How Love Lets You Scale — with Y Combinator's Sam Altman

The startup world has its own unique vocabulary, filled with acronyms, slang, and colorful phrases. An uninitiated listener would be understandably confused by a founder enthusiastically exclaiming, “We're crushing it! Our lower CAC proves that the dogs are eating the dog food!*” But the core prerequisite for scaling a new company is a common, simple, and universal word: Love.

Building products people love is at the heart of the philosophy that Sam Altman advocates at the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Since 2005, YC has worked with nearly 1,600 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox and many more.

In this week's episode of Masters of Scale, Sam explains why it's so important to make something that's loved, even if by only a small group of people. In fact, it's better to have 100 people who love you than 1 million who just like you. You'll hear why Sam believes that there are two kinds of blitzscaling—hard and easy—and how love is the key to making it onto that easier path. You'll also learn why, paradoxically, love makes it easier to start a hard company (like Boom, a YC company that is making a supersonic airliner), and harder to start an easy company (like a dating app).

Along the way, Sam explains how he ended up fighting an imaginary enemy with an actual antique sword from the Bronze Age while interviewing an entrepreneur, and reveals the one possession of Jeff Bezos that Sam really wishes he had.

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As always, I'd like to hear your thoughts and reactions to this episode. What are the products you love so much that you tell other people about them? How did you find your first group of passionate, devoted users?

Please write a short post on your LinkedIn newsfeed to share your answers with the wider community. Tag your post #mastersofscale so I can find it. And if you’d like, Tweet it at me (@ReidHoffman) and @MastersOfScale.

* Silicon Valley jargon translator:

• “Crushing it” = “Performing well” (popularized by Gary Vaynerchuk)
• “CAC” = “Customer Acquistion Cost”
• “the dogs are eating the dog food” = “end users are adopting the product”