Building 0-1

💡 30 Ideas as we wrap @beondeck's 19th Cohort 💡 Here are 30 ideas about founders, startups, San Francisco, sales, fundraising, and more taken from the second half of the program — sourced from fellows, guests, and me (blame me for the ones you disagree with most vehemently… Show more

A genuine interest in something is a very powerful motivator — for some people, the most powerful motivator of all. [3] Which is why it's what Jessica and I look for in founders.

I think the mistake too many entrepreneurs make is they start companies assuming they have scale. We’ve seen no scale, we’ve seen hyperscale, and what we realized was what we have to do is we have to start with that utility and the best networks. I didn’t realize Chris wrote that post, but I should maybe in the back of my mind that’s what I was... See 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... See more

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 fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal... See more

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune.

The goal of newthing is to live as long as possible while staying true. The longer it does this, the stronger and more itself it will become.