founder's mentality
insights, articles, musings and resources to help founders and builders cultivate a healthy mindset and get unstuck
sari and
founder's mentality
“At both Viaweb and YC, every minute I spent thinking about competitors was, in retrospect, a minute wasted... It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility... Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more
... See moreBrave thing I heard in a board meeting this week: “I don’t know if we have a good answer to that, yet.”
Admitting you *don’t know* the answer is hugely productive. We’re trying to find, together, the important things we don’t know the answers to
Striking how rarely it is said
sarah guo // convictiontwitter.com
We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.
Bent Flyvbjerg • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
Because of how much we deify the great entrepreneurs of our time, we end up inevitably comparing our new company
John Koenig • Edward Lando
Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
David Bayles • 3 highlights
amazon.com
Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then conducting a post-mortem, conduct a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong then using the power of hindsight to deduce the likeliest reason it went wrong.
Gurwinder • 30 Useful Concepts (Spring 2024)
the teams best positioned to endure a bold journey are those in which the benefits from the sensation of progress outweigh the costs of working amidst uncertainty, anonymity, and anxiety.
if progress is a sufficient reward, you can be losing for a long time and still win.
scott belskytwitter.comI look at product as an act of, how does this get communicated through the distribution channel we need to use. Said another way: if this product doesn't make a pretty compelling social ad -> we ain't doing it.