
The path to $100B [video] - matco11
https://www.startupschool.org/videos/51
======
max76
A lot of people here are saying $100B is too high of a goal to accomplish.

The best advice of the video is to have a strong vision of the future. How
will the world be fundamentally different in 10 years compared to how it is
today. Think about that change, and then build a company that will be well
positioned with the new change. The stronger your vision, and the more
accurate it is, the better your chance of success is.

In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of
$100B companies is going to explode as well. More and more commerce is
happening on the internet which scales much easier than brick and motor
commerce. More and more goods purchased are entirely virtual, and have huge
margins. More and more value is in software, which can be copied and used
without practical limits. If your goal is to start a company that grows to
$100B there has never been a better time to do that than right now.

~~~
dxhdr
> In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of
> $100B companies is going to explode as well.

Devil's advocate, is that actually a good thing?

Might be good for the consumer but not great for the laborer. Working for
someone else is a bummer. Increasing consolidation means increasingly more of
us will be in that position.

~~~
samstave
Yeah, the future is the Dystopian-Cyberpunk-Anime future of the mega-
corporation-government-states which own and control everything.

People may say that is too-dystopian and cynical of a perspective, but all
data-points over the last several decades are very solidly pointing in this
direction....

There will certainly be lots of 10B, 50B and 100B companies - then the 1-5T
companies will consume them just as the 5B companies grabbed up everything
they could to build their moats over the last few years.

There will be cyber-wars for privacy in the next 20 years. There will be
digital outcasts who seek to hack and bring down large systems.

There will be plenty of cyber-terrorism to come.

Personally, I thin kthe US is sitting on its laurels way too much and will be
completely unprepared for a real cyberwar when it actually happens.

Anyone know of some good authors with a contemporary grasp of where we
currently are with technology who is putting out some good cyberpunk fiction
about the impending future?

~~~
elorant
_Anyone know of some good authors with a contemporary grasp of where we
currently are with technology who is putting out some good cyberpunk fiction
about the impending future?_

Gibson is the master of the genre.

~~~
samstave
Neuromancer is what made me. Cyberpunk was what i was in the late 80s through
today.

But I see the dystopian dark nature of it. I helped, along with everyone on
HN, build this monster we have now.

I tried Gibson's latest story, and I wasnt too into it...

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ArtWomb
I was thinking about this in light of the recent MegaMillions lottery frenzy.
Chance of buying a winning ticket is about one in a million times the number
of successive draws in which no winner is declared in order for the jackpot to
reach a sizeable pot. Ballpark estimate around 1:10M.

Whereas the chance you could actually build a company with billion dollar
valuation is probably well under 1:1M. Just from being in the pool of startup
school attendees or auditors. There are additionally many other factors which
could substantially increase those odds.

Also, would just like to mention the recent podcast with Laura Deming of
Longevity Fund was excellent. Incredibly informative and reasonably optimistic
about the probability of a breakthrough in our lifetimes.

~~~
jm20
Odds in a lottery are uniform and do not account for personal attributes.
Assuming 1 ticket per person, anyone that buys a ticket has an equal chance of
winning. A 98 year old grandmother has the same chance of winning as a 21 year
old man.

Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are
a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a
successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large
number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero
percentage chance of success.

~~~
r32a_
One small caveat is if someone is very wealthy, they can spend $0.9Billion
buying lottery tickets which increases their odds vs someone that just buys 1

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sjg007
The insight on Facebook's success and its implicit focus on the network vs
Google's focus on product is interesting. Same with their conviction on the
newsfeed.

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brian_herman__
How about the path to $1

~~~
iamgopal
This.

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r32a_
I'm interested to see who can build the first $100B, fully remote company.

~~~
ph0rque
Not sure if fully remote is the best goal. What if a company is fully remote,
except for ~10 employees in a city who request an office at the local downtown
co-working space? That kind of flexibility would be ideal, IMO.

~~~
sytse
I think it is important that there is no headquarter. Some people having desks
at the same co-working space is fine. All the executives in the same building
means everyone else is at a satellite office.

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htor
startup culture is destroying the planet! we don't need more innovators we
need inventors!

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bwang29
Around 32:00 : I was confused a little when Paul was talking about when 80% of
facebook's user revolted against the decision on newsfeed and then facebook
decided to stick with the decision which is ultimately successful. Seems to in
direct contrast in what he believed when he was building Gmail.

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maxxxxx
Why would anyone worry about scaling to 100B? Once you are at that level you
probably won't watch this video and everybody else is probably more worried
about 1 or 10 million.

