"Video Lecture _ Lecture 20 Later-stage Advice”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZQ-rf6iIc

   In this blog post, I'm going to discuss the main ideas explained and presented in the last 20th lecture 'Later-stage Advice' by Sam Altman. Samuel H. "Sam" Altman is an American entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger. He is the president of 'Loopt', Y Combinator, and co-chairman of 'OpenAI'.  All these lectures were conducted in fall 2014. He taught a class at Stanford University called "How To Start a Startup". There were many guest lecturers included Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Adora Cheung, Alex Schultz, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Carolynn Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Ben Horowitz, Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, Kevin Hale, Ben Silbermann and Emmett Shear. All of their lectures summarized you can find on my blog. In the last lecture, he summarizes everything advised through the first class to last. Sam Altman shares useful advice about the later stage startups which may meet some issues. Thus, he considers 7 main fields which will prevent from problems:

• Management;
• HR;
• Company productivity;
• Legal, finance, accounting, tax;
• Founder psychology;
• Marketing and PR;
• Deal-making.

Let's start from the first point which is Managment. In the early stage when the market or product suitable, the first thing you should do as a co-founder is to create a great product. Though the company grows and passes 25 employees, then your essential priority becomes creating a great product in order to form and develop a great company. The management, initially,  is very limited, and it goes fine, you when you have less than 25 employees as in this case everyone is reporting to you, and that is good and beneficial for the early stage. However, when the number of employees grows there might be some issues and the system might not work as it was earlier. In this case, you have to clarify that you need an arrangement and form before facing difficulties. Therefore, the formation should not be too complex. The necessary thing is, to begin with, the concept that every employee should have their manager and the manager for that people should be one. Furthermore, every manager should be aware of who their firsthand addresses. The main idea is to group people into right teams, with other words make a meaningful cluster with that teams. Moreover, to have less management and more benefits you should have a clarity about the mission and the goals you want to achieve. After the structural problems, you can face other issues regarding management where usually founders lose: Senior People; Not Delegating; Delegating Poorly; Personal Organization; Communicating.

After the management following point is HR. Often founder pay lack attention or sometimes do not even think deep about the HR in the beginning. However, you should pay enough attention to HR from the first period of your startup as missing this may cause a huge problem and if you continue overlooking this point it may bring further difficulties to later periods of the startup. Thus, being aware of HR may assist your startup to balance much quicker. For this case, a lecturer remarks 3 things that a good HR suggests:

1.  A clear management structure,
2. A way for people to talk about workplace issues and concerns,
3. Pathways for people to evolve in their careers.

Next, you should think and understand how to perform relations for compensation. Compensation links people and lets them know how much they should reasonably be gaining. For instance, a mid-level engineer will know he/she comes in a certain range and a senior engineer in another. Furthermore, equality is also reflected and has a very influential segment for compensation. This aspect also suggested 'YC' company as they have data which implies that most successful companies give out a lot of equity. If you are a founder of a company then you should be informed that giving away 3-5% of your company each year for 10 years will keep your people stimulated. In order to success, you have to use several tips of HR:

1. Build a Diverse Team,
2.  Announce Offers,
3.  Structure On boarding,
4.  Build Paths for Early Employees.

Other concept to follow is surely company productivity. Obviously, the most difficult thing in business is to build a company which will have enough innovation that will interest people always (wherever and whenever). There is a popular issue, sometimes companies do very interesting things but in the systematic period after that, they just stop their innovative work.  Thus, great founders try to solve this problem. The lecturer mentioned that alignment is the reason why companies become unproductive as people are either not on the same page, or they do not understand the advantages. When you can keep the entire team joined in the same direction, you have won over half the battle.Start getting there with a very clear mission, roadmap, and goals. Everyone in the company should know what the roadmap is for the next 3–6 months or even a year. Therefore, here are several tips for the company to have long-term productivity:

1. Do Offsite,
2.  Get Legal Docs in Order,
3.  Start Doing Financial Planning and Analysis,
4.  Hire a Fundraiser,
5.  Pay Attention to Unit Economics,
6.  Watch Your Runway.

This also includes legal, finance, accounting, tax.

Moving to the next topic which is a founder psychology we will clarify another major part in developing your startup/company/business. The main concept in this is to decide how to neglect the haters. It is natural that while the company is growing you will have ups and sometimes downs. This cannot be missed by media and people who will try anyway to hurt and offense you. In this case, you should keep in mind that sometimes you need a rest for yourself. Sam Altman said that there are founders who go 3-4 years without thinking about rest. However, it is not that much useful and sometimes this process cannot last long and the someday day will just give up. Moreover, you should be focused and in this way you cannot stay concentrated. Thus, without concentration, you can lose your path to success. Hence, think before risking becoming troubled.

Do not forget about marketing and PR and get familiar with the important and influential journalists. Sam suggested choosing 3-4 journalists that you will develop good relationships. In this way, they will understand and support you. After such understanding actions, they will pay attention to your startup/company and care about of its reputation.

The final point is deal-making in business implies that evolution can start to value. While you’re growing into business development deals, you need to be sure that you are forming special connections with whomever you’re trying to do big deals with no matter when. Moreover, you need to consider that your actions set up competing situations. It is your basic principle of negotiation. This act most founders gain from fundraising.

In conclusion, no matter what keep your vision and be focused. The start is always difficult but by the time accepting all the mentioned methods above you will achieve success.