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Life & fun · November 5, 2015

Startup Playbook

Written by Sam Altman & Illustrated by Gregory Koberger

Startup Playbook launched on November 5, 2015 with 164 votes, #154 of 4,110 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.

What it does

To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea, a great market, a great team, a great product, and great execution.

We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies. This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written—the goal is to get it into one place. There may be a part II on how to scale a startup later—this mostly covers how to start one. Your goal as a startup is to make something users love. If you do that, then you have to figure out how to get a lot more users. But this first…from playbook.samaltman.com

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