~~~
rootusrootus
Yeah I would much rather see something about 10M. I'm not looking to win the
lottery, I want to live a successful, comfortable life.

~~~
puranjay
I'm more interested in knowing if some companies are inherently designed to be
$100B companies, or can any company get there by gradually expanding its
operations.

Can the $1M ARR SaaS startup build products that can take it to $1B ARR? Or
does that require a different DNA altogether?

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cvaidya1986
This a fun challenge! Check back this comment in 10 years if I built it. We
are doing some work in AI that could have a shot.

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HugoDaniel
Right now I am worried about the path to $10k

~~~
max76
Focus on what you can ship today. Find users that love your product and
determine what they love about it. Talk to the users that do not love your
product, and determine which features you can add to make them fall in love
with your product. Go after high impact easy to implement features first.

100 users paying $8.25 a month will equal a $10k/yr MRR business.

~~~
HugoDaniel
I did try it with gridgenerator[0]. A painting application to create geometric
patterns and shapes. I tried to have users, people loved it but didn't feel
they were the target audience. Tried to get some b2b partnerships afterwards
which failed for various reasons. I have a few debts to pay now (because I was
using my pension money for it) and a large amount of bugs to fix when my
willpower comes back up again.

Today no one uses it. I had to shut down the export server, and got about 40
followers on instagram with some of the works I managed to do with it[1].

[0] [https://gridgenerator.com/](https://gridgenerator.com/) [1]
[https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/](https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/)

Now i work at a web company trying to slave my way to pay the debt and in
another 10 years try it again. Does it entitle me to say "been there done
that" ?

~~~
max76
Who were your users? Were they paying? Why did you feel they weren't the users
you wanted?

I'm really interested in your decision to move away from a consumer model to a
b2b model.

~~~
HugoDaniel
Still in spite of all of these I do believe that there is a lot more this tool
can give. My plans for it in the near future (early 2019) are:

\- Present it in a slightly different way (remove landing page and instantly
start playing a dumbed down version of it that introduces the current features
as a 'initialization/introductory process')

\- Improve the mobile experience (by default shape creation must be done by
choosing which areas to paint instead of the current approach of connecting
points, this is a small fix that makes using it in mobile a much better
experience)

\- Allow anonymous export and sharing of works. Remove the login until it is
absolutely needed.

\- Create thematic portfolios with it and share them with current graphical
artists that work with grids

\- Restart instagram marketing

If you have any other ideas that don't fit the traditional "startup book"
approach I will gladly do them or try to incorporate them in the reboot.

~~~
max76
I wouldn't take this as the path to success. You are in a very different
industry than I have ever worked in. I do have some ideas for you to consider.

\- Add a share button. Freeware gets a watermark, paid gets the clean image.
Integrate with twitter, facebook, and instagram to make posts.

\- Rebrand the application to something more artsy sounding. I now have three
tabs open that say "Grid Generator" and it sounds like an engineer tool, while
the application runs like an art tool.

\- Hows the tablet experience? I would focus on desktop and tablets more than
mobile. I think this application would lend itself to larger screens than cell
phones have.

\- Run a subreddit for people to share their work.

\- Server costs for the export engine can be lowered by using AWS lambda to
provide on demand computing. Implementing this can range from easy to
difficult depending on which language the engine is written in.

If you want to reach out to me more about this subject you can find an email
address in my profile. Good luck to you!

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mothsonasloth
Tres commas

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threeseed
I applied to YC for the first time after attending Startup School.

They said they would release the outcomes of who got in or not at 10pm PST.
Instead it started to trickle in some 3 hours later. During that period the
Slack channels had entrepreneurs panicking about whether they got in or not.
Some even talking about suicide. And apparently this happens every, single
time.

I have lost any and all respect for YC and the partners who claim they
represent the interests of founders.

Founders should focus on making great products not trying to reach some
arbitrary number.

~~~
confiscate
This is not YC's fault. I am not sure why you would blame YC for this.

As you said, founders should focus on making great companies (not just great
products), so they should not focus on the outcome release time.

If you get into YC that's great. If not, you are still going to build your
company anyways. There's not going to be a change in direction of your company
either way.

YC is an accelerator. It accelerates your progress up a path, but ultimately
you are responsible for setting the path and running up it.

Please don't consider suicide over a YC application. There's going to be a lot
more obstacles ahead, that will be more stressful than applying to YC.

------
billions
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Highly recommend checking out all their videos, especially on finding product
market fit and growth. We just launched if you want to check us out:
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