investors to reduce the amount of equity given. Be generous with employees

-> Don't tell your employees they're fucking up every day, cause they will leave.

-> Give your team all the credit for all the good stuff. Take responsibility for the bad stuff that happens.

-> Daniel Pink: "Autonomy, mastery and purpose"

E. Fire Fast

-> Fire fast. Everyone hopes that an employee will turn around.

-> How do you balance firing people fast and making employees feel secure? Everyone will screw up once, twice or more. You should be very loving, not take it out on them. If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act. It'll be painfully aware to everyone.

-> When should co-founders decide on equity split? Not a discussion that gets easier with time. Set this very soon after you start working together.

-> How do you know if someone is not going to scale up to a role if they're inexperienced? Smart people almost always will find a role within the company.

-> What happens when the relationship with your co-founder falls apart? Every co-founder (including yourself) has to have vesting. You pre-negotiate what happens when someone leaves. Normal is 4 years. Try to prevent dead weight.

-> What about co-founders not working in the same location? Don't do it. Skeptical about remote teams in general. Communication and speed outweigh everything else. Video-conferencing and calls don't work that well.

4. Execution

-> Being a founder means signing up for this years long grind on (good) execution. Everyone gets modeled after the founders. Work hard, be frugal, focus on customers, etc.

-> Only executing well is what adds/creates value

-> 5 jobs for a CEO: Set the vision, Raise money, Evangelize, Hire and manage, Make sure the entire company executes

-> 1. "Can you figure out what to do?" 2. "Can you get it done?"

-> Focus. One of the hard things about being a founder: 100 important things to do every day. A lot of things that look important do not matter. Identify the two or three most important things and do these. Say no a lot (97 out of 100 times).

-> Set overarching goals for the company. Everyone in the company should know these. These are the key goals. Repeat them. Put them up on the walls. Talk about them in meetings.

-> Communicate. You can't be focused without great communication.

-> Meet every week. Focus on growth and momentum. Have to right metrics. Don't let the company get distracted by other things. You can easily get excited by your own PR.

-> Be in the same space with your co-founder.

-> The secret to startup success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. Not the best choice for work/life balance. Outwork your competitors

-> Have a high execution speed. But be obsessed with quality at the same time. Focus on quality for everything you do (e.g. buying computers/gear).

-> Be biased towards action. "I could do this great thing". Every time you talk to the best founders, they have done something new.

-> Do huge things in small incremental pieces. There's almost always a way to break complexity down into smaller projects.

-> Be quick, do whatever it takes, show up a lot, don't give up and be courageous.

-> "When I was running my own company, we felt we were about to lose a deal. Critical deal for first customer in the space. We called them saying we had a better project/deal. We drove to the airport and showed up in person. We got to their office at 6am. They told us to go away. Junior guy wanted to meet. Then senior guy wanted to meet. Within a week, we had an agreement."

-> Always keep momentum in growth. It's the lifeblood of startups. You want your company to be winning all the time. A winning team feels good and keeps winning.

-> If you lose momentum, most founders try to get it back in the wrong way (rally troops with speeches). You have to save the vision speeches for when you're winning. Sales fixes everything in a startup. Figure out where you can get small wins.

-> Fights will break out when losing momentum.

-> When Facebook's growth slowed down: Mark created a growth group. Small fixes got the curb pack up. Most prestigious group. One of Facebook's best innovations that turned around the dynamic.

-> Ship product, launch new features, review metrics and milestones

-> Do not care about competitor noise in the press. Don't worry about them at all until they're beating you with a real shipped product.