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#unfiltered #35 How Do You Know When You Click?

Over the weekend, my friend and I had this fascinating conversation about how we found our other friends. I know, metaphysical, nerdy even. But nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it. She posed the question: “Is it just based on how long you’ve known each other? And how often you see each other?” For most of my life, I would have said yes. Classmates that became friends were people I met and could chat with over lunch or after school. The same is true for colleagues. And strangers. Some happened exceedingly fast – within 24 hours. Others have taken over half a year before we “warmed up” to each other.

Unsurprisingly, it gave birth to the question: At what point does an acquaintance become a friend?

The PMF parallel

To be honest, I didn’t have a good answer then, nor do I have one now. Part of the reason I’m sharing this is to open up dialogue and draw inspiration from you, my readers.

Pushing up my glasses, which I’ve got to get a new pair (open to any recommendations), I couldn’t but analogize it to startups finding product-market fit.

How do founders know when they hit product-market fit? The TL;DR version: when you’re too busy to even ponder if you have product-market fit. Or simply, you’ll know it when you have it. For the longer, less nebulous answer, I recommend checking out Lenny Rachitsky’s piece on it, and some of other essays I’ve written on the topic:

Or as Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, says:

“Product-market fit isn’t when your customers stop complaining, it’s when they stop leaving.”

Some more examples include, when:

  • You’re focused on upgrading your servers rather than acquiring customers.
  • There’s so much demand, you’re writing “I’m sorry” and “Not yet” emails to your customers who are asking when can they get off the waitlist.
  • Laggards on the adoption curve start using your product and saying wow. In Airbnb’s case, that was Joe Gebbia‘s mom using the product.
  • There are handwritten love letters in your office mailbox.
  • Customers are asking how they can pay (more) for your product.
  • You’re feeling the pull of the market rather than pushing your product in front of people.

Friends

On a similar note, when the entropy of a relationship and the subsequent conversations break into an impetuous nature that eclipses the inciting reason for the relationship, you might have something going. Or in simpler words, you can’t stop the momentum of the relationship. “What about this?” “Let’s do that!” “Ahhh, not enough time!” Of course, as all relationships go, it takes two to tango. Just like product-market fit, when you don’t have it, it’s not obvious what you need to do make it click. But when you do have person-person fit, everything makes sense. And quite obvious, in retrospect.

While the above was my answer on Sunday, I’m not completely sold it’s the end all, be all. And as I continue to find new sparks and rekindle old flames, I’m sure I will learn more about myself and others. A provocative question that may require a more provocative answer.

Top photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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When Investor Goodwill Backfires – What It Means to be Founder-Friendly and Founder-Investor Fit

A few Fridays ago, I had the fortune of reconnecting with a founder, backed by some of the most recognizable names in the Valley and exited his business last year to a juggernaut in the data space. Now working on his second startup. And he brought something extremely curious to my attention. “Investors shouldn’t be too founder-friendly.”

I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and seen thousands of pitch decks in my short 4 years in venture capital. Yet, that Friday was the first time I’d ever heard that. And it was too bizarre for me not to double-click on. The fact that the sentence also came out of a founder’s mouth and not an investor’s bewildered me even more.

Continue reading “When Investor Goodwill Backfires – What It Means to be Founder-Friendly and Founder-Investor Fit”
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#unfiltered #34 The Impetus to Cup of Zhou

It was a warm autumn 7pm. The golden ball had just found its home beyond the rolling hills of San Francisco. The sky above, dyed violet melting into a soft pink. I was walking up to Liholiho Yacht Club. According to my pal, the best spot in town for Hawaiian food. A 7:30 reservation for our quarterly mentor-mentee dinner.

As I was walking up from SOMA, I was running through the conversation I just had with a founder. He closed the conversation off with: “You should really share this advice publicly.” He was right. ‘Cause in my 3 years in venture capital, I’ve shared that same piece of advice I gave him more than 50 times at that point. I’d been meaning to. I had 11 blog posts written already, just not published. All written in an FAQ format. Yet, the only thing I was still wrestling with was the name of the blog.

