founder's mentality
insights, articles, musings and resources to help founders and builders cultivate a healthy mindset and get unstuck
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founder's mentality
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
Clayton M. Christensen • 3 highlights
amazon.com
I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
Dan Rosetwitter.comThere is a difference between moving fast and rushing.
You can move fast and be thoughtful. When you rush, you sacrifice thoughtfulness.
Conversely, when you are thoughtful but not moving fast, you are overthinking it. Procrastination in disguise.
Don’t rush, but... See more
James Cleartwitter.comThe best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook:
nametwitter.comThe good stuff is always lonely in the beginning. Nothing meaningful will get made if its potential makers all wimp out too soon, because they get scared by the sparse crowd, the empty room.
Robin Sloan • A Year of New Avenues
Get customers to talk about their problems, not your product.
Scott Belsky • Talent Density, Feeling Special as a Service, Moving Past Prompts, and Product Leadership.
“Instead of finding the product through discovery and iteration the goal is to reverse engineer the vision,” he explains. “If you take an incremental, discovery-led approach, then you might find yourself with product-market fit in a local maximum, building a company that you don’t want to lead.”
Matt Walton • Case study: Sana's vision
work from the vision backwards