Building 0-1

A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.

A lot of advice I gave this batch was some version of noticing that one thing the company was doing was working, and encouraging them to prune everything else and focus on that one thing. For example, it's reasonable to try 5 different ways to get users, but if one of them works… Show more

One of our theories is to seek out opportunities where there’s a major change. Major dislocation in the way things are. Wherever there’s turmoil, there's indecision. And wherever there’s indecision, there’s opportunity. So we look for the confusion when the big companies are confused. When the other venture groups are confused. That’s the time to s... See more

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).

That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation

Startups often assume their better funded competitors are doing well, which leads to dogmatically chasing/copying #1 if you’re #2+ #2 tries to catch up to #1 by running the same way but faster. It’s often the case #1 is headed in the wrong direction, and now #2+ is too

Q: Is it better to target a small market or a large one? In the clip below, Peter Thiel (billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) describes his framework for evaluating markets: “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s… Show more

The future is self-employed New businesses formed in the US 🚀 2019: 3.5 million 2020: 4.4 million 2021: 5.4 million 2022: 5.1 million Only about 1/3rd of the applications filed in 2021 are for businesses deemed likely to hire employees Majority are self employed Source:… Show more

Non consensus approaches to picking businesses