Building a Successful Startup: Tips from Tom Preston Werner at Startup School 2012

Name: Building a Successful Startup: Tips from Tom Preston Werner at Startup School 2012
Uploaded: 2023-03-09 21:31:46
Description: The key to building a successful startup is to focus on complementary skills, hiring the right people, having a clear mission statement, and creating a strong culture based on optimizing for happiness and working from first principles.

This article is a summary of a YouTube video "Tom Preston Werner at Startup School 2012" by Y Combinator

TLDR The key to building a successful startup is to focus on complementary skills, hiring the right people, having a clear mission statement, and creating a strong culture based on optimizing for happiness and working from first principles.

Timestamped Summary

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00:00
Money doesn't matter, people do - the success of GitHub was due to the complementary skills of its co-founders and the bigger questions of where it's been and where it's going.
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04:03
The company hired a third co-founder and diverse employees to accomplish more tasks, while the speaker's team lacked business and executive experience.
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06:19
Having a beginner's mind is crucial for solving new problems in startups, hiring the right people is hard but necessary, and titles are not important in the beginning.
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10:38
Building a successful team requires a mix of skills and personalities.
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14:16
Focus on quality design and a clear mission statement to appeal to users, while GitHub's mission is to make developers' lives easier and solve more problems.
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18:11
Reinvest profits, focus on product, and choose between lifestyle or world-changing impact for success.
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20:57
Philosophy at GitHub is based on optimizing for happiness, winning with the best argument, and working from first principles, creating a strong culture that attracts superfans and drives positive change.
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25:00
Mastering decisions, philosophy, and products is key to raising $100M.