- In this video,
we talk about what skills a future founder
can and should work on
before they take the plunge into starting something.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
Do you have the skills
and do you have what it takes?
First off, here's the list
and it's pretty long.
Engineering, product, design, sales and marketing,
finance, leadership and management.
The more things out of this list
you are actually familiar with,
the more likely you will succeed.
We all want to be a part of a rocket ship
as it's taking off
but we don't want to join anything
that will fail without us.
And as a result,
we repel people when we need them the most.
And in the same way,
we attract them when we have other options.
This is a key fact of life.
The more of these skills you have,
the more you will attract high quality people
to come work with you,
whether it's cofounders or employees.
If you're early in your career,
know that you should try and figure out
which of those skills you can be particularly good at.
What do you enjoy?
At the same time,
learn the other parts too.
You might not enjoy working on some of these skills,
but every single one of them
will help you along on your journey.
And because you're strong at those parts,
you will be much more complimentary.
Be deep in one or two of these areas
but broad enough to be dangerous in the rest.
You actually need this to be able to tell
who's actually good in those positions
and to be able to work with those best people
in those expertise areas.
(rockets firing)
I want to be super explicit here-
you don't have to have all of these things figured out.
Deciding to start is a very personal decision.
There are people who have very few of these things
and still succeed,
and there are also people
who have all of those skills listed
and they fail.
Starting a start-up isn't deterministic like that.
You're taking risk
and these skills make it a more calculated risk.
All right, let's start.
When it comes to engineering,
we're talking about technical prowess.
You have to have the basics down.
You don't need a computer science degree
but it sure does help.
Technology remains the key leverage in this world.
It's the ultimate moat.
When you have a piece of code
or an algorithm figured out
that nobody else has,
when you have something like PageRank,
that's the ultimate moat for Google
and it protects something
that is worth billions and billions of dollars.
Someone can't just walk in off the street
and take that from them.
They'd have to build PageRank first.
I realize a lot of different kinds of people
are watching this video.
So I don't want to discourage you.
If you have technical skills, great, that's table stakes.
If you don't,
then you do have to team up with someone who does.
And if you don't know how to do that,
then you should try to learn enough
to get dangerous with it.
Most people who try to find technical cofounders
don't even make the simple effort
of understanding the craft.
But if you understand the craft
and you can build a good but not perfect version
of what you ultimately want to build,
you can get the ball rolling.
It'll immediately distinguish you
against this sea of nontechnical people
who are also trying to find a technical cofounder.
Again, you don't have to be the best at this
but it helps.
All I'm saying
is that if you don't know how to code
or you don't have a technical background,
you should keep an open mind
and you should learn.
How do you acquire this skill?
Well, while top CS schools remain the gold standard.
Increasingly, there are great ways
to learn how to code online.
Codecademy, for instance, is amazing at this,
or for scientists who want to train up
into the data science and data engineering roles,
there are amazing fellowships out there
like Insight Fellows.
Link in the description
if you want to watch my video on that.
There's a YC startup named Career Karma
that is also an amazing way
for people to break into tech.
They'll even help you find the right bootcamp
or figure out if the bootcamp path is right for you.
Next is product.
Being able to do product,
being able to run the product function
is about knowing what to build and for whom.
I really like Suhail Doshi's lesson about product
and here's what he says,
"I wish I understood the degree to which
"focusing on a few things in a product mattered.
"I used to feel liberated
"that I could finally work on new ideas
"once things started growing
"but I later realized
"that you're only at the beginning of a curve
"to finally take the market.
"It's often so hard to discover and deliver on a use-case
"that's so important to people.
"And to let up on the gas and let others catch up to you
"is an opportunity wasted.
"Often, it requires continuous improvement
"over many years
"to keep and take the mantle."
Product is about knowing what to build.
It's basically being able to run the process on a machine
to continually find and refine product market fit.
This isn't a one time thing.
This is a constant process.
And how do you acquire this skill?
Unfortunately, there's not an obvious way
to become a good product person,
short of practicing it.
So that's why working on projects in your spare time
is probably my best recommendation
to learn product.
Build something and release it,
release it to users and see if they stick with it.
Talk to users
and see why they did or didn't take to it.
Did it solve their problem?
What are their hangups?
The next big thing to really focus on is design.
And when we're talking about design,
there are actually two parts to this,
interaction design,
also known as user experience,
and visual design.
UX and interaction design
is about how it works
and visual design is how it looks.
Most people think about visual design
when they hear the word design.
It's a skill like drawing or painting.
You can work on it,
this skill can be cultivated
and I think there are two practical aspects of visual design
to really note.
One is really being able to do it yourself.
And the fact is, most founders
would get a lot out of this skill
but it's not required for them.
It sure does help
if you're particularly consumer though.
