Sam Altman on how to build a “Facebook-sized company”

“The best companies all have great products. Unfortunately, the current fashion in Silicon Valley I think has gotten a little bit too far away from this—it’s too much about growth hacking and sales and marketing machines and everything else. And that does work for a while. You can get away for a pretty long while with executing really well to grow a mediocre product. But you don’t usually create a Facebook-sized company by doing that.”

Sam shares a simple heuristic for assessing whether or not a product is great:

“If I think about all of the most successful internet mobile startups—and this is true for enterprise and consumer apps—I heard about them because they were so good that one of my friends spontaneously told me about it. They were not being incentivized to; they didn’t market to me; they didn’t advertise to me. It was just someone I trusted said, ‘you gotta try this new thing, it’s amazing.’”

Full video: Y Combinator “Sam Altman - Startup Investor School Day 1“ (Mar 2018)