Startup Advice

Choose Your Reason and Season Wisely

Some entrepreneurs build businesses for a compelling, undeniable, passion-fueled reason regardless of their venture’s timeline. Others hop on a bandwagon or try to master a trend and either sink or swim in one short season. Rather than try to compete with a herd of rats who are already decades ahead of you in an... See more

Projects rarely unfold in a linear fashion; they require frequent course correction. Most trainees should spend more time on a project’s decision tree than they currently do. Once you get into a project, you will have learned from your initial experiments, new papers will have been published, and technology will have advanced. As a result, at any... See more

ON SMALL TEAMS

Impressive things accomplished by small teams:

• Instagram had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. They had 30 millions users at the time.


• Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. At that time, Mojang had revenue of about $290 million

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A PM I once worked with was struggling to persuade somebody of something. I told him to ask them the question, “What data would I have to show you to get you to change your mind?” If they didn’t have a clear answer, then he would know this was an idea they held on faith, a bit like a religious belief. No amount of data can sway a person from their... See more

As a founder, there will come a point where your backs against the wall, runway is short, and you’ve got to fight for your companies survival.

Every founder has been there. Always look to have another move in your back pocket for when you need it. Ben Horowitz has walked the walk on this — here he is answering why he made the unpopular decision to... See more

Being original is always the best strategy. We now live in a world where every day there are hundreds of companies launching or redefining themselves. Brand is no longer a secret and the process to create one has been codified

It can help to reverse the polarity of our relationship with new ideas. We often treat them with reverence; before long, confirmation bias sets in and we begin looking for reasons why they will succeed and ignoring evidence suggesting they might fail. A common failure mode is to jump on the first idea and get started—this is probably the worst... See more

1. The 7 sources of power:
   
   
   1. Brand: Your unique brand identity attracts and retains a significant number of customers.
   
   
   2. Process power: You can produce something more efficiently than competitors, and the competitors can’t easily copy the method.
   
   
   3. Cornered resource: You have exclusive access to a vital resource, such as the only rights to a patent.
   
   

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