It seems trivial in the grander scheme of things. But the perfectionist, inspired by my younger career in art, kept nagging me.

Reality on Ice (ROI). Nah, that wasn’t it. Sounds like a Disney ice show.

Irrogueular. Nah, too eccentric.

David’s blog. Mhmm, talk about uninspired.

Curiosity. Oooh, I like this one, but (1) it’s taken, and (2) doesn’t feel deep enough.

And 80 more where those came from. But none clicked.

Anxious, once again, I began ideating as I bobbed and weaved between the evening crowds. Yet to no avail by the time I reached Liholiho.

Dinner was great as per the usual. My mentor had just joined a new startup, leading a new initiative. We talked work. Life. Athletic endeavors. Romance. And of course, food. It came to no surprise when we two hungry bears needed more to satiate our appetite despite a wonderful meal. After we were “Yelping” places to go to, which we probably flipped through a dozen or two, we gave up.

“David, let’s just grab a cup o’ Joe, and call it a night. Wanna go to-“

“Wait. That’s it!”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“Coffee.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, no, no… for my blog. The name. My job is to grab coffee with folks. And at the same time, just like caffeine kickstarting all of our days, hopefully my blog can help founders kickstart their startup.”

I ended up scrapping 10 of my 11 blog posts. The only one I kept was my thesis. And I started anew. I spent 3 months ideating a name. 3 years, if you count all the random other WordPress blogs I started. But all it took for me was a moment – a spark. The closest thing I could analogize, at that point, to gut feeling.

Afterword

Oddly enough, this past week, three people independently asked me why this blog is called Cup of Zhou. One pronounced it “cup of zow” (like cow). Another pronounced it “cup of zoo”. The last was over text. I don’t blame them. They’re not the first, and they’re definitely not the last. I respond to them all. They’re all part of my American-born Chinese identity’s memoir. And this blog is just another chapter in my memoir.

Cup of Zhou. /cup uh Joe/

Photo by Demi DeHerrera on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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#unfiltered #33 Inspiration and Frustration Pt. 2 – What Drives Some of the Most Resilient People Forward

A few weeks ago, I published Part 1 of this post on inspiration and frustration. In that time, its reception has been uplifting. Easily my most popular and well-received blog post to date. It also happens to be one of my favorite posts to have published so far. So, I thought I’d continue to ask people about their cocktail of emotions now, the below two questions:

  1. What is the one thing that inspires you so much that it makes everything else in life much easier to bear?
  2. What is stressing/frustrating you so much right now that it seems to invalidate everything else you’re doing?

But, each person can only choose one of the above two questions to answer.

Three of the below candid responses are people I asked from the first cohort, while the other eight are people I thought would add a new degree of freedom on perspective. All of which were drawn more to their inspiration than their frustration.

And as such…

  1. It takes a lot of things to inspire and motivate… rather than one individual thing. – Model, writer, founder
  2. I’m inspired to have a hand in making the world better for everyone through technological progress! – Venture capitalist
  3. I’ve made friends with a girl from my neighborhood grocery store and a stranger opened a door wide for me so I could run towards the train and not miss it. – Founding partner/CEO, investor, community manager
  4. When you start to understand that life is bigger than just you and me, there’s a shift in perspective that brings meaning and purpose to our lives. – Zynara Ng, public speaking coach, video producer, TED speaker
  5. We have the means to weather our current circumstances. – Business professor, consultant
  6. We have struggled to find an extremely valuable and painful problem to start with. Nevertheless, someone will figure it out. Why not me? – Startup founder
  7. We just got a new addition to our family. […] I look forward to future conversations about life and deep topics with him, just like this one! – Startup founder, podcast host
  8. We just tend to judge ourselves more harshly because we have our entire past and lived traumas that we judge ourselves by. – Senior policy aide
  9. Their thank you letters, pictures, and stories of how Vinder has changed or saved their business/life solidifies to me that I’m on the right path. – Sam Lillie, startup founder, hiker
  10. Since this goal is so long term and grand, it’s easy to realize that small things don’t matter. – Sohum Thakkar, engineer
  11. In a world that falls short of showing us unconditional love, I can live my life in such a way that I can be that source of acceptance that others need. – Engineer, writer
Continue reading “#unfiltered #33 Inspiration and Frustration Pt. 2 – What Drives Some of the Most Resilient People Forward”
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#unfiltered #32 How to Win Even When You Lose

