I’ve talked to Sam once a long time ago which gives me a rudimentary answer to your curiosity. PG’s notes on Sam in that 2009 essay ring true to me (http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html).
> there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
We discussed nuclear power which was an industry I left but dreamed of building a successful startup in. Sam asked me why I wasn’t building a startup in nuclear power if I thought the technology was so powerful. What I realized in what he was conveying was that if he had the same conviction he would have no doubt about the ability to drive it to success. The more experienced I get the more I value that type of conviction and determination. The more I also see that behavior being rewarded with results.
I imagine what I’m missing most is how he handles those huge obstacles. We all can turn on sheer force of will for a set amount of time but keeping it buoyant in the face of huge obstacles is another matter entirely.
His company failed, selling for a bit over the amount of cash they burned. So he didn't handle huge obstacles. And at YC, it's the startups that have obstacles that need to be surmounted, not YC itself. YC has perpetuated the cult of the startup (and the cult of "you need YC for your startup to be successful") so well that they can take equity in a number of the world's tech startups very, very cheaply at the nascent, "fruit fly" stage, ensuring that YC has enough lottery tickets that some will pay off. It's the "startup factory" play, all the founders triumphs and tragedies are just so much grist for the mill.
YC is like a doctor which takes a 10% cut of the lifetime earnings of every baby they deliver. Adding some value, yes, and some kids won't earn very much, but the wealth earned by the new human would have almost certainly been earned regardless of the doctor's skill. And this doctor happens to deliver half the babies of the entire state of California.
The cult part was thanks to PaulG. As long as that continues, YC will be successful.
OpenAI was the result of a fear that big tech. was going to monopolize all the fruits from recent deep learning advances, because they had all the data and the money. That was the obvious new hotness to get into. Proprietary AI was an existential risk to VC livelihoods.
I don’t know much about Sam Altman, but the OP listed a bunch of external signals which are just that.
My guess is the Sam has a solid combination of vision, determination, intelligence, realism and connections. Strong determination with all those other positive supports can take you a long way.
Sam also got the timing right: doubling down on AI just as the technology was ripe for it to flourish.
Have my first child, now 7 months old. If I could only say one thing it's make sure to have a trusting & productive relationship with your partner. Problems or going to come up every day and solving for them is a function of how well you two collaborate.
I had the benefit of co-founding a startup with my partner so we had already cut our teeth on this. A child is like a type of startup. Identifying and managing problems/complexity is a daily activity. If you have a good working relationship there than you can have a blast being parents together.
Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa
Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.
We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.
Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.
I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with us
https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer
Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa
Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.
We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.
Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.
I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with us https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer
Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa
Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.
We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.
Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.
I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with me https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer
What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.
By the same token, good tools do not solve politics, low morale or low transparency. I saw Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz's talk when Asana was announced (2010? 2011?) and was converted. The idea of ditching email, bringing down barriers between silos and giving a greater vision between layers was inspiring and I immediately tried to implement Asana into all areas of my life.
It didn't really work for me as a personal organiser. Paper was just too damn handy, didn't require a log in and I didn't need any of the collaboration features. It didn't work for my dad and his business because he didn't quite 'get' the task oriented nature of the beast and ended up with a weird mish mash of orders, inquiries etc which ended up being unmanageable and he abandoned it quietly.
I tried setting it up for the production pipeline at the video society at my uni. I thought it would help lower the barrier to entry so that people could more easily get involved, see what was in the works, see tasks that were available to contribute to. But no, nobody logged in. The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
I tried setting one up at my internship - a small data shop where surely things could be easily captured as tasks. We could assign things, hand things over, track bugs in code, split up larger assignments into smaller ones. But again, after some initial curiosity and a lot of patience from the teams, it didn't quite take either.
It feels a bit like the slow rise of corporate instant messaging generally or slack more specifically. Tools can enable a massive improvement to an organisation's ability to keep in touch, react to change, collaborate and all that usual stuff, but unless the company embraces that change or has a mindset/culture that allows those benefits to come to fruition then even with something like Asana you won't be able to turn things around with tools alone.
