What I send people, and why.

You shouldn’t know a lot about startups in order to start one, gaming the system won’t work, it will consume all your life especially if you’re successful, you shouldn’t start one during college, you can’t tell who is going to be successful at it

The way to get good startup ideas is to look for a problem , preferably that you have yourself, and that is not obvious to people who don’t have it

Most of the obviously good ideas are bad ideas for startups because large companies are already pursuing them. A good idea for a startup has to be contrarian, non obvious, yet right.

A good idea is a map of every turn the market has already punished. The founder worth backing has walked the maze and knows which doors are shut.

When you start, you have nothing to lose, can take more risks and execute faster. What then prevents people from starting? While they objectively have nothing to lose, they subjectively fear what their mum/friend/colleague are going to think about them in the future if they fail.

Before zero to one there is minus one to zero: the unglamorous search for a problem worth committing to. Conviction and certainty are not the same thing.

Build something 100 happy users can’t do without rather than something that a large number of people vaguely enjoy

Some very successful founders are not born ambitious, they build it over time. See the Mark Zuckerberg example

Startups mostly die when the founders give up. Survive long enough and the odds turn in your favour.

Instead of throwing out a MVP as soon as possible to see what sticks, start by testing critical assumptions

Product-market fit is felt before it is measured. The signal is pull you cannot keep up with, not a metric you have to squint at.

Simple to state, murder to reach: a hundred users who love it. Getting people to like your product is easy. Love is the expensive part.

Coinbase example

Each stage has distinct challenge

Especially from 26:32, the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and his management style (he conquered the enemy by incorporating them into his army) and the implications for building a company culture (it’s not your perspective or the perspective of the person you are talking to at the moment that matters. You must consider the people who are in the room, they are the company, they are the culture)

Peacetime grows the opportunity, wartime survives the threat. The same person has to be able to switch, and most cannot.

We entered into entrepreneurship by jumping into the next thing. But this lesson we then need to unlearn to focus and stick on what we’re doing

We seek competition (in education, startups, sports…) for validation because we are mimetic yet our success in business, career & life depends on avoiding competition

Why following your passion is not the best compass for figuring out your career. Passions are difficult to prioritize, passions evolve over time, passions are not necessarily where you are most skilled, passions are very me-centric. Follow your contribution instead.

First rule of career planning: do not plan your career. Focus instead on creating a portfolio of opportunities.

Paul Graham’s essay argues that “great work” is neither accidental nor the result of step-by-step career planning. It emerges when you combine aptitude with deep personal fascination and chase the intriguing gaps at the frontiers of knowledge. Curiosity is the engine, hard focused effort is the fuel, and a readiness to ignore fashion, break implicit rules, and keep iterating small versions is the method. The sooner you treat learning as your own project—not a syllabus handed down—the faster you’ll reach those frontiers and notice questions no one else has asked

What lifestyle do you need to sustain being an efficient founder, i.e. work hard AND smart?

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” — Taleb’s line, and the whole argument in one sentence.

In most work it is enough to be right. In founding, investing and research you have to be right where everyone else is wrong, so the thing to train is independent-mindedness, not accuracy.

There is a common misperception of what makes life meaningful.  It is the idea that we have a special purpose in life – and that once we find it, all our confusion ends...An alternate non-linear approach is premised on the idea that life is full of randomness punctuated by sudden moments – crises and opportunities – with vast potential for meaning making, when our skills and virtues shine.

Derek Sivers argues Life is full of inherent tensions that can take us in opposing directions (e.g. safety vs. novelty). It can be navigated more smoothly by reframing either/or as both/and. Your life becomes a symphony if you make room and time for each of these conflicting forces rather try to pick one while suppressing the other.

Transformation runs neither straight nor logical. It is a dance between deciding and being changed by what the decision costs.

Life is choice. Good enough, chosen on purpose, beats optimal chosen never.

The longest study on happiness lands on one variable: the quality of your relationships. Not achievement, not money.

The skill-luck tradeoff for outcomes: if you don’t take extreme risks, even if you’re the most skilled person, you will be outperformed by someone who did. And if you take extreme risks, you will have worse average outcomes than if you didn’t (competing for the first place often means using strategies that reduce your average outcome).

The role of luck in entrepreneurial and life success is overrated. We can build a startup/ life where we construct the future and good/bad luck is something we deal with along the way (i.e. a determinate future) rather than a world where luck stops all thinking and action before we even start

More options make a decision costlier, so we defer it. Procrastination is often a symptom of too much choice rather than too little will.

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