founder's mentality

Don’t get fooled by the insane outliers. It’s a long, slow road. But if you can stomach the wait, the embarrassment, and the frustration, you just might make it.

We all know “startups are hard,” but I think we tend to imagine that this difficulty is bounded, contained, modelable, a bit like running a marathon: yes, legs and lungs hurt, but that’s normal and appropriate, and we know the route, the distance, and that there’s a finish line. This is a kind of difficulty we can contend with without losing... See more

1. Momentum is a moat . As an optimistic entrepreneur, chief product officer focused on innovation, and especially as a leader of M&A for years, this is a lesson I have learned the hard way more times than I care to admit. When a product has escape velocity, it doesn’t even need to be the best product on the market to continue winning. This pains me

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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.

Founders are taught to possess enough faith to will whatever they’re working on into existence but are rarely reminded to worship anything but themself. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that they often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God — and we all know how that ends.

“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

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If you want to create something but feel it has already been done 1000 times, remember: There is always room for quality.