Veltrx@Veltrxai
Sam Altman taught 720 startups one formula where luck is a random number between 0 and 10,000.
Stanford, 2014. The opening lecture of CS183B was so packed he asked for a bigger auditorium.
He was 28, a dropout from this same school 9 years earlier, now running Y Combinator. The formula he wrote on the board: idea × product × team × execution × luck and you only control 4 of the 5, because the fifth one goes to 10,000. His words, not a metaphor.
Then he did something strange: he handed half of his own lecture to Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, whose entire job was to talk students out of starting companies.
Dustin showed one table.
Employee 100 at Dropbox with standard 10 basis points made $10 million, employee 250 at Facebook made $200 million, and employee 1,000 joining in 2009, when everyone said it was too late still made $20 million.
Your own startup? Best case you build a $100 million company and keep 10% after dilution.
$10 million, same as employee 1,000, minus your health.
Dustin knew the price because he paid it: at 21 he was throwing his back out every 6 months from pure anxiety, always on call, unable to quit a founder who leaves wears the black eye for a decade.
Then Altman twisted the lecture back with advice that cut against everything in the room. The best ideas look terrible at the start: the 13th search engine, the 10th social network limited to college kids, sleeping on strangers' couches. If an idea sounds good, too many people are already building it.
Make something 100 people love instead of something 10,000 people like. Ben Silbermann recruited Pinterest's first users by walking up to strangers in Palo Alto coffee shops, then resetting every browser in the Apple Store to Pinterest's homepage until they threw him out.
And the only valid reason to start is that you can't not do it. Dustin built Asana at night, after full days at Facebook, unpaid and unasked.
"The idea was beating itself out of our chest."
The rest is a number between 0 and 10,000.
