The Article Every First-Time (And Failed) Entrepreneur Needs to Read

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and work insane hours on something you have no idea whether or not it will be successful

Sometimes the prize feels closer, other times farther away. Still other times it feels like we are drowning in aimlessness and exasperation. An identity crisis looms for any high achiever flirting with failure, and a calculation begins on the conflicting forces of sunk costs and lost time on the one hand, and reputational harm on the other. As entr... See more

In the short term a 1-of-1 purpose will almost always fail. Every day is yet another moment that people didn’t follow your vision and the world failed to transform according to your ideas. The failures are literally limitless.

With a longer view, however, this process looks different. Eighty straight days of struggling in the darkness can produce on... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

When you start a business even though you have nobody to look to for guidance. SISU

he research suggests something fundamentally hopeful: that periods of failure can be periods of growth, but only if we understand when to shift our work from exploration to exploitation. If you look around you at this very moment, you will see people in your field who seem wayward and unfocused, and you might assume they’ll always be that way. You ... See more

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.


2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short t

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I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to p... See more