“If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.” — Paul Graham in a 2005 Essay “How to Start a Startup”
“tuition on someone else’s dime” — Chris Fralic of First Round Capital talking about a hypothetical situation of raising $10 million, failing, and starting another company and doing it again. The point I took away from his anecdote was that failure doesn’t prevent you from going out and trying again. Future investors look at your failure as just “tuition on someone else’s dime.”
5 Reasons Your Startup Should Teach Everyone to Code
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There are two theories in hiring people:
• Find the candidate who lacks major weaknesses (but doesn’t have major strengths).
• Find the candidate who has major strengths (even though he has major weaknesses).
The first line of reasoning is flawed because everyone has major weaknesses…the second line of reasoning is the way to go.
” — Guy Kawasaki in “Art of the Start”
Vital Statistics
When: September 9th - 12th, 2010
Where: Bloomington, Indiana
What: “The Combine is a display of talent, entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s an event about tech, specifically the people, ideas and environments that drive technology.”
Featured Speakers: See below
Ticket price as of writing: $199 (buy yours)
Lucky for you, the guys at SproutBox love the town of Bloomington, Indiana, and work hard and pull their connections to draw some of the internet’s top innovators closer to home.
For the first time, they’ve put together a technology conference in Indiana that startup founders are excited to go to. It’s called the Combine and is designed in the spirit of another “midwest” conference called Big Omaha. Since you’ve probably never heard of that either, just picture all the talent, creativity, and innovation of SXSW, but in a setting where you can spend some time getting to know interesting people, instead of spending all your time fighting the throngs of people.
Just check out the lineup of this year’s speakers. Did you ever think you’d find a group of people like this just an hour south of downtown Indianapolis? And I wouldn’t be surprised if they added more before the event.
The price might seem steep to all of you starving founders trying to make something happen, but I promise you there isn’t a better value this close to home.
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“Feedback is important, selling is important, getting the market to recognize your offering and make a sale—all important. But there’s a difference between achieving your goals and realizing your work matters.” — Seth Godin ”Validation is Overrated“
“(Founders) spend so much of their time trying to convince everyone around them that their idea is great and the company is doing well: employees, investors, partners, friends, family, significant others - it’s a long list. But when they go to sleep at night, who’s there to convince them that they are making progress? My experience is that many founders actually have a deep anxiety that maybe they are not succeeding. Sure, they are keeping everyone busy, but are they really working on the right things? A marketing launch is a temporary salve for these kinds of worries. Plus, it gives you something you can send home to mom (hi, mom!).” — Eric Ries on why we want press coverage and why and when we should fight that urge.
Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”
The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”
This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.