Magazines take your photo. Venture Capitalists offer to invest over email. Billionaires smoke weed in your living room. No one doubts you. Like this post? Discuss it on Hacker News. Your company is hot. You are hot. And it feels awesome. To struggle for months, to...
So much of the best advice is impossible to hear when you are first starting out. Success feels within our grasp, just a sprint or two away. We’re in too much of a hurry to listen. Failure slows you down. The pain of failure forces you to stop. Failure creates...
Silicon Valley favors the brash and the brilliant. If you have a pedigree and a network (e.g. if you studied Computer Science at Stanford), the bar is lower. People will doubt you less. The corollary to this, of course, is that the more of a nobody you are, the harder...
If you’ve never done it before, price negotiations are easy to fuck up, especially when you need to have a non-adversarial long-term relationship with the guy on the other side of the table. Think: Employee Salaries Venture Capital Valuations In either case, you...
A good startup CEO sets the direction, the mission and the unit of measure, then empowers his team to figure out the rest. — Matt Mireles (@mattmireles) May 2, 2013 I became a startup CEO because it was the only palatable job I could find. But I never really knew how...
“There are no rules. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.” -Jim Everingham Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned––though I struggle with it still––from my first startup experience was: YOU ARE ALONE. You are Cortez at the shores of Veracruz....
