Sam Altman of Y Combinator shares his Startup Playbook

Looking for startup tips? Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator (the world’s most powerful startup incubator), has distilled and compiled the advice his organization gives repeatedly to YC and YC Fellowship companies.

Then, he made it available to everyone as the “Startup Playbook”.

The Startup Playbook is an excellent resource for new arrivals in the startup world. It’s also a good place for founders familiar with the writings of YC partners to refresh their memory and get access to everything in one place. Investors, too, will find value in learning what Sam Altman and Y Combinator look for in founders and their companies.

Startup Playbook is an online incarnation of a small booklet that can be read top-to-bottom in half-an-hour or so. That is, if Altman’s opening doesn’t put you off: “A word of warning about choosing to start a startup: It sucks! One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we get from YC founders is it’s harder than they could have ever imagined.”

But he continues, “The riskier option is having an idea or project you’re really passionate about and working at a safe, easy, unfulfilling job instead.”

If you have an idea, and you’re thinking about taking the next step, the Startup Playbook is required reading. The Playbook is organized into four sections detailing what you’ll need to be successful: a great idea, a great team, a great project, and great execution. The nitty gritty of execution — growth, focus and intensity, jobs of the CEO, hiring and managing, competitors, making money, and fundraising — each get detailed attention.

Altman’s tips start from the obvious but often neglected “you need to know what you’re building and why” and meander through plenty of counterintuitive strategies, interesting anecdotes, and a few of the specifics of attracting venture capital.

What if you don’t have an idea yet? Altman writes, “Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts. Work on projects you find interesting. Go out of your way to hang around smart, interesting people.”

And if you’re searching for smart, interesting people working on interesting projects, look no further than our community at 79 Studios!

Here are 14 more tips from the “Startup Playbook” to whet your appetite:

• “If you do not build a product users love you will eventually fail. Yet founders always look for some other trick. Startups are the point in your life when tricks stop working.
• What if you don’t have an idea but want to start a startup? Maybe you shouldn’t. It’s so much better if the idea comes first and the startup is the way to get the idea out into the world.
• The best founders are unusually responsive. This is an indicator of decisiveness, focus, intensity, and the ability to get things done.
• You usually need to recruit initial users one at a time. . . . Recruit users manually, and make the product so good the users you recruit tell their friends.
• This sounds obvious, but you have to make money.
• Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution. Growth (as long as it is not “sell dollar bills for 90 cents” growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth.
• Talk internally about strategy all the time, tell everyone what you’re hearing from customers, etc. The more information you share internally — good and bad — the better you’ll be.
• Most early-stage startups should put “Do things that don’t scale” up on their wall and live by it.
• If I had to distill my advice about how to operate down to only two words, I’d pick focus and intensity. These words seem to really apply to the best founders I know.
• The market doesn’t care how hard you work — it only cares if you do the right things.
• A successful startup takes a very long time — certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about — nothing else will sustain you for ten years.
• My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. The most successful companies we’ve worked with at YC have waited a relatively long time to start hiring employees.
• It’s really important to have fundraising conversations in parallel — don’t go down a list of your favorite investors sequentially. The way to get investors to act is fear of other investors taking away their opportunity.
• Strive for people to say “X just somehow always gets things done” when talking about you.”

At 79 Studios, we support women and minority entrepreneurs. So we’re pleased that Altman has made this Startup Playbook available for all potential founders.

(Image credits: Startup Playbook)