Starting small, choosing projects, and hiring

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: Niche Down to Scale Up

Peter Thiel: “Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.”

• Amazon started with books

• PayPal started with eBay power-sellers

• Facebook started with Harvard students

• Airbnb started by renting air mattresses

• Tesla started with high-end electric sports cars

“You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem… large existing markets typically mean you have tons of competition and it’s very hard to differentiate.”

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia: “Start by solving your own problem, even if for a small market at the beginning.”

Monopolize a niche. Expand concentrically from there.

Source: Competition is For Losers (h/t: Brian Ji)

2: On Choosing Projects

Sam Altman: “Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on.

It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours.

It’s better to take your time and find the project that, ‘if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.’”

Naval Ravikant: "People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing. What you work on is more important than how hard you work.”

Source: Sam Altman YC Interview

3: On Hiring

Jeff Bezos: “I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone, than hire the wrong person.”

Brad Jacobs: “An empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit”

Mark Zuckerberg: “I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person.”

Marc Andreessen: “I look for something you’ve done, either in a job or (often better yet) outside of a job. The business you started and ran in high school. The nonprofit you started and ran in college. If you’re a programmer: the open source project to which you’ve made major contributions. Something.”

Steve Jobs: “You’d take a lot of time finding the parter, right? They would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30% of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.”

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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