Matthew Giampetroni

Firms should invest in innovation while cutting losses when a strategy is unlikely to pay off. This is an explicit recognition of the value of quitting

Start-ups of any kind are awash in ambiguity. It’s the founder’s responsibility to hold that ambiguity for everyone, which is often a lonely job.

Speculative investment, with ambitious but inexact expectations of financial return, is important fuel for founders who build the unknown future. However, investors and operators are often deeply misaligned: investors think in bets, while operators think in consequences. The relationship is tense, but can be explosively productive.

A pseudosecret is a narrative about a next-order effect within your company its path towards world domination, and the future you believe in. It’s not the most obvious narrative, but is often the most important.

Beyond deliberately architecting the people who surround you, the best way to control your mindset is to “own” the way you speak to yourself, what sports psychologists call your “self-talk”

People on the outside sometimes wonder why businesses with so few traditional assets seem to require so much financing. Well, they  are  accumulating assets: users are the new assets, and their  use  is what you’re out to monetize.Whatever your business model is, acquiring users is the new building factories.