Two and a half weeks ago, I wrote about my mental model for confronting fear – the art of running into walls. Inevitably, I’ve had more conversations about fears and how to overcome them since then. And in those moments, I was reminded of a question Seth Godin posed on his recent appearance on The Tim Ferriss Show. Most people ask the question: “What would you do if you could not fail?” And subsequent answers led to wild dreams, achieving the impossible, and often times, still not a step closer to achieving that dream, myself included. I wanted to be an astronaut, a pilot, an Olympic medalist, and more. Instead, Seth posed the counter: “What would you do if you knew you would fail?“

Knowing that I’d fail

Seth cites that most marathoners competing in the Boston Marathon do not aim to win, yet they still do it. Similarly, I work with founders knowing that most will fall short of their dreams. If we’re talking about expected value – the sum of all the dollar size outcomes of each possibility, multiplied with their respective probability of occurring, then:

E(Vstartup success) << E(Vmost other career paths)

Rationally speaking, the career of a founder is not designed for success. But hell, it’s the irrational founders who do find it. Against impossible odds.

But why?

Why still pursue a career when the odds aren’t ever stacked in your favor?

On the same token, why participate in any contest if you know you’re most likely going to fail? And, I mean contest in the most liberal sense here. Just like a marathon is a contest of endurance and physical prowess, building a startup is a contest of capital, time, and social impact. Confessing to your crush is a contest of love. Sending a cold email is a contest of attention. The more saturated the market – the contest – the more likely you are to fail.

How to Win

In winning, I focus on only one question: What will I gain in this pursuit that’s independent of the result of the contest?

Running a marathon proves that I can push my body beyond its limits.

Confessing to my crush gives me resolution to move on in my life.

Sending a cold email hones my communication and research skills.

I work with startups to build friendships and acquire skills that will transcend the dollar value of the venture. People who are ambitious typically learn fast, and will try again and again until something works. If not this idea, then the next. If not today, then tomorrow. And, if not tomorrow, then the day after. It’ll only be a matter of time before preparation meets opportunity. It’s why we call startups 10-year overnight successes.

So when I take on a new endeavor even outside the exciting world of venture, I look for where there will be a net positive in my life and the world around me, on 3 fronts:

  1. The relationships/friendships I will build along the way,
  2. The skillset I will develop and/or hone,
  3. And the impact the process will have in the lives of other people, particularly my friends and family.

If the above function has a positive first and second derivative, then I know I will win even if I lose.

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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How Entrepreneurship and Networking Are Synonymous With Each Other

A few days ago, I came across a question on Quora that sparked my interest. “What [is] the best network for developing entrepreneurship skills?” And I couldn’t help but backcast, as Mike Maples Jr. at Floodgate would call it, which I shared a bit more here. Looking at the entrepreneurs I know who have achieved some modicum of success, how did they build their entrepreneurial skills?

Taking it a bit further, what is one skill that they have that made all their other skills much easier to acquire and/or hone? And I could only come up with one answer, which is understood in various nominations. Resourcefulness. Scrappiness. Creativity under pressure. Staying lean. Frankly, their ability to hustle.

“The best network”

What is the best network for developing entrepreneurial skills?

The simple answer: One you build yourself.

The longer answer…

Entrepreneurship is a career that requires you to hustle. Likewise, a network you build yourself from reaching out and cold emailing has the potential to be stronger than even the best of networks out there. But entrepreneurship can come in two flavors: a hobby and a lifestyle.

A hobby or a lifestyle?

If entrepreneurship is a hobby, there are amazing collaborative:

  • Slack groups,
  • Subreddits,
  • Facebook groups,
  • Quora spaces,
  • Meetup groups,
  • Conferences/trade shows/expos,
  • You name it, it’s out there.

But it will be akin to sitting in a classroom and learning the theory and conceptualizations.

