Michael Jordan on leadership, Sam Altman on what successful startups do differently, and the startup curve

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Michael Jordan on leadership

“I pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn't want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn't endure all the things that I endured.

Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game, and I wasn't gonna take anything less. Now if that meant I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that.

You ask all my teammates, "The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn't fucking do."

When people see this, they're gonna say, "Well, he wasn't really a nice guy, he may have been a tyrant."

Well, that's you. Because you never won anything.

I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well.

Look, I don't have to do this. I'm only doing it because it is who I am. That's how I played the game. That was my mentality.

If you don't wanna play that way, don't play that way.“

Source: The Last Dance by Netflix

2: Sam Altman on what successful startups do differently

“I get asked all the time how I can tell if a startup is going to do well during YC, and my answer to this is a two-part answer and the two words are focus and intensity.

The bad startups, when we see them every week, we talk about the same things and they're talking about all these different plans and making progress on none of them, so it's the same conversation, it's like Groundhog Day every week.

The best startups are incredibly focused on the one or two things that really matter right now and they do those things incredibly intensely.

We could have a conversation one week, we could agree on the two most important things for the startup to do, and then the next week when we meet again, not only did the startup do those two things but in the process they figured out all these other new things to do and they did those as well.

Bad startups talk about I'm going to do that next week, I'm going to do that next month, and good startups talk about I'm going to do that in the next hour and that other thing in the next four hours.

If you think about a startup as successive iteration and you can get 5% better every iteration, if every iteration is 4 hours that compounds really fast, if every iteration is two weeks it compounds much slower.“

Source: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI shares tips to Start a Startup

3: The startup curve

Source: Y Combinator

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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