8 Steps to Starting a Start-Up

Posted inEntrepreneurship17 Comments on 8 Steps to Starting a Start-Up

As good as a list as I've seen from VentureHacks:

  1. Move to Silicon Valley. [BC: Not mandatory]

  2. Pick a great co-founder with complementary skills.

  3. Select people with intelligence, energy and integrity.

  4. Pick a big market.

  5. Develop the minimum viable product to test your hypothesis about what the market needs. Preferably it’s a product that you’re passionate about since you’ll need to stick with it to an irrational point (the Internet especially is efficiently arbitraged).

  6. Iterate like crazy until you find product/market fit. If you don’t find it, do not raise money, do not pass go. Start over.

  7. If you have found product/market fit, raise money from high-quality people that you trust. Keep control.

  8. Scale. Hang on.

The links within the list are good as well.

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  • Interview with Australian teen who had a party when his parents were out of town and refuses to apologize on TV.
  • Clint Eastwood lists three reasons why he will never win an Oscar.
  • Chris Yeh comment on my post on interestingness: "Things are interesting when they are both novel yet strangely familiar. It's like when you meet a new person, yet it seems like you've known them forever."
  • Interesting photo project of strangers touching each other.
  • Mexico's conflicting interests when it comes to the drug trade. Another masterful analysis from Stratfor.
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Know Yourself: Principal or Lieutenant?

Posted inSports8 Comments on Know Yourself: Principal or Lieutenant?

"Know yourself" includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Many entrepreneurs I know think of themselves as CEO material. Generic ambition points to the top. But not everyone is best suited for the top job all the time, even if they are sufficiently capable.

You are not either a principal or lieutenant. Teams and circumstances vary. Part of being a good team player is knowing your role within the team. Most of the time I find myself a principal / CEO, but there is at least one area where I excel and enjoy more a lieutenant role: basketball.

My sophomore year of high school and the spring league immediately thereafter was the peak of my basketball career. That year I started on the varsity team. I was a key contributor but a senior was the undisputed team leader. He was a talented player. Together, we worked well, and in a supporting role I consistently racked up 10-20 points a game. That spring I played in the Slam N Jam Development League in East Oakland. Our team consisted of a handful mid-major D1 college basketball prospects. I was probably the weakest on the team in terms of athleticism and skill, but I banged around down low, contributed 3-4 buckets each game, played good help defense, moved well without the ball, and helped communicate coach's instructions on-court. I was a solid role player on a thuggish team of athletic stars.

At most other points in my playing career I was the (or one of a couple) go-to guys. My final two years of high school ball I was a co-captain and more responsible for scoring and winning. Yet, I never felt I performed at my peak level, and our team results, despite one regional playoff birth, were mediocre. For example, I thrived offensively when I could get the ball well-positioned on the block for either a back-to-the-basket post move or a face-the-basket shot or spin. For this to work the guard with the rock needs to know how to pass and be well-spaced, the other post players need to be well-spaced, and everyone else needs to move to get open in the case of a double team. If all this happened and I had my shit together, I was effective. Otherwise, I wasn't good enough to make things happen on my own. On the defensive end, I was skilled at rotating and moving and orally coordinating a man-to-man help defense framework. This relies on the whole team moving in concert. But I was not capable of "shutting someone down" or playing intense in-your-face defense on their best player up and down the court. Finally, I didn't care enough about the sport to lead by example on the "killer instinct" front which is what "the guy" is supposed to do on a team.

By the way, this is just one example of a broader life lesson you can learn from playing sports….

Bottom Line: "Know yourself" includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Teams are most effective when each player knows his role.

(thanks to Andy McKenzie for his feedback)

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The Mind as a River

Posted inBooks9 Comments on The Mind as a River

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be….

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.

— Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War, page 22.

Here’s Greene on John Boyd’s OODA loop and why speed is the critical element of winning strategies. Of those who win in ruthless times: “We can think fast, let go of the need to control everything, stay close to the environment in which we operate (the streets, our clients), and experiment.”

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So Good It’s Bad

Posted inWriting7 Comments on So Good It’s Bad

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. 'Solar,' the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad…. The performance is an exquisite bore, with all the overchoreographed dullness of a touring ice ballet cast with off-season Olympic skaters.

That's Walter Kirn reviewing Ian McEwan's new book. There is a whole category of art and people who fall into the "so excellent it's dull" category. "She's too nice," was a complaint Jerry had about one of his girlfriends in Seinfeld.

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In Jeremy Denk's review of Netherland, he referred to "a sentence so stupefyingly boring that I fell asleep three times while typing it into my computer and had to wipe the drool thrice lovingly off my mousepad."

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