If entrepreneurship is a lifestyle, you need to learn by application. And unfortunately, you’ll need to develop scar tissue from making real mistakes outside the classroom. You need to hustle and find what works and doesn’t work for you. Two of my favorite venture firms, 1517 Fund and Hustle Fund, invest in founders who do exactly that. Unlike many other venture funds, it’s in their thesis. Learn by doing. Learn by hustling. While there is merit in literature and academic institutions, you are learning at the pace of the system. And when you’re a founder, often times, time is not on your side.

In a parallel, an entrepreneur once described the bifurcation as a “lean-back” versus a “lean-in” activity. A “lean-back” activity would be watching a sitcom, picking strawberries, or typing a simple response to an email chain. Whereas a “lean-in” would be playing football, playing a competitive first-person shooter game, or fixing a bug in the code 2 hours before a product launch. Entrepreneurship, as you might guess, is a “lean-in” sport. So is networking.

There are two French words I often allude to – savoir and connaître. Both mean to understand. Savoir means to understand on a superficial, factual level. Connaître means to know on a deeper, emotional level – to be deeply familiar with. As an entrepreneur, the lifestyle you choose is often not passive, but an active one, or some might argue, an aggressive one. One where the clock started ticking before you started. Sometimes, before you were even born. Ben Horowitz makes a brilliant comparison between a peacetime and a wartime CEO. From his piece, I’ll quote two of his juxtapositions:

“Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.”

“Peacetime CEO has rules like ‘we’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number 1 or 2.’  Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number 1 or 2 and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.”

Where you’re required to make decisions in difficult times, and if you don’t understand a concept or a skill to the level where it’s engrained in your bone, you will fumble more often than you run touchdowns. Part of the reason why second-time, third-time entrepreneurs usually perform better than first-time entrepreneurs.

I graduated from a stellar university, UC Berkeley, located at one of the epicenters of Silicon Valley/Bay Area, where I got my economics degree and a certification in entrepreneurship and technology. I took a number of classes that allowed me “to learn and hone” my entrepreneurship skills. While there were a handful, I came out feeling I was equipped with the knowledge to take on the world. When I put them to the test, I realized I knew nothing. When faced with reality, I didn’t know how to deal with edge cases since edge cases are rarely taught in the classroom.

Most communities and classes teach entrepreneurship skills in abstractions, making it easier to understand. Even this blog post is, in many ways, an abstraction. They rarely teach the edge cases ’cause frankly, there are too many “what if’s”. But as an entrepreneur, you need to be ready for the “what if’s”. For anything and everything. And over time, what transcends the individual skills you have is having a mental model to hedge yourself from future edge cases.

I once asked someone what being an expert meant. And I really liked his answer, as it stuck with me all these years. He said, “An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes in a very narrow field.”

Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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How to Build Fast and Not Break (As Many) Things – A Startup GTM Playbook

The tech world, particularly Silicon Valley, in the past 2 decades, has accelerated its growth ’cause of one mantra: “Move fast and break things.” Some of the most valuable products we know today were built because of that. Facebook, whose founder coined the phrase. Google. Amazon. LinkedIn. Uber. The list goes on. In sum, be “agile”. Simultaneously, I see founders, on the regular, take this mental model too far. They move fast, but they rarely give enough time to test their hypotheses.

Equally so, some companies cannot afford to “break things”. Take Dropbox, for example. Ruchi Sanghvi, founder of the South Park Commons Fund, former VP of Operations at Dropbox, and Facebook’s earliest female engineer, told VentureBeat in 2015, “Quality is really, really important to Dropbox, and as a result we needed to move slower — not slowly, but slower than Facebook.” Ruth Reader, who wrote for VentureBeat at the time, further extrapolated, “What was right for Facebook — fast-paced iteration and fixing bugs in real time — didn’t work for DropBox, an application people entrusted with personal documents like wedding photos or the first draft of a novel. What was valuable to DropBox was the details.”

On the other extreme, there are founders who spend day after day, week after week, and sometimes year after year, pursuing the “perfect” product before launching. If they were right on the money before, by the time they launch 6 months later, they might be 6 months off the money. Take the situation we’re all in today for example – the pandemic. No one could have predicted it. In fact, I had many a few predictions before the pandemic, which all proved to be unfortunately wrong.

