Find Your 9others

The hard thing about hard things: Building a business when there are no easy answers by Ben Horowitz (2014)

What 9others does – and what we believe any good sounding board for founders should do – is provide a place where people can both listen and be listened to.

Becks Armstrong

Respond quickly to people you care about. The aim should be immediately, the default within 24 hours.

gives you something to put in front of people, to tell them your mission and ask, ‘What do you think?’ Once you discover that stuff, there will of course be technology to build to make it more efficient and help you scale, but you don’t need to have all that to get people behind you. To get people interested, you just need to act.

Most people/founders want to do something they enjoy, earn good money and decide what to do with their time. I genuinely think VC is one of the worst ways to achieve those

What do I expect of myself on a daily basis? It doesn’t need to be a lot (in fact, it shouldn’t be), and it doesn’t need to be impressive; it just needs to be honest. What are the things that you know you can do that will make each day resonate so you feel fulfilled?

As a final word, this isn’t to dismiss high standards. Your standards should still be high, and you should always try to do the best you possibly can. But this is relative to your size, what you’re creating and how you’re presenting it. If you’re showing a paper prototype of an app, then of course it will be simple, but it needn’t also be ugly and

Rule 5: Off the record We adhere to the ‘Chatham House Rule’, i.e., people share whatever they’re comfortable sharing in the room, and people are free to share points made in the discussion, but not to reveal who made any particular comment. Everyone explicitly agrees to this rule at a dinner, and it helps build trust in the room.