You're absolutely right. A mindset needs to accompany any tool in order for it to be successful - or direct relationship to how successful
There's a great book on this topic from the first dot com age. Necessary but not Sufficient (https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-But-Sufficient-Eliyahu-Gold...). The idea being you can adopt a tool but if you don't understand the mental models that go along with that tool then you won't fully reap the benefits.
As a company, this is still our responsibility. The best products educate as well as enable.
Your comment sums up what a lot of the comments here state.
> The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
What makes it so hard to target the plurality of the middle, I wonder?
Sounds like the exact narrative from my time at Atlassian; I often wonder if these types of ideas are a natural byproduct of companies working in the same space.
As an employee, do you have an equity package? If so, are you worried at all that these new unicorn-status investors will have priority pay-out over your equity if the company doesn't have a $1.5B exit?
Not worried at all. Our value of transparency internally extends to this raise as well.
Yes employees have equity packages and we're well informed of what the terms of this raise are, the dilution and our leadership team has worked hard to get employee-friendly terms. We believe in this because our team members are the main function for Asana to grow and hit these expectations so it must be a trusting and win-win partnership in order for it to last.
If Asana values transparency internally, then why are employees not told their pay bands as well as given a level such as senior engineer? I know engineers who have left because they could not tell if they had room to grow salary wise. The only way they could find their market rate was by interviewing at other companies.
Ex-Asana here. Asana has written about the lack of leveled titles in the past[0]. I believe the use of titles is a separate issue to pay transparency. At around the same time, there was an effort to improve the transparency in pay bands. I have since left (for unrelated reasons), and so I cannot definitively speak to whether that was successful.
Was an employee (and am a happy equity-owner in Asana as a result), and I wouldn't be worried about that - I trust the Asana leadership to ensure clean terms with the investment.
If anything, I'd worry about the anchoring effect - e.g. if the SaaS valuations decline a year from now so that a prospective Asana IPO wouldn't be worth much more than $1.5B, would that result in them being more reluctant to IPO?
But that's the effect that is plaguing unicorn startups - the ones that have to go IPO or get acquired at less than valuation see the employees getting pennies on the dollar for their equity, while the investors that gave the startup the unicorn status take the bulk of the pay out.
Do you know the terms of this latest round of funding? Has senior management confirmed the class of equity?
I'm not a current employee, and even if I were, I'm not sure that would be something I could disclose. But I can tell you that in the past Asana leadership has been very good about insisting on clean-sheet terms for investor funding.
Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Product Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa
Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.
We're looking for Product Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.
Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced)
I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with me https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer
Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature. If you want to learn more, we're having a Meetup in NYC on the 23rd. RSVP here https://www.meetup.com/typescript-react/events/254691034/
I've only recently started learning more about GraphQL and wow , 'live' queries is quite the feature! I'm curious though, have you found any downsides to using 'live' compared to more traditional updates? Thanks for the event plug btw, looking forward to it!
Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Product Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa
Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.
We're looking for Product Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.
Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced)
I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with me https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer
When I reached out to Asana regarding roles in their NYC office, a recruiter told me that they were only considering senior candidates for that location. Is that still the case?
This is a great idea. I've been on a several year cycle where every 3-4 years I go hardcore again and cut 20-30 lbs with minimizing meal variability and exercising constantly. This feels like a great solution for the intermediate time of trying to slow/stop my general daily increase of 10-20% increase in calorie intake. Even having a small, easy habit like using a mechanical tracker would make me more mindful of what I eat and have a beneficial impact.
> there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
We discussed nuclear power which was an industry I left but dreamed of building a successful startup in. Sam asked me why I wasn’t building a startup in nuclear power if I thought the technology was so powerful. What I realized in what he was conveying was that if he had the same conviction he would have no doubt about the ability to drive it to success. The more experienced I get the more I value that type of conviction and determination. The more I also see that behavior being rewarded with results.