1st time founders, grab some 🍿
2nd time founders, this one’s for you: What’s one thing that’s obvious to you now, that you would tell your first-time founder self.
A startup fails when its’s Founder/CEO gives up. And a startup succeeds when the Founder/CEO refuses to give up and keeps on trying until they succeed.#InsanePerseverance
Elon Musk is a big believer in First Principles Thinking.
Not just Musk — Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Feynman too.
Here's what it is, how to use it, and become better at it:
A painful lesson about growing up:
Every few years, the game you're playing in life changes ― and so do the rules.
A lot of people fail to make this mental switch and keep stumbling in life.
Some examples:
When people share how crypto can bring payments to underserved communities, I ask them if they heard of UPI which did this - but without blockchain.
UPI has no fees, is secure, works offline as well and 6 years after launch accounts for 60% of retail payments in India (!!)
1 week to apply for the September @TechstarsLA program, which will focus on: Aerospace/Defense, Healthcare, B2B SaaS, PropTech, and eComm/Retail enablement. https://t.co/gxA6mdBZak
Tl;dr:
Effectuation is a lower-risk but high upside way to do startups.
Using these 6 principles:
-Start with what you can do
-Make repeated small bets
-Rapid mistakes maximize your learning
-Find skin in the game partners
-You build the future
-Go against the grain
And win!
Ideally - you want every VC fund in the ecosystem that is on your wishlist - to find out about your round at the same time.
👉🏽 This means no VC has an information or time advantage on your deal - meaning they all have to start the race from the same starting line. 🏃🏽♂️
A huge amount of the moral progress society has made comes from our collective commitment to civil liberties, and the messy process of helping people constructively update their views. We can't give up on this.
The biggest problem with taxing unrealized gains:
Let's say you start a company, and it starts doing well.
The market value of the equity you have goes up.
You owe tax on it.... way more than your cash.
So you're *forced* to sell any time it goes up to get $ to pay tax.
One of biggest mistakes VCs make:
“Each investment has to return the fund.”
True but predicated on outcome scenario planning. Good luck. You’ll always underestimate the size of winners.
At seed, don’t try & outsmart the market, find amazing founders & give them dollars!
Exercise:
To improve your mood
Meditate:
To think more clearly
Read:
To understand the world
Write:
To understand yourself
Help yourself:
To help others
Stay consistent:
To grow faster
Love others:
To get loved
Doing one thing leads to the other.
In 1955, President Dwight D Eisenhower suffered a massive heart attack while playing golf.
What happened next brought on the BIGGEST obesity epidemic the world has ever seen.
🔴THREAD 🔴
A bull case for investing in fertility: It’s the only employee benefit I can think of where people will choose to stay at an employer or pick an employer based on whether there’s coverage. Hard to say that about anything else…