4. Paying Attention to Details: It's All in the Details

Gilman Louie, a partner at Alsop Louie Partners, discusses decision making, which details matter when starting and growing a business, and venture capital conventional wisdom.

With over a century and a half of venture capital experience and many more years of practice in entrepreneurship, the teaching team and guest lecturers for this student initiated course cover the fundamentals for building a successful company. While there is no set formula for building a great company, basic principles and general patterns are manifested in the most successful start-ups.

Stanford University:

Management Science and Engineering at Stanford:

Stanford University Channel on YouTube:

[crazyhead]

3 mins in, I like this guy already. Have watched 3 lacklustre videos this evening, this is getting me back into the mood

[JosephPattersonNRM]

Gilman Louie, I watch this video almost everyday. Your lecture provides the best advice and insights into starting and growing a business! I love your brutal honesty!

[kyoungd]

Thank you, Mr Gilman. This lecture rocks. A lot of direct usable information to measure, perform and excel.
Thanks again, Stanford for sharing these awesome information.

[Jasmine_Rose-]

1. Data Driven (Get the Data)
2. Most entrepreneurs do not know how to ask the right questions
3. The big mistake is most entrepreneurs only focus on their own customers
4. Measure your competition and not only your customers
5. the further you can understand beyond what your competitor understands you win
6. Gain angles on competition- Make quicker decisions based on observation than my opponent you will always gain angles
7. Outperform your competition

[Feverish_Pitch]

Maybe the best startup video I saw this year

[shiningc]

What most entrepreneurs do when they found a start-up is, besides not understanding the market and the business world, only thinking about "myself" and not realizing that there is a HUGE social responsibility of being an employer - it is a responsibility to your employee AND the family members whose survival depend on them! Employees are not machines that you can throw away when you don't need them!

[cutiex]

I learnt all the things that doesn't matter at uni, business major 😜 haha, especially the business plan, even had to write assignment about it.. 😂. Thank you for this presentation!! Learnt so much!!

[richliv]

Good advice I think this will help me startup in Africa. I hope I get some more tech advice

[TmTylr]

I am at minute 3 and allready loving it.

[ShesSkyLove]

really detailed and to the point, thanks

[sureshp-bo]

1. Data Driven (Get the Data)
2. Most entrepreneurs do not know how to ask the right questions
3. The big mistake is most entrepreneurs only focus on their own customers
4. Measure your competition and not only your customers

[dimit]

This presentation should be watched by young associates in M&A departments in Big theory applied to young career starters :D

[NianLi]

For the last question at the end of this video:
PartA: What number should they use to tell the investor? Of course the growth... Growth means everything for startup. If they cannot grow, no matter how fantastic numbers (revenue, margins etc.) they have now, they won't get the fund. If the VC cannot see the hope of the company, why don't they just invest in Apple? VC don't wanna double or triple their money in the next 5 years, they want 100x!
PartB: What number should they use to tell Apple to keep their product in the front page? They need to tell what kind of profit (watching hours, new customers etc.) they have brought to Apple TV? Youtube is only like 15 min per session, but we got 1 hour session on average. And what would be the optimization we will do to make it even better, to project the future value that our company will bring to Apple.
PartC: What number to check internally to decide either to sell the company or keep going. This is a tricky question in my opinion, and it is very subjective. For Mark Zuckerberg, he cares nothing but to connect everyone. No number matters to him to sell Facebook! If I really have to say the number, I would answer the cash in your balance -- whether your company will bankrupt in the near future and whether you can get the fund or not. The typical example was Tesla in mid-2017 to mid-2018. It was the hardest time of Tesla and they nearly bankrupted.

[jordan]

6 years later feel like a lot of the principals he mentions are still relevant !

[sininetulnukas]

It seems to me that You forgot the fact that engineers can have a thought that they should not maintain a highly paid CEO with their hard labor, specially if the CEO is paid more than the engineers. Formally it's Your company, You do what You want, but that does not wipe out the feeling of injustice and the result is that You will just receive friendly resignations with some formal excuse about "the need to move on" or something similar. Of course You have the option to be naive and think that if a person is really talented at engineering, sales, etc. then he/she is dumb enough to not care bout his own income and not to notice that someone else, a new management hire, is getting a huge compensation at the expense of the talented person's hard labor. Good luck to You guys with that kind of old-fashioned line of thinking!

[kovisualeyesst]

Good presentation, but aren't those Japanese Samurai in the illustration and wasn't Sun Tsu Chinese?

[chanthien]

Why were there so much noise in the background?!
And the girl at around 14m left and didn't look interested.

Just a few minutes in, and I already think that this is a good presentation.
Why these people don't seem to appreciate it?!

[shiningc]

This is great for beginners/Bambi's survival in the Jungle.
For artists, these points are all way too simple, and I don't believe a person can understand how to execute them.
BTW most of his teaching is teaching you to be the next Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs. If your goal is to earn money, this lecture will do. If you want more, PLEASE JUST LOOK INTO YOUR INTUITION and read "Freedom, Inc." (the author of "Freedom, Inc." advised me not to enroll in any business school - he is right!)

[theamici]

these lectures are a bit long, I think everyone would've gained something by keeping it to 30-35 minutes, and then rather make 2 lectures that follow each other. Especially when the lectures are so intense.

[lebasson]

Am I the only one cringing at that constant mouse cursor?