When you build a product with 10k or 100k users, it’s a matter of skill. But when you are planning to build a product with 1 million or 10 million users, luck is a factor that one cannot neglect. During my short time of working at ByteDance (Gauth, TikTok), I caught glimpses of what the early days of the company looked like. However, as the company grew, the early product culture slowly diluted. What does it feel to have worked at such a company during the early days, and how does one go about finding such a company? This is the question that I’ve been repeatedly thinking about recently, and trying to figure out through writing this post.
“The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t start a social network company.” It doesn’t make sense to simply do a mapping of all the things that worked in the past and expect new billion dollar valuation companies to spin out of them. This task requires a more fundamental approach. I see this to be a continued work in progress, but will document ideas as they come along.
Be in the right hubs
By hubs I don’t necessarily mean you have to be in SF (I might be biased here), or clustered with all the other startups, just being in cities like New York, or in the Bay Area, or internationally in Beijing, Shanghai, puts you in a good position to come across these companies in unexpected places. I’ve personally encountered a number of people just by chance being in San Jose and Beijing. Although I haven’t quite spotted one that I’m set on, I think it only takes time until I do find one.
Find the right people
Aside from being in geographical proximity with startups, another way of finding the next great startup is by people. Smart people go off to build extraordinary things, so the easier approach would be just to find smart people. Here, I don’t necessarily mean smart in terms of getting 4.0 GPAs at school, or being the most senior at a company (though that is also a reflection of skill in some sense), but rather people who are actually capable of building valuable things or excelling in the level of depth in thinking when operating on seeminly unananimous tasks. Google, ByteDance, Stripe, and some other companies have been the center of talent for some while now, so I do see merit in working at these companies.
Building an investment thesis
Finding the next big startup to work at is no different from investing, you are investing your time and opportunity cost forgone at working at another high paying job. Another way I see this to work is build up your own thesis of what could truly revoluntionize (sorry I’m using this word here) a particular industry or way of doing things. I personally really like the phrase “technology changes quickly, humans change slowly”, instead of focusing on tech and media hype, I think focusing on evaluating the underlying needs met might be more effective. A product with PMF can scale much more easily than a product with good tech and money but no PMF.
WIP
6.13 - Other leading indicators - Ramp Top Saas Vendors.