  • The Marketplace of Startups, written on February 24, 2020 – I alluded to an opinion I held that consumer social was almost dead. The consumer app market had become so saturated that it was hard for new players to play in.
  • Myths around Startups and Business Ideas, written on October 12, 2020 – Pre-COVID, I was more bullish on Slack than Zoom as a public stock investment. History proved otherwise.

… and more to come. Mistakes are inevitable. And “the rear view mirror is always clearer than the windshield”, as Warren Buffett would describe. Seth Godin said in his recent interview on The Tim Ferriss Show: “Reassurance is futile because you never have enough of it.”

At the end of the day, as a startup founder, your raison d’être is creating value in the world where there wasn’t before. As Bill Gates puts it: “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.” Analogized, your startup is that platform.

So, in this post, using the lessons from other subject-matter experts (SMEs), I’ll share how startup teams can balance speed with intentionality in their go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

Continue reading “How to Build Fast and Not Break (As Many) Things – A Startup GTM Playbook”
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Before the Close – How to Increase the Chance of Raising Capital

A number of founders ask me for fundraising advice. While they come in different magnitudes, one of the common themes is: “I’ve had many investor meetings, but I still can’t get a term sheet. What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do or to say to get a yes?”

To preface, I don’t have the one-size-fit-all solution. Neither do I think there is a one-size-fit-all solution. Each investor is looking for something different. And while theses often rhyme, the “A-ha!” moment for each investor is a culmination of their own professional and life experiences. This anecdote is, by no means, prescriptive, but another perspective that may help you when fundraising, if you’re not getting the results you want. This won’t help you cheat the system. If you still have a shoddy product or an unambitious team, you’re still probably not going to get any external capital.

One thing I learned when I was on the operating side of the table is: When you want money, ask for advice. When you want advice, ask for money. It’s, admittedly, a slightly roundabout way to get:

  1. Investor interest,
  2. And reference points for milestones to hit.

But it’s worked for me. Why? Because you’re fighting in a highly-competitive, heavily-saturated market of attention – investor attention. This method merely helps you increase the potential surface area of interaction and visibility, to give you time in front of an investor to prove yourself.

Investors are expected to jump into a long term marriage with founders, while, for the most part, only given a small cross-section in your founding journey to evaluate you. It’s as if you chose to marry someone for life you’ve only met 60-90 days ago. While angels and some people have the courage and the conviction to do that, most investors like to err on the side of caution. Contrary to popular belief, venture capitalists are extremely risk-averse. They look for risk-adjusted bets. And if you can prove to them – either through traction or an earned secret – that you’re not just a rounding error, you’ll make their lives a lot easier.

So, let me elaborate.

When you want money, ask for advice.

As you’re growing your business and you want to show you are, ask investors for advice. Tell them. “So I’ve been growing at X% MoM, and I’ve gotten to Y # of users. I’m thinking about pursuing this Z as my next priority. And this is how I plan to A/B test it. What do you think?”

And if you keep these investors in the loop the entire time and ask and follow-up on their advice, at some point, they’d think and ask, “Damn, this is an epic business. Will you just take my money?”

So, what are good numbers?

The Rule of 40 is a rough rule of thumb many investors use for consumer tech markets. Month-over-month growth rate plus profit should be greater than or equal to 40. So you can be growing 50% MoM, but burning money with -10% profit, aka costs are greater than your revenue. Or you can be growing 30% MoM, but gaining 10% profit every month. And if you’ve got 10s of 1000s of users, you’re on solid ground. Better yet, one of the biggest expenses is increasing server capacity costs.

For more reference points on ideal consumer startup numbers, check out this blog post I wrote last year.

For enterprise/B2B SaaS, somewhere along the lines of 10-15% MoM growth. With at least 1 key customer logo. And 5 publicly referenceable customers.

Of course, the Rule of 40 did not age well for certain industries in 2020.

When you want advice, ask for money.