Being able to do it yourself
just means faster iteration time.
The second aspect is probably more important
and that is having taste.
So being able to know when a design
does or doesn't work.
Does it fit the aesthetic?
Does it fit the mood?
Does it speak to your customer?
Does it convey the right level of quality?
Taste is something that is very important,
particularly for consumer,
but these days, for all businesses.
Now, interaction design is probably the meat of design
when I think about it.
Interaction design is most directly related to product.
And it's about taking the ideas of who's it for
and what problem are we solving
and it brings it to the level of how.
Where do you put the buttons
and what do you say on those buttons?
What do you say around those pages
to get people through something really complicated?
How do you break up a complex multi-step process
into something manageable?
And how do you make sure the user knows where they are
and where they want to go?
And one of my favorite books
on how to learn the basics
is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
I actually did a two hour talk
on Y Combinator Startup School
on YouTube that you can watch right now.
It's also a link in the description.
(phone ringing)
Next is sales and marketing.
As Ryan Peterson of Flexport says,
"Sales is the most underrated profession."
My cofounder Alexis Ohanian talks about
how everybody is a brand
and a brand's ability to capture attention
has never mattered more.
Brand is super important
because every business today is a meme.
It's never been easier for a startup
to access exactly the people who have that problem.
Sales, marketing, being able to sell,
being able to get in front of people,
it's super key.
(Intro to Pink Floyd's song Money)
Finance is another key skill to work on.
This isn't super important at the outset.
Engineering, product, sales, marketing,
they're really the key to getting product market fit
but financial literacy is absolutely essential
once you go from zero to one.
Matt MacInnis from Rippling
talks about, "I wish I'd better understood
"the principals of corporate fiance.
"Once I understood that my company was worth
"the net present value of all future cash flows,
"I started making better decisions.
"Also, all the investor tropes
"started to make a lot more sense."
Finance is a fundamental too
in helping you figure out how to repeatedly grow
and how well you're actually doing on that front.
Every business in the world
is either growing or dying
and you can't really tell which one you're doing
if you don't have the metrics to measure it.
Finance and budgeting
allows you to make sense
of the decisions you have to make in a business.
Should you hire that executive
and let them build a team?
Should you invest in that new office?
When do you get paid back for those things
and do they make economic sense?
One of the most important skills
is actually leadership and people management.
How do you lead
and how to do you get people to do things,
sometimes without authority?
Well, by example, for one.
Most people think being a leader is about being stern
or having some sort of authority.
Harvard professor Barbara Kellerman says,
"Followers are more important to leaders
"than leaders are to followers."
And this is why leading from empathy is more powerful.
It creates a more connected team
that can weather more storms
and make better decisions together.
There's more to being a leader
than being empathetic though, of course.
The next stage is to hold people accountable.
And in practice this is very hard
because you have to have very crucial conversations,
hard discussions about when things didn't go right,
ideally as constructively as possible,
while also having the impact you need to have.
This bad thing, it can't continue.
And how do you acquire this skill?
Well, if you're still in school,
one of the best ways to do it
is find leadership positions
that let you run programs and coordinate people.
That might be an after school sport,
that might be a club,
things right there in your school.
At work, there are even more
very direct ways to exercise this.
Take on projects that require coordination,
ideally with many people,
and try to actually drive to some sort of numerical outcome.
Can you actually increase sales by X percent?
Did you and your team
create X amount of value for that company?
The best book I can think of
that a lot of people haven't read
because it has a very cheesy title is actually
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
It's one of the most obvious ways
to put to work a bunch of skills
that you need to be successful
across the whole gamut of skills really.
Read that book and you'll be a better leader
but you'll also get better
at all the other skills too.
(dramatic music)
So that was a lot of things
and the reality is it takes a lifetime, or maybe two,
to even get good at one or maybe two of these things,
let alone getting to passable in the others.
How do you put lifetimes of experience together in a room,
well it could be a Zoom room,
in order to make something great?
Well, you just described the process
of putting together a startup, a startup team.
People talk about founders a whole lot
but founders are often the speck of dust
that forms the crystalline structure
that actually solves a real problem.
And this is why teams are so crucial.
Any given single human being
could probably only get truly great
at one or two of these skills
but you need a team of people who are great at all of these
in order to build a startup or business that really matters.
Finally, remember you don't have to have
all of these things figured out.
Deep expertise in one or two of these things
and then a broader view on the other skills
is all you really have time to do in a lifetime.
And having all of the right skills
is still no guarantee you'll find the right idea
or build the right team.
But that's why you're watching this.
If you want to hear more about ideas and teams,
stay tuned for future episodes
and please smash that like and subscribe button.
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and it all helps me a ton
so that I can try and help you all.
Thank you again for watching all the way to the end
and I'll catch you real soon.