Later Stage Advice with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 20)

All right, uh good afternoon and welcome to the last class of how to start a startup.

So, this is a little bit different than every other class. Every other class has been things that you should be thinking about in general at the beginning of a startup. Um, and today we're going to talk about things that you don't have to think about for a while. In fact, you shouldn't. But since I'm not going to get to talk to most of you, uh, again before you get to sort of post product market fit stage, I wanted to just give you the list of things that you need to think about as you're scaling and the list of the things that usually, uh, founders fail to make the transition on.

So, these are the topics we're going to talk about. But again, um, all of these things are things that are not writing code or talking to users. Which means, with a few exceptions that I'll try to note, you can ignore them until after you have product market fit. Most of these things for most companies become important between months 12 and 24, but it's really more about stage than anything else. These are things that usually hit around 25 people, uh, and definitely post product market fit. So just write these down somewhere and look back at them when you get there.

So the first area we're going to talk about, uh, is management. At the beginning of a company, um, there is no management, and this actually works really well before 20 or 25 employees. Most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder.