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Gustaf Alströmer: evaluation

2 Mar 2023 Lenny's Podcast Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb)

“When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much a strategy as about.”

— Gustaf Alströmer

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Speaker
Gustaf Alströmer
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
2 Mar 2023
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Tough gig this founder life. You got to got to be everything. Let's see if there's a big difference in this next one. Execution and tactics versus focusing on strategy and kind of higher level stuff. How deep do founders go that you find that are most successful? Gustaf Alströmer So this one actually I have a strong opinion about. I think that the reason that we talk about strategy a lot is because it goes back to business school. The origin of business school was to teach people to join the corporate world. And in the corporate world, strategy matters, right? So when you join a big company, you're employee number 2,010 or something, then you probably might have a business school job where thinking about corporate strategy is an important thing. When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much a strategy as about. Maybe later on you might be fruitful to think about strategy, but strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small startups cannot. They can just do one thing at the same time. So execution is the thing that matters for companies. Whenever someone wants to have a strategy conversation, it assumes that they don't understand their priorities. The priorities is always a list from top to bottom where there's one thing that's more important than the others. You can't really have a strategy session about the other things because there's only one thing to work on. So to me, a clear answer here is the good founders are execution-oriented and they just continually have one priority of what they're trying to go for. And then they're just hitting that priority all the time and then new priorities will come up and you don't really have time to have a discussion about company strategy. Company strategy also assumes that you have product market fit because you already have something that's working. If you don't have that, then getting to people wanting your product, that is your strategy. You don't have any other strategy. Awesome. Okay. We found one that's quite different one on the spectrum or the other. How about autocratic and kind of like, I don't know, I think of Steve Jobs-like versus kind of consensus, collaborative driven, if this is a spectrum at all. And then where do you find founders might fit that are most successful?…

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