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.
tuition on someone else’s dime
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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.”
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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.
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Guy Kawasaki in “Art of the Start”
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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.
(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!).
Nail it before you scale it
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
His scarcest resource was his youth and the energy he had to put into startup ventures when he has no kids, no mortgage and no major encumbrances.
Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. But if everybody is looking for me to make their decisions we’ll never get anything done. I felt like I had done the hard bit and chosen people that I truly respected and I would rather empower them to make decisions and accept consequences.
We don’t pay you to work here—we pay you so you can work here.