When you ask for money most of the time, investors, partners, and potential customers will say no, especially if you’re super early on and don’t have a background or track record as an entrepreneur. So when they do say no, I like to ask them one of my favorite questions: “What do I need to bring you for you to unconditionally say yes?” Then, they’ll tell me what they want to see out of our product or our business. These, especially if they’re reinforced independently across multiple different individuals in your ecosystem, should be your North Star metrics. And when you do put their advice to action, be sure to follow up with the results to their implemented advice.

  1. You either do what they recommended. And show them what happened. And what’s next.
  2. Or you don’t do what they recommended. But show that you heavily considered their recommendation. What you did instead. Why you chose to do what you did instead. And what’s next.

To take it one step further, once I ask the above question to have a reference point for growth trajectory, I ask: “Who is the smartest person(s) known to achieve X (or in Y)?” with X being the answer you got via the previous question. And Y being the industry you’re tackling.

For instance, I’d recommend:

Then, go to that person or those people and say, “Hey Jennifer, [investor name] said if there’s one person I had to talk to about X, I have to talk to you.” Feel free to use my cold email “template” as reference, if you’re unsure of what else to say.

If you use this tactic again and again, eventually you’ll build a family of unofficial (maybe even official) mentors and advisors, even if you never explicitly call them that. Not necessarily asking for money all the time. But asking for money might help you ignite the spark for this positive feedback loop.

In closing

When I was on the operating side, a brilliant founder with 2 multi-million dollar exits once told me: “Always be selling. Always be fundraising. And always be hiring.”

I didn’t really get it then. In fact, I didn’t get it the entire time I was on the other side of the table. What do you mean “Always be fundraising”? Should I just be asking for money all the time? What about the business?

It wasn’t until I made my way into VC at SkyDeck that I realized the depth of his words. Keep people you eventually want to fundraise from and hire in the loop about what you’re building. Keep them excited. Build a relationship beyond something transactional. Build a friendship.

Jeff Bezos put it best when he said:

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.

“At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

Photo by Frame Harirak on Unsplash

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

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Fantastic Unicorns and Where to Find Them

As a venture scout and as someone who loves helping pre-seed/seed startups before they get to the A, I get asked this one question more often than I expect. “David, do you think this is a good idea?” Most of the time, admittedly, I don’t know. Why? I’m not the core user. I wouldn’t count myself as an early adopter who could become a power user, outside of pure curiosity. I’m not their customer. To quote Michael Seibel of Y Combinator,

… “customers are the gatekeepers of the startups world.” Then comes the question, if customers are the gatekeepers to the venture world, how do you know if you’re on to something if you’re any one of the below:

  • Pre-product,
  • Pre-traction,
  • And/or pre-revenue?

This blog post isn’t designed to be the crystal ball to all your problems. I have to disappoint. I’m a Muggle without the power of Divination. But instead, let me share 3 mental models that might help a budding founder find idea-market fit. Let’s call it a tracker’s kit that may increase your chances at finding a unicorn.

  1. Frustration
  2. The highly fragmented industry with low NPS
  3. Right on non-consensus
Continue reading “Fantastic Unicorns and Where to Find Them”
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#unfiltered #31 The Art of Running into Walls – How to Confront Fear and Fear-Setting

Last night, I happened to re-stumble across a sentence in my collection of quotes that caught my eye.

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

– Walter Bagehot
Journalist, businessman, essayist

The founder story

I’ve had this long-standing belief – which if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re no stranger to – that founders need to have a personal vendetta when building a business. They must have something to prove or someone they’d want to prove to. Building a business is finding where selfishness meets selflessness. In fact, I’d argue that’s true in every ideal professional career.

The path of entrepreneurship is one where resilience is the floor, not the ceiling. While I understand, it is not the only career path that carries this trait, it is the one I am most familiar with. And having asked 31 people, 18 of which are or have been entrepreneurs, I’ve learned that everyone, despite their job title or background, can be scared in the face of obstacles. Everyone feels fear, myself included. The question is what do we do next, after the feeling of fear enters our heart and mind.

Continue reading “#unfiltered #31 The Art of Running into Walls – How to Confront Fear and Fear-Setting”
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