Startup Advice

The hardest transition as a founder is going from working directly on the product to not. There’s this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it’s done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.

The result of this garage-centered approach to entrepreneurship was a business paradigm that looks liked this:

In the above model, notice how the product is at the center of the company, and all the work and effort of building the actual business is focused on marketing the product.

Steve Jobs gave one of his best interviews about building products back in 1995. Anyone who wants to craft amazing products should watch it. Here are 9 quotes from Jobs that really resonated with me:

But I will say, the thing I try to ask people to do is really take some time to introspect and just ask yourself, do you actually want to be here? If you could magically wave a magic wand and you were to start a new company right now, would it be this one? If it's not, there's no indentured servitude anymore. It's okay. It's okay to move on. And... See more

Don’t confuse people rooting for you with market signal

On some level, all founders suffer from “happy ears”—the chronic confirmation bias pervading conversations with customers, partners, team members, and investors. We tend to have irrational levels of confidence anyway, but that gets compounded when we mistake support for market signal. Most... See more