Top 5 Learnings After Mentoring 100 Startups
3. Learn to think independently
Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.
Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchang... See more
Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite. So you have to cultivate it on your own.
Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchang... See more
Sam Altman • How to Be Successful
The ability to learn from those missteps is what distinguishes a successful startup from those whose names are forgotten among the vanished.
Steve Blank • The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
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
If you... See more
Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
you may want to find a business mentor, someone who has been through the startup grind before.
Steve Blank • The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
All unsuccessful startups are alike; each successful startup is successful in its own way.
Matt Rickard • The Contrarian Strategy of OpenAI
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
- Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
- 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
blog.samaltman.com • What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
As a mentor or an adviser to several start-ups, I have seen more than one team fail to find its first customer or secure external funding because it focused on finding answers that didn’t exist instead of pivoting when necessary.