Just pick people the way you would pick people if you were picking friends. (in business)
Work with people you would generally like and respect and that you have known long enough to be sure about because there are a lot of people who are really good at seeming likable for a while.
What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users.
If you measure people’s performance they will inevitably exploit the difference to the degree that what you’re measuring is largely an artifact of the fakeness.
Whenever you hear somebody talk about Growth Hacks, just mentally translate it in your mind to “bullshit”.
If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree that you cannot imagine and if it succeeds it will take over your life for a long time.
Which has this strange side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder is concealed from almost everyone who has done it.
Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it’s like a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably.
you can’t learn those until you actually start the company, which means that starting a startup is something you can intrinsically only learn by doing it.
Starting a startup could be a good component of a good life for a lot of ambitious people. This is just a part of a much bigger problem that you are trying to solve.
There are things that you can do in your early twenties that you cannot do as well before or after.
But success has taken a lot of the serendipity out of his (Mark Zuckerberg) life. Facebook is running him as much as he’s running Facebook.
It’s easy to tell how smart people are in ten minutes. Hit a few tennis balls over the net, and do they hit them back at you or into the net? The hard part and the most important part was predicting how tough and ambitious they would become.
The very best ideas almost always have to start as side projects because they’re always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.
How do your turn your mind into the kind that has startup ideas unconsciously?
- Learn about a lot of things that matter.
- Work on problems that interest you.
- Three, with people you like and or respect.
I figured out a technique for detecting whether you have a taste for generally interesting problems. Which is whether you find working on boring things intolerable and there are known boring things.