Early Stage AI Startups

If you’re here from the lecture, welcome! Slides are available here and are released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Add me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to chat about AI, startups, and the future of technology.

Reading List

In general, I recommend Y Combinator’s Early Stage Advice. A few hours reading through it is time well spent.

For sales and marketing, especially for high-tech products, read Magical Selling.

Other lectures in this area that you might find useful:

• Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel
• YCombinator YouTube Channel for a treasure trove of startup wisdom

For the startup stages and taxonomy:

• The Six Startup Stages
• The Startup J Curve
• Y Combinator’s Startup Stages

For VC funding:

• AngelList power-law post
• Skalata.VC venture return post
• Venture Deals for the inner workings of VCs and term sheets
• Sequoia Capital’s leaked YouTube investment memo, for an inside look at how VCs think about investments

For customer discovery, product-market fit, and eventually scaling:

• Mastering the Hype Cycle
• Crossing the Chasm
• Inside the Tornado

For a general overview of AI in business:

• My AI Platforms Lecture, including open-source as a defensive and offensive maneuver
• This CGP Grey video
• Sizes of LLMs

Saving the most important for last, how to think:

• Chesterton’s Fence, or in short: “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
• S.M.A.R.T Goals
• The Gervais Principle, for an explanation of office politics.
• The Men Who Killed Google, for how overreliance on metrics (rather than product quality) leads to short-term gains at the cost of long-term goals.

As always, turn your critical thinking skills on and carefully engage with the claims each source makes. To quote Bertrand Russell:

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.