zlacker

>>sandsl+(OP)
I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but why should I or other engineers/entrepreneurs look at Sam Altman as a massive startup success story when his lone startup Loopt never really achieved product-market fit, and ended up in a firesale?

Across 5 funding rounds, Crunchbase lists Loopt as having raised $39 million and then was acquired (acqui-hired?) for $43 million. He didn't create any multiples of value for his investors. Loopt wasn't a breakout hit like so many other YC startups have been. It was certainly one of the first interesting location-based apps in the App Store, but soon was surrounded by other location-based apps and never really appeared to surface and gain traction.

Obviously Sam runs YC now and has dramatically improved it, but in the lens of being an entrepreneur, isn't he still essentially unproven, and not a success story in the startup world?

>>flyosi+ib
To add another data point in support of Sam's comment, I think one can build a good understanding of entrepreneurship and how to increase the chances of success without having been a hugely successful founder. I joined VC four years ago because I wanted to learn more about early-stage startups before starting my own, and I ended up falling in love with the job. I've learned a ton about factors of success and failure over the last few years.

My belief is that there's a large chunk of building a company that I will never learn or understand without becoming a founder myself. Maybe that's 50% of success. However, for the other 50%, I can actually learn things better than many founders because they have a sample size of one or two or three startups that they have started, while I can look across fifty or a hundred companies that I am intimately involved in and analyze what is different between the ones that become huge and the ones that do not. I think this cross-sectional pattern matching is what makes a lot of VCs and investors sources of good advice (in some startup topics) even though they might not have built huge companies themselves.

>>lpolov+Rf
I watch football. By watching football I have built a good understanding of football management and how to increase the chances of success without having been a hugely successful football manager.

Maybe that's 50% of success of being a football manager. I can learn more than other football managers because I can watch lots of football games on Sky Sports.

That's why many top premiership teams hire their managers by finding the people who watch the most football games on TV.

EDIT: I'm sure there's plenty here who have been in more startups than me, but in the 4 or so I've been in, I've heard conversations between founders and investors plenty of times.

Often little of what comes out of the founders mouth is based in reality. Sometimes they're not seeing reality as it really is, sometimes they're painting a rosier picture, sometimes they're outright lying, sometimes they're tired and not thinking straight, sometimes they've got obsessed by something utterly irrelevant. Sometimes they're not actually listening to the staff, or not even asking the right questions.

As a VC or researcher or whatever, you're not actually playing the game. You're not on the team, you're not on the field, you're not even on the side-lines. You're seeing a different game than's being played.