Startup Advice

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the companies that have a reputation for building the best products of this generation—Slack, Figma, Superhuman, Notion, and Linear—are basically new versions of successful predecessors. These companies didn’t distract themselves with four-step strategic maneuvers or clever wedges into a new category that they... 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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Complicated problems have a solution, and the solution can often be found by breaking the complicated portions into smaller pieces.

And complicated problems often have an emotional component, because there are parts of the problem we don’t want to look at closely, or deal with personally.

If you’re lucky enough to be handed a complicated problem,... 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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