Tech Startups in a Nutshell

0:00 Airbnb, Uber, FTX. Besides exploitation and ruining society, what do these companies have in common? They're tech startups. You see the hype on Twitter. You see these logos everywhere. You see how dumb tech startup CEOs are. And you start wondering, maybe I should start a tech company. And given the state of the job market, it's better than doing nothing. Every good startup starts with a visionary con artist, otherwise known as a CEO. But in tech, it's called a founder. So, your first step is to think like a founder. Remember, you're not unemployed. You're a CEO. All great tech founders have one thing in common, a Patagonia vest and an ego the size of a JavaScript bundle. At this stage, forget everything you know about programming. Your job isn't to be useful. Right now, you should focus all your energy on posting random quotes on Twitter. And if anyone asks what your company does, say

0:45 you're in stealth mode. Back in the day, when being a CEO actually meant something, you needed to have experience at big companies, domain expertise, and maybe a degree from a real school. But as a tech startup founder, all you really need to do is post quotes on LinkedIn. Call yourself a 0ero to1 thinker and watch a few videos from the Y Combinator YouTube channel. Before buying that AI domain and starting your GPT rapper Grift, you need to pick a target victim. Sorry, I meant a market segment. And there are two very broad markets. One is where you scam millions of people $1 at a time. This is called business to consumer. Think of ethical giants like we work, Facebook, Amazon. If you can get $1 from 10 million people, that's $10 million. and potentially a Senate hearing. Another great market is scamming entire companies. This is called businessto business. The beauty of B2B is that

1:31 companies don't spend money, they spend budget. And budget is monopoly money that disappears every quarter. So they'll happily pay $40,000 a year for your AI text to speech converter as long as you call it an enterprisegrade linguistic enablement suite. Most of the time, you don't even need to build an original product. All you have to do is take something in the real world and make a bad clone. Like look at Slack. It's Discord but worse. and it got acquired for 27 billion. All right, now that you have a Patagonia vest, some cloud on Twitter, a few buzzwords memorized, you need money to get this going. Now, repeat after me. The first rule of startups is that we will not make money. You see, if you just started a software company and it made money, that wouldn't be a startup. That would just be a business. And with a business, all you can do is provide a decent life for yourself and your family. But you don't want that. You signed up to be

2:17 supreme leader of the free world. You know at heart you're a founder/ CEO/TEX speaker. Now at this point you might be thinking wait we haven't even written a line of code or built an actual product. And this is exactly why you're not a founder. The most important things in startups aren't good ideas, profitability models or industry experience. It's PowerPoint slides. You need to get out there and find the greatest designer from India or Indonesia and get them to make the best PowerPoint ever. Then you can convince a bunch of people in suits to give you money based on your Twitter club. Based on evolutionary science, these people are a new breed of leeches known as venture capitalists. They'll give you real money based on imaginary shares, and then they'll call themselves business experts. Venture capitalists complete the first layer in your triangle of startups, which might

3:03 resemble an MLM or a Ponzi scheme, but you can call it innovation. Now that you're loaded with cash, you have an idea, you can finally start building. But remember, you don't have to do anything. You have an idea, money in the bank, and an ego that can convince enough people to work for less than minimum wage. You see those imaginary shares you sold earlier, you can now give them to employees as options. And this completes your third layer of the pyramid. Now, with these options, you have to give them some motivation so they forget they have a life outside of work. So they can do all the real work like engineering, design, and support while you go on podcasts talking about your recent multi-million dollar funding round. And don't focus on real numbers like revenue, profitability, but some absolutely random madeup acronyms you've pulled out of nowhere like DAO, WOW, CAC. And here's a bonus tip. If anyone

3:50 asks what your tech stack is, just say serverless microservices on Kubernetes. And in case you ever run out of money, just go convince some more suits continuing the pyramid. And if they aren't convinced, shut the whole thing down. Post a photo of yourself crying on LinkedIn, blame market conditions, and say you're taking some time off for personal growth. Now, although picking a name for your startup might be hard, picking an app for everyday learning is made so simple, thanks to the sponsor of today's video, brilliant.org. Brilliant is an online learning platform with excellent courses on science and math. Learning a little everyday is the simplest way to grow, and Brilliant makes that easy. Their courses are built around problem solving and not boring memorization. Brilliant has the perfect mix of fun problems, challenges, and habit forming loops that keep you coming back. Thanks to their mobile app, I've replaced mindless scrolling with fun,

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