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
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
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
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
The best analogy I’ve heard for startups is that they’re like looking for gold.
Not because of the adventure, or the camaraderie, or the riches awaiting you on the other end.
But because a gold-seeking expedition has two very different phases: first, you look for gold; then, you build a mine. And startups are really in the business of doing the forme... See more
Not because of the adventure, or the camaraderie, or the riches awaiting you on the other end.
But because a gold-seeking expedition has two very different phases: first, you look for gold; then, you build a mine. And startups are really in the business of doing the forme... See more