Startups

The 3 W's of Business: What - is the problem you are solving? Who - is the customer that needs this? Where - are they so you can market to them? That's it.

If you notice something at your company below standards and don't fix it or make sure someone else does, you have set a new standard. Complaining about it does not count as fixing it. If someone gets upset/tells you to stay in your lane, they've set an even worse new standard.

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it take off, but it's hard to say which